On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 6:02 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz < bmsch...@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2010, Walter Bender wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Tiago Marques <tiago...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> I was just looking at the layout again and just noticed the new arrow >>> keys >>> placement. >>> >> > We debated this one. A shorter shift key would be difficult to type >> on. We opted to emulate the hjkl vi arrangement. >> > > Keyboard layout is virtually the ultimate bikeshed painting problem ... but > here's my opinion anyway. > > Ins and Del are Harmful. You probably know Ins because when you > accidentally bump it, your editor switches into "overwrite" mode, and every > character you type deletes another until you figure out what happened and > hit Ins again. "Del" is the reverse erase that nobody wants. Apple, and > the XO-1, have eliminated Ins and relegated Del to Fn+Erase. I recommend > removing both. > > I had exactly those same problems with Ins when I started using computers and can't remember the last time I used it. As for Del, I didn't even knew it was supported in the XO but I have felt the need for it. Perhaps, if a merge is in order, an F style mention would be the way to go? Tiago > Getting rid of those keys frees up valuable space that can be used, for > example to move += to the top row, replaced by ?, replaced by up-arrow. No > more hjkl. > > Some other notes: > > 1. fn is a bad key because software can't reuse it. For example, on the > XO-1 we tried to make fn+F1 send an F1 press to the activity (instead of > going to the mesh view), but it was not possible because the fn key is > treated specially by the keyboard microcontroller, and not forwarded to the > OS. There was no way to tell from software whether a user had pressed fn+F1 > or just F1. > > Accordingly, on new keyboards, OLPC should consider pushing this special > handling into the software keyboard mapping as much as possible. It's hard > to see why fn+Spacebar needs to be a new keycode, and not just a series of > standard up/down events. The only tricky spot I can think of is > PageUp/PageDown/Home/End. > > 2. We have a lot of redundant modifier keys. fn, altgr, and hand-key could > all be a single key, because they are never used together. If the keyboard > controller would turn altgr+left into Home (etc.), there should be no > regression of functionality, even under windows. > > --Ben > >
_______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
