Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the left hand is probably much of this. I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Jack Campin writes: | Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as | I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard | mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the | left hand is probably much of this. | | I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - | while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people | do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. | My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in | the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, | and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity | material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. It has always seemed to me that musicians should react the other way. After all, right-handers who play stringed instruments always seem to want to use their left hand for the fingerboard. And if you're a keyboard player, I'd think you would of necessity be fairly ambidextrous. I usually put a mouse on whichever side is most convenient. I find that switching sides with the mouse doesn't take any thought; I just do it. This seems to surprise a lot of people when they notice it. But I'd think that a keyboard player would just react by asking What sort of keyboards do you play? | What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the | right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it | would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, a clever abc editor might have an option to keep track of the tonic from the K: lines, and map 1-7 to notes in the obvious way. You'd use 0 for a rest. Maybe you could use the + and - keys on the keypad to do octave shifts. Actually, you want lengths, too. So maybe you could use the shift key to select between 1-7 meaning notes and lengths. Then, with the left-hand shift key, you could enter notes and lengths entirely with the right hand. You'd still need to move your hand for bar lines, I suppose. It might be worth experimenting with. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Hello Everybody, Thanks for your input on keyboard layout. I see that I differ from other abc users in that I have opted to relearn how to type on the Dvorak keyboard, and that I avoid the usage of the mouse if at all possible. Keyboard shortcuts all the way, man. The Dvorak keyboard doesn't have the quality that all letters abcdefgh are keyed with the same hand. Of course, even with a qwerty keyboard, you still need the right hand for the |,[],: , characters, which are used quite frequently. Or is this what you used the mouse for? If having the right hand free for the mouse is important, the keys could be remapped so that all the frequently used characters, including |,[],:,, are on the left hand. This may even be better having all the letters abcdefg on one row. (Incidentally, Dvorak also designed keyboard layouts for people who only had control of one hand. They are now a standard part of Windows. Apparently people can type up to 55 wpm with these. I'd like to see a one handed person do that with qwerty.) For those who experimented with alternate keyboard layouts, and later switched back, how long did you try the alternate layouts? It took me about a month to learn Dvorak, and another 2 or so to reach a decent speed, but it was worth it. Might the difficulty have been that your brain was (soft)-wired for qwerty because it's all you've ever learned and it was hard to rewire to something else, rather than a difficulty inherent in the keyboard layout? Despite what some have said, other than the problem of our brains being softwired to type a certain way, I have a hard time believing that something more closely resembling a keyboard layout couldn't be better (in the long term at least) than something where the main keys used are laid out apparently randomly. If you were to design a layout to enter the tune part of an abc, without knowing where the pertinent letters are on a standard qwerty keyboard layout, would you put the letters where they currently are on a qwerty keyboard? Probably not. I assume that for most or all of you, though, entering abc tunes does not make up the bulk of your typing, so it is probably not worth the effort to relearn how to type on a new layout, unless you could use it for all your typing, which you couldn't in the case of an abc friendly layout. I think that answers my question as to whether it is an idea worth pursuing. Perhaps I'll experiment with it myself, and see if I like it any better. Randy. At 02:31 PM 18/11/2003 +, you wrote: Jack Campin writes: | Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as | I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard | mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the | left hand is probably much of this. | | I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - | while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people | do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. | My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in | the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, | and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity | material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. It has always seemed to me that musicians should react the other way. After all, right-handers who play stringed instruments always seem to want to use their left hand for the fingerboard. And