On Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 08:17:56PM -0400, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
Oddly, swearing at keyboards seems fairly limited to computer types. I use to work with a lot of copy-typists, and they could work on anything at all. They'd switch from Suns to Macs to Thinkpads to real typewriters without complaint. Some of them were using multilingual layouts and could use QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ at blazing speeds depending on the language of the project.
These people were the fastest and most accurate keyboarders I've ever met — like, ‘retype a whole page with no errors faster than you could walk to the photocopier and back’ fast — and they lived all day on keyboards. I don't think I heard about them complain about a computer keyboard ever. Plenty of complaints about chairs and desks, sure, but no complaints about keyboards.
The letter keys are not the ones being moved around. If all you do is enter text, the placement of most other keys don't matter that much (although I would think the size of the shift key and the enter key would still be a problem in some cases). I remember my mother did not get along with the microsoft natural keyboard because they put n on the wrong half of the split. Of course some people think they put it on the right half. Depends how you learned to type. Well azerty does move letters around and I am surprised if someone can actually be efficient on both azerty and qwerty. Impressive. I have seen people be pretty efficient on both qwerty and dvorak though, which is totally different, so I guess you could get used to it.
(There was a specific desk's keyboard that they'd complain about *a lot* though, and refuse to use unless it was the only one available. It belonged to an editor who would water their plants over the keyboard and also eat their lunch directly over it. It's the only keyboard I've ever seem that had algae growing between the keys, while some of the keys would rebound very slowly accompanied by a wet sucking noise. It was very unhygienic.)
Eww!
I never learned to type, and likely will keep my 4½-finger typing technique until I die. My current (non-Raspberry Pi) keyboard is a CoolerMaster gaming thing with an irritating top row. They keys are marked
` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - = ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ +
which is no fun if you're keyboarding by sight.
Oh top and bottom labels are reversed? -- Len Sorensen