simonh said:I noticed the extend mode in the latest PKL. I haven't yet figured out how to use it with Colemak though. For that matter does anyone know what Prolemak is? And why Colemak was not included with PKL instead of being a layout you have to download separately?
- Prolemak is Farkas Máté's own layout. You can see that it's very inspired by Colemak, but he chose to move around some keys. As the moved keys include rarely used ones that I think should've been left alone and shortcut keys such as B and W, I don't quite agree his layout but maybe it's good for typing Hungarian? No arguing with the fact that he likes it at least! ;)
- Colemak and colemak-inspired layouts is one of the many layout packages you can download for PKL. You can also get layouts that remap only part of your standard keyboard, different variants of Dvorak and others, and layouts for typing classical Hebrew or Greek, diacritics and all! PKL is so much larger now than just a Colemak mapping. You can also download a separate standalone Colemak, which runs Colemak but none of the many other layouts - good if you want something simple and compact. Under Standalone layouts there's Colemak, Prolemak and that oddball EntiKey which was made by a German guy for typing one-handed (or two-handed if you wish). Haven't looked into that one.
- To use the Extend key in a layout that has this functionality (such as Prolemak), you hold down the designated key (Prolemak uses CapsLock) and hit another (or several) to produce a remapped keypress whereas the original function of the 'extend' key is only realized if it is released without pressing another key with it. The results are mapped in the pkl.ini file I think, so there's one Extend mode in PKL common for the layouts and the layout itself only specifies an Extend key. This is very similar to what I'm after, but only has one mode where I'm after several. In fact, if you try the Prolemak with the help image on and press CapsLock (provided you still have one, hehe!) you'll see that the nav keys use the same layout that I'm after! UNEI for the arrow keys, JH for PgUp/PgDn and ;O for Ins/Del (I'm still undecided on whether to switch JH and ;O but the idea is the same). The cool thing is that you're sending "real" blind keystrokes and not just character codes with it, so that, e.g., holding down shift/capslock/ctrl/i in Prolemak will give you a shift-ctrl-arrow which selects one word forwards!
Once again, I start looking into something cool and Farkas has already done it very well.
If you want the Extend/Transpose functionality in your layout in PKL, you can add a line in the layout.ini under the [global] section, like for instance the one from Prolemak:
[global]
extend_key = CapsLock
Keep in mind that if you use a commonly used key for this, the 'key-on-up' way of working may get annoying as will the accidentally transposed keys if you type fast. Therefore a rarely used key (such as CapsLock, the left Win key(?), or a rarely used letter such as Q or Z) is preferrable to anything you use much.