if you're a keyboard player, I'd think you would of necessity be fairly ambidextrous. I usually put a mouse on whichever side is most convenient. I find that switching sides with the mouse doesn't take any thought; I just do it. This seems to surprise a lot of people when they notice it. But I'd think that a keyboard player would just react by asking What sort of keyboards do you play? | What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the | right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it | would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, a clever abc editor might have an option to keep track of the tonic from the K: lines, and map 1-7 to notes in the obvious way. You'd use 0 for a rest. Maybe you could use the + and - keys on the keypad to do octave shifts. Actually, you want lengths, too. So maybe you could use the shift key to select between 1-7 meaning notes and lengths. Then, with the left-hand shift key, you could enter notes and lengths entirely with the right hand. You'd still need to move your hand for bar lines, I suppose. It might be worth experimenting with. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
hello, if you're interested I may add this feature in JedABC. What OS are you using? Later, Guido =8-) -- Guido Gonzato, Ph.D. guido . gonzato at univr . it - Linux System Manager Universita' di Verona (Italy), Facolta' di Scienze MM. FF. NN. Ca' Vignal II, Strada Le Grazie 15, 37134 Verona (Italy) Tel. +39 045 8027990; Fax +39 045 8027928 --- Timeas hominem unius libri To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
I've played around with keyboard mappings too, but eventually concluded that nothing else is going to be faster than the conventional layout. One thing I have found useful though is to use the ctrl and alt modifier keys to get octave shifts. An option in BarFly causes ctrl-A to give a' and alt-A a''. With the shift key down as well you get the lower octaves, so shift-ctrl-A gives A, and shift-alt-A gives A,,. (The ctrl key is not used for menu equivalents on the Mac, we've got another key for that.) Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Randall J Elzinga wrote I'm curious to know if anyone has ever written keyboard drivers to remap the keys of a typical computer keyboard to something that would be more accommodating to entry of ABCs. For example, characters that are used most often can be mapped to keys in the home row, or the row above it. I realise you're really interested in physical keyboards, but as an aside: in the handheld world of skinnable virtual keyboards this kind of thing is easy. In fact it's so easy that I've done it, for my PalmOS machine. Specifically, I've written an ABC overlay for the VirtualKB keyboard manager, giving you two rows of keys C..B and c..b plus other abc symbols. It's free, and available from http://www.thomasbending.co.uk/palm Caveat: VirtualKB is a hack, so doesn't work on my spiffy new Sony Clie running PalmOS 5 8-(. I'm investigating alternatives ... Thomas Bending To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
You certainly are not the only person who enters abc textwise! After some experience with an excellent music program (Lime) that maps the keyboard somewhat like you mention, I switched back to text entry because it's faster for me. All the notes are under my left hand leaving the right hand free to manipulate the partition or mouse. Norman http://www.normanschmidt.net Randall J Elzinga wrote: Hello, I'm curious to know if anyone has ever written keyboard drivers to remap the keys of a typical computer keyboard to something that would be more accommodating to entry of ABCs. For example, characters that are used most often can be mapped to keys in the home row, or the row above it. Let me explain what I mean further. Rather than the typical home row of a keyboard, asdfghjkl, we could have something like abcd~:efg|, the row above the home row could be ABCD[]EFG... or something like that. From a quick glance at a couple of abc tunes, this would seem to put the most commonly used keys in the most accessible positions on the keyboard (one must admit, the key for the pipe symbol, |, used for separating measures, is in a rather awkward position for a key that seems to be used the most often after the letters used for notes.) These may not be the best options (I haven't even considered the possibilities available to us by way of the SHIFT key), that's a different debate, but it is certainly an improvement over a qwerty layout. For those who might be concerned about writing up the header of the tune, where the current system works fine, it is possible to switch between keyboards by a click or two of the mouse or else by keyboard shortcuts (at least in the OSs that I've used), so one could easily use a normal layout for the header, and then switch in less than a second to an abc friendly layout for the tune section of an abc. There seems to be a significant contingent of tech savvy types within the abc using community who work on abc software. I really know nothing about writing keyboard drivers, but writing a keyboard driver seems to pale in comparison to writing something that can take a bunch of text and turn it into a postscript file containing conventional music notation or into a midi file, or vice versa. Does anybody here think this is a worthwhile idea? Or am I the only one who enters abc textwise? Randy. