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    Optimizing Colemak for Esperanto...

    • Started by Juna Urso Tropika
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    • Registered: 09-Jan-2016
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    25-Jan-2016 03:55:33#1 Optimizing Colemak for Esperanto...

    As said in the Colemak Wiki, Colemak is optimized for English, but at the cost of not being optimized for other languages such as Esperanto. Lately I have been giving thought to building an Esperanto Keyboard inspired by Colemak that aims to be for suitable typing in both English and Esperanto. I have dabbled with trying to make a keyboard that is optimized only for Esperanto, but my impression was that the benefits of creating a keyboard suited only for Esperanto would be so insignificant that it just wouldn’t be worth creating, even if it includes characters Ĝ, Ŝ, Ĉ, Ĵ, Ĥ, and Ŭ.

    My next thought was that instead of rebuilding another keyboard layout from the ground up, it would better to use Colemak and modify it for the needs of Esperanto. I use English more than I use Esperanto anyway so I might as well stick to modifying Colemak. So far this is what I have come up with (I am having trouble embedding the image so I have provided a link):

    Esperanto Colemak Keyboard

    I am aware that it does not include characters: Ĝ, Ŝ, Ĉ, Ĵ, Ĥ, or Ŭ, but given that they only account for 6% of all of the Esperanto characters, I think that I can worry about that later. Since I primarily use Macintosh OS X as my main OS, I can simply press and hold down a key using pressAndHold.app to insert the characters Ĝ, Ŝ, Ĉ, Ĵ, Ĥ, and Ŭ. Alternatively, I can for example use “gx” to indicate ĝ.
    The only characters that I have moved around in this mockup were:
    I rearranged A, R, S on the home row simply because A is the most frequent letter in the Esperanto alphabet (it accounts for approx. 13% compared to other letters), and therefore it is rather uncomfortable to type it with the left pinky finger. R and S were then moved accordingly.
    Since ‘J’ accounts for 3.5% of all Esperanto letters, I think it would be best to swap P, F, and J accordingly.
    I have somewhat adjusted it for bigraphs or trigraphs. With quick scan it looks good so far with regards to bigraphs, trigraphs, and such.

    So what do you guys think? Even with those 6 characters moved around it would still, in theory, be comfortable and fast enough to type in English. I would create this keyboard layout if I could, but I don’t even know how nor where to begin with that.

    Last edited by Juna Urso Tropika (25-Jan-2016 04:31:17)
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    25-Jan-2016 11:44:36#2 Re: Optimizing Colemak for Esperanto...

    Consider the Venn Diagram of "people who type using Colemak" and "people who want to type in Esperanto".  The intersection in that diagram must be tiny... quite possibly you are the only person in it!  Therefore you can invent whatever suits you best. For those other characters Ĝ, Ŝ, Ĉ, Ĵ, Ĥ, or Ŭ, why not just have them on AltGr.

    Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    25-Jan-2016 12:32:10#3 Re: Optimizing Colemak for Esperanto...

    What the... there was just another topic about this. I don't think Juna Urso is the only one after all. You know, people who want to improve things, life hackers and optimizers, tend to come across several interesting projects. Like, say, both keyboard layouts and artificial languages. I myself am fascinated by InterLingua. ;-)

    Question to Urso: Where do you have your Esperanto letter frequency info from? It's interesting!

    I've started making a Colemak Esperanto layout, it'll only be implemented in Linux/XKB for now (because implementing in PKL isn't automated yet).

    Moving A and J is out of the question for me, so that'll have to be an individual solution. The reason for this is that many will be typing a lot of English as well. Also, your n-gram (NB: It's not '-graph', but '-gram'!) analysis may not be as thorough as Colemak's and it's really easy to break something that'll come back to bite your arse! :-)

    Point in case: Your mockup moves the F to a completely horrible position for English! Probably too poor for Esperanto, even. And I shudder to think of the n-gram implications...

    I honestly think that you'll help your left-hand pinky more with the Angle mod (see my sig topics) than with a dedicated layout that moves A.

    I don't think AltGr is good enough for a dedicated Esperanto typist though. My solution is a caret dead key and an Ŭŭ key, on LBracket and RBracket respectively. With the Wide mod, these keys are in the middle of the keyboard.

    For another solution, there's this one that's already available as an option in Linux XKB: Adding Esperanto letters to AltGr mappings of corresponding letters. Stevep99's suggestion is already available!

    From the xkb/symbols/epo file:

    // This is a generic "component" that is not used by the other layouts in this file,
// but is meant to be applied to any Qwerty layout.  If you have any questions, ask
// J. Pablo Fernández <pupeno@pupeno.com>.

[...]

// Add the Esperanto supersigned letters to their related keys in a
// Colemak layout.  Similar comment as above applies.
partial
xkb_symbols "colemak" {
    key <AB03> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, ccircumflex, Ccircumflex ] };
    key <AD05> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, gcircumflex, Gcircumflex ] };
    key <AC06> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, hcircumflex, Hcircumflex ] };
    key <AD06> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, jcircumflex, Jcircumflex ] };
    key <AC03> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, scircumflex, Scircumflex ] };
    key <AD08> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol,      ubreve,      Ubreve ] };
};
    Last edited by DreymaR (25-Jan-2016 12:42:43)

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