Tricks for comfy Shift/Ctrl/Hyper...

Tricks for comfy Shift/Ctrl/Hyper...

[Teika Kazura]

Hi, it's a keyboard trick. You can have for example "Space-Shift dual
role key". When you press the space key alone, it's a space; but when
you press it with another key, it's a shift. Any pairs of keys are
possible. This means your hands can stay almost always at their home
postion.

I think it helps Emacs users a lot. In my case, ctrl is overlaid to
space. Now I can't type comfortably without it.
(In fact, I also press alt and shift with my thumbs now, but Japanese
keyboards is the best to achieve it. Japanese keyboards have a short
space key, and there's many keys you can hold with thumbs. You can buy
one from e.g. amazon.com or amazon.co.jp.)


My news is that this trick is now also available in Linux, enabled by
my hack which is a fork of Xorg driver "xf86-input-evdev". It's
already some one year old and stable enough. (For Win and Mac, there
have been keyboard utilities for such purpose, like AutoHotKey. Don't
ask me how help for them. A new thread for it may be, if you want one,
nice.)

In Japan, it's been known (to some extent) as "SandS" - stands for
"Space and Shift", proposed by K. Kimura in 2001. See the README cited
below for more on the history.

* README of my hack tells the detail:
  http://gitorious.org/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier/blobs/raw/master/README
* Homepage:
  http://gitorious.org/at-home-modifier/pages/Home

For installation, visit distro forum threads:
* Gentoo: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-865313.html
* Arch: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=938140
* Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10907505
* Debian: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=65950

It can be built exactly the same way as the Xorg's original
xf86-input-evdev package, so it must be easy, even if your distro
is not (yet) supported.

Happy typing,
Teika (Teika kazura)

Re: Tricks for comfy Shift/Ctrl/Hyper...

[Jonathan Groll]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:47:15 +0900 (JST), Teika Kazura <teika@lavabit.com> wrote:

> Hi, it's a keyboard trick. You can have for example "Space-Shift dual
> role key". When you press the space key alone, it's a space; but when
> you press it with another key, it's a shift. Any pairs of keys are
> possible. This means your hands can stay almost always at their home
> postion.

Thanks for writing about it, it seems to be one of those Japanese
innovations that is little known in the West!

Personally, I use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard on my main machine, for
which you use your thumbs for ctrl/alt/space. I will try out "SandC"
on my other machine that has a conventional layout, it sounds like an
excellent idea.

Cheers,
Jonathan
--
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has_one { :blog => "http://bloggroll.com" }
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