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Norman Schmidt writes: | You certainly are not the only person who enters abc textwise! | | After some experience with an excellent music program (Lime) that maps | the keyboard somewhat like you mention, I switched back to text entry | because it's faster for me. All the notes are under my left hand | leaving the | right hand free to manipulate the partition or mouse. I was wondering if someone else would make a comment like this. I've played around a bit with a tcl/tk tool to handle abc, and one of the thing that I experimented with a bit was alternate keyboard mappings. I eventually decided it wasn't worth the bother, for pretty much the same reasons. One funny disappointment here: I play a chromatic accorion. You'd think it would map very easily to the typewriter keyboard. But it didn't. The problem was that the angle of the diagonals are wrong. I couldn't find any position for my hand relative to the keyboard that actually worked. The angle of the diagonals are just wrong for this use. Combined with the difficulty of figuring out how to deal with the non-note parts (bar lines, slurs, chords, ...), this was enough to give it up as an idea waiting for someone with some brilliantly innovative idea that will magically make it work. But I'm apparently not that someone. One side thought I had was that the universal keyboard just might work. This would really only need two rows for the notes, and you could use the top and bottom rows with their conventional mapping. Maybe some day, when I have the spare time, I'll experiment with this. Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the left hand is probably much of this. But this is really true only for plain, monophonic tunes, so maybe something clever is possible in other cases. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Rather than the typical home row of a keyboard, asdfghjkl, we could have something like abcd~:efg|, the row above the home row could be ABCD[]EFG... or something like that. If you want to get fancy, you could set up a bunch of key mappings, one for each key (you can name them G, ADor, DMix, etc.) so that the middle row (asdfg) is do re mi... in whatever key you're in (e.g. in D, asdfghjkl would map to DEFGABcde---well, the F and c are sharp, but that's taken care of by the keysig in abc) with the upper (qwerty) row giving do re mi in the second octave, the lower row the octave below. This lays the keyboard out like an organ. And, while you're at it, why not make it sound the note as you type it? Then you can type by ear. Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Hmmm, I hadn't considered this, but it does make sense, and, with a huge caveat, it would be simple. On my system, linux running with KDE, I'd just set up a keymapping for a mythical language called abc, and then install it instead of the real languages (like French or Ukranian) that KDE comes with. Then the magic keys would switch me between abc and english. What you say, you don't use linux or KDE? Ah yes, that's the problem. Keymapping is dependent upon the OS and windowing system, and ain't portable. But see if your OS supports multiple languages and if you can set up your own. On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 02:39:56PM -0500, Randall J Elzinga wrote: Hello, I'm curious to know if anyone has ever written keyboard drivers to remap the keys of a typical computer keyboard to something that would be more accommodating to entry of ABCs. For example, characters that are used most often can be mapped to keys in the home row, or the row above it. Let me explain what I mean further. Rather than the typical home row of a keyboard, asdfghjkl, we could have something like abcd~:efg|, the row above the home row could be ABCD[]EFG... or something like that. From a quick glance at a couple of abc tunes, this would seem to put the most commonly used keys in the most accessible positions on the keyboard (one must admit, the key for the pipe symbol, |, used for separating measures, is in a rather awkward position for a key that seems to be used the most often after the letters used for notes.) These may not be the best options (I haven't even considered the possibilities available to us by way of the SHIFT key), that's a different debate, but it is certainly an improvement over a qwerty layout. For those who might be concerned about writing up the header of the tune, where the current system works fine, it is possible to switch between keyboards by a click or two of the mouse or else by keyboard shortcuts (at least in the OSs that I've used), so one could easily use a normal layout for the header, and then switch in less than a second to an abc friendly layout for the tune section of an abc. There seems to be a significant contingent of tech savvy types within the abc using community who work on abc software. I really know nothing about writing keyboard drivers, but writing a keyboard driver seems to pale in comparison to writing something that can take a bunch of text and turn it into a postscript file containing conventional music notation or into a midi file, or vice versa. Does anybody here think this is a worthwhile idea? Or am I the only one who enters abc textwise? Randy. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html -- _ _ Ali Corbin/, |_ __(_) ___ _ __ Axian, Inc. //| |\\/ /| |/ _ \| '_ \ Phone: (503)644-6106 #205 _//_| | / / | | |_| | | | | e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (( // |_|/_/\\|_|\_/|_|_| |_| http://www.axian.com/ ``-'' ``-'' To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
