youBane said:before, i thought changing the layout was going about it the wrong way. take colemak, for example. it advocates changing the caps lock key to backspace. at work, i use a truly ergonomic. it does it right. it solves the problem in hardware by putting the backspace key in the center, reachable by both hands; the typematrix does this too. then i got a laptop!
now i'm considering getting rid of my truly ergonomic. i still think it's better to solve the issues in hardware, but, more important than that is conformity. i finally got around to trying emacs and found that i was getting confused between keyboard commands, because i had different finger habits between the two keyboards. because i can't change my laptop keyboard, i now want my desktop keyboard to be the same
Hmm, it seems that this is actually quite a big problem. Mind you I still can't imagine getting rid of a keyboard which I was happy with in order to use something I knew to be significantly worse. It would rankle too much and cause me to think of dodgy burgers :P
But then, if I knew I needed to use my laptop while travelling a lot, I would factor that in to my keyboard buying decision and get one that still allowed moderately similar operation. The Ergo Pro I recently got fits this compromise fairly well in being a nice keyboard but with still with a moderately conventional layout.
Maybe you could try to adapt the layout on your laptop keyboard to more closely resemble that of the Truly Ergonomic? For example, with the wide and angle mods, the difference between the TE and the laptop may be less severe, and the wide mod in particular gives you buttons in the centre which could become your backspace and enter and whatnot. Also, what I really like about the using an Extend layer, is those troublesome keys like delete and enter are no longer in special places away from the main hand positions, which means those keys can become almost independent of physical hardware anyway.
At least the TypeMatrix is quite small and portable so in that case it would be possible to carry it around. Ideally laptop keyboards would pluggable components so that you could replace them with one of any design, but sadly that isn't likely to happen :(
Last edited by stevep99 (22-Aug-2015 15:13:05)