Suggestion: Move spacebar to home row - General

ecchichuu
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22-Sep-2007 18:58:59#1 Suggestion: Move spacebar to home row

I haven't started learning Colemak yet but I believe that it could be even more effective against RSI if you moved the space bar to the home row. Probably where 'd' currently is on Colemak ('g' on QWERTY). The space bar is probably the most frequently used button on the keyboard but the thumb isn't in a good position to press it. That's what I gather from the fact that the base of my thumb has recovered the slowest and hurts the most from the typing pain I got over the past month. Heck, if you think about it, when your hands are in touch typing position the thumb doesn't even push down at a correct angle - you push your thumb down side ways to hit the space bar.

I tried changing the layout myself with Windows Keyboard Layout editor but that software will mess up Colemak's capslock/backspace key. Plus I would like to map a letter or even the left shift key to the space bar and you can't do that on WKLE either. Anyway I read on another thread that Shai is too busy to do custom layout mods for people but Shai if you ever update Colemak in the future I think it's something to consider.

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keyboard samurai
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22-Sep-2007 23:33:53#2 Re: Suggestion: Move spacebar to home row

The standard colemak layout has been fixed which is I think one of it's advantages. It's not contanstly being tinkered with.
If it was being tinkered with constantly I personally wouldn't have given it a chance.

There are people on this forum that have modified Colemak for their own particular issues and maybe one of them can help you make a slight modification. Moving the space bar for general use on a standard keyboard would just be nuts. You might consider one of those specialized keyboards. If you are having medical issues that would seem to be a worthwhile investment.

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DreymaR
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23-Sep-2007 01:53:31#3 Re: Suggestion: Move spacebar to home row

The thumbs are strong and generally fit. I think you may be having a special strain-related problem that a better work position and correct use of rests could fix far better than a new layout.

This issue has been up before I think. The answer from Shai at that time, iirc, was something along the lines of the thumbs being quite strong and the space so common that putting it on another finger would probably overstrain that finger. You certainly don't want to use your index fingers, as they're very busy as it is and already jumping a lot around the 6 keys each of them have (8 including the number keys).

My thumbs push at a comfortable angle as far as I can notice.

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Korivak
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23-Sep-2007 13:56:41#4 Re: Suggestion: Move spacebar to home row

I already have a bit of a mental hiccup when I switch back to QWERTY (I tend to tap the caps lock once or twice, too), and if the spacebar was anywhere else I doubt I'd be able to switch back and forth at all. That's just a bit too drastic, in my opinion. Also, as mentioned above, the layout is locked now, so there won't be any updates in the future.

I am one of the people that keyboard samurai mention - I use a variant I call Colemak-B that swaps 'J' and 'B', moves the '-' one key closer to my pinkie, and swaps the shifted states of '?' and '/' so that all the sentence-terminating punctuation is unshifted (except the exclamation point, which I very rarely use). I use a Mac, so my keyboard tweaking software is Ukelele, but I don't know if it allows remapping of system keys like the spacebar (it didn't allow tweaking of the caps lock key, for example).

Feel free to play around with the layout, but don't expect Shai to make any more changes to the layout, especially significant ones like moving the space bar. He's earned support for his layout due largely to his caution and the subtlety of his changes. He was very careful swapping 'R' and 'S' because it broke the muscle memory for Command-S (Save). Breaking the muscle memory on the space bar is not something that is going to happen.

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