The sticky or "One shot" modifiers in EPKL work well for me. It may take a little bit of fiddling with the timing settings to get them just right for you. I've tried fancy solutions like putting period plus space on a dead key release so I could tap the Extend key then a home row key at the end of a sentence, but in the end that didn't quite sit well with me. Not sure why, probably felt like a bridge too far to adress a very minor problem, having to learn and then become dependent upon a special solution for something as common as the period.
So this is a finicky situation: I don't feel quite comfortable with the period key, but not uncomfortable enough to go to any lengths to fix it! ฅʕ •ᴥ•ʔฅ
]]>Period gets prime placement on Dvorak. Probably a very good spot. But I too struggle with copying texts, not so much from the periods, but because of the shifting required for the next character. That's far more of a slow down. In the past I tried sticky keys, which felt promising, but I didn't stick with.
That's not to say that the period placement isn't a problem for you. Auto captilisation on touch devices gets around the shifting irritation. Though that can also be an irritation!
]]>In PKL_eD I was still using the old PKL way of setting an Extend key explicitly in the layout.ini file (extend_key = CapsLock) but no more. Now you should have the key in question set as <scancode> = Extend Modifier, or you can get fancy and have a Tap-or-Mod Extend key.
]]>To test EPKL I just shut down pkl_eD and started EPKL but it doesn't seem to be working. The usual alphanumeric layer is coming through fine with EPKL though.
]]>But since you want Extend you must have a key you want Extend on; what key is it? Find its scan code and define it as extend as in my examples, and you're good to go.
]]>I suspect this might be due to me having remapped my modifier keys with SharpKeys at the registry level. In particular I have Capslock mapped to the LAlt key so perhaps that's why it's not registering it? I use SharpKeys because modifier key mappings didn't use to work with pkl_eD but perhaps this is fixed now with EPKL so I don't need this anymore?
]]>I've used it for quite a lot of number entries while holding down the Extend key though, and it works well for me at least. You only need to hold down the Extend key alone, AltGr is just for choosing the right layer.
I'm thinking that AltGr+Shift+Extend could be the lock layer. Little chance of hitting that accidentally, too. ( ಸ‿ಸ)
]]>I use a modifier setup like in the following (with the difference that I've got Ctrl mapped to the Shift keys) so AltGr combos should still be easy enough to reach.
That said, I'm finding the [ ( { } ) ] keys on the number row pretty easy to reach with my setup so I'm not sure that will be such a big requirement anymore for me. Numbers and dates have become quite an annoyance now though so what I would like is a good Numpad layer. Something that also sets numbers apart from punctuation and symbols is that number digits tend to come in clusters so that could be optimised for whereas the other symbols tend to be more dispersed in the text and often come only one character at a time.
]]>Layers 3 and 4 are perfect for this unless you need them for foreign language symbols. But even then most languages don't have so many special symbols that you couldn't also make optimized layers for your own usage patterns. If you only type in English, this is an especially easy quick win.
]]>I'm finding it pretty comfortable so far but I can't really tell properly yet because I'm still limping along at about 40 to 50 wpm due to the Colemak switch.
You can see what it currently looks like with this analysis: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-anal … d/0CnPpbCV
]]>In the past I considered row-swapping [] and -= keys, but maybe it's more beneficial to swap () and [] (the characters, not the whole keys).
]]>I'm currently transitioning from Dvorak to Colemak and also found the period on the right ring finger less than ideal, especially since on Dvorak it was on a middle finger. I experimented with switching the period and comma keys which also seemed to be supported by the Python punctuation character frequencies here: http://xahlee.info/comp/computer_langua … ution.html
However I found that I also use the comma a lot and after running http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer on some codebases that are more representative of my usage (fast.ai and dask), it suggested that the original period and comma placements are better for my usage.
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