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"Sloppy Adolescent"

  • Started by Dekshuduph
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In this topic, I'm going to be typing in 'QWERTY' to avoid driving myself insane.  This is a reference point for myself and others; maybe I'll be able to type my next post in Colemak.

I am at the moment fifteen years of age, turning in a month and a half.  As such, there are many things I am doing just "for the sake of lacking common conformity":  Primarily, using Linux as my main operating system and ceasing the playing of many videogames, substituting instead for more enjoyable things like fiction.  Colemak was called to my attention on Tuesday, February 25, when I heard somewhere that QWERTY was not optimal for fast typing and that other, more efficient layouts have been made (I now believe they were referring to Dvorak).  When I first googled for custom keyboard layouts, I came upon a page that linked to the Colemak FAQ but in itself was a service to help individuals find layouts that work for them.

Of course I wasn't interested in optimal layouts as I knew next to nothing about keyboard layouts, so I settled on reading a bit more into Colemak.  I do say "a bit," though; I honestly looked no further than the website itself, which from reading the forums I now understand holds some unreasonable claims.  I instantly went straight into it, getting PKL to use at school, setting my Ubuntu keyboard settings to use Colemak, and breaking my keyboard to rearrange the keys.  I haven't learned touch typing for QWERTY, so I figured this was a great excuse to do so, but straight into Colemak which I hope could be something I use for the rest of my life.  A great advantage I now see is that I haven't forgotten how to use QWERTY since I don't use a proper touch typing technique for it, and as such I am now using it while making more typos that usual yet without needing to look (Which I can't do anymore).  The only two drawbacks are that I'll take a bit more time than  other users of this forum to get into Colemak as others have already learned touch typing, and that there really aren't all that many typing tutors that cater to users of other keyboard layouts!

_________________

I guess I'll be posting my progress on learning touch typing here, and maybe this can be more unique a topic than many others.  So, without further ado:  'Begin' mainly means start practicing with other sites, while 'Master' means meet the requirements on KTouch (Which, after the first lesson I modified to require only 160CPM and 98% accuracy).

2014-02-25:  Begin STNE
2014-02-26:  Begin RI
2014-02-26:  Master STNE
2014-02-27:  Begin AO, master RI
2014-02-28:  Begin DH
2014-03-01:  Master AO
2014-03-02:  Begin PL

Now that vague recollections are out of the way, here's some real numbers, pulled straight from KTouch rather than my ass.  This is the highest characters per minute, with accuracy above 98%, that was scored each day I care to edit this post.

           STNE| RI | AO | DH | PL | FU | WY | GJ | VM | BK | QC | ZX |
Up to post: 220| 194| 163| 133|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |
2014-03-02: 263|    |    | 157|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |
2014-03-03:    | 221| 202| 180| 152|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |
2014-03-04:    |    |    |    | 184| 161|    |    |    |    |    |    |
2014-03-05:    |    |    | 191| 195| 175| 140|    |    |    |    |    |
2014-03-06: 281| 233| 222|    | 215| 190| 181| 147|    |    |    |    |
2014-03-07:    |    |    | 208| 216| 188| 197| 166| 172| 145|    |    |
2014-03-08:    |    |    |    | 236| 208| 202| 181| 194| 165| 167|    |
2014-03-09: -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
2014-03-10: -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
2014-03-11:    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    | 197| 163|
Last edited by Dekshuduph (12-Mar-2014 02:40:32)
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Welcome! If you want some extras, look into my sig posts. ;) But you probably have enough as it is.

Amphetype is portable, layout agnostic and can be set up for texts or word practice. I use it to type literature. But it isn't a typing tutor per se.

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Good luck.

(It has been a while since I tried Ktouch,  does it have Colemak lessons built in now?  There's a link to a lesson download on the Colemak website: https://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=KTouch, not sure if it is still compatible, you may need to modernise it.  Gtypist has Colemak lessons.)

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DreymaR said:

Welcome! If you want some extras, look into my sig posts. ;) But you probably have enough as it is.

Amphetype is portable, layout agnostic and can be set up for texts or word practice. I use it to type literature. But it isn't a typing tutor per se.

Thank you.  This is quite enough, yes, but if I ever look at new keyboards I'll keep angle mod compatibility in mind.

Already heard about Amphetype, I'm looking forward to using it once I can type my stories fast enough to read moderately.

pinkyache said:

Good luck.

(It has been a while since I tried Ktouch,  does it have Colemak lessons built in now?  There's a link to a lesson download on the Colemak website: https://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=KTouch, not sure if it is still compatible, you may need to modernise it.  Gtypist has Colemak lessons.)

Thank you.  About KTouch, it looks and feels great for learning for me.  No complaints.  Haven't heard of GTypist, might also try that out for some variety.

Though, I'm beginning to have a bit of concern over something:  Is my muscle memory retaining individual letters, bigrams and trigrams or... whole words, even?  Though between days I jump around 20 CPM for KTouch lessons, I don't improve as much as I expect on learncolemak.com (Which contains different, more complex words) or sense-lang.com (Which generates random strings of letters).  I'm beginning to feel as though I'm underrating keybr.com for having a whole lot of nonsensical words that feel too repetitive for me to handle when really it would be faster in the long run.

Last edited by Dekshuduph (04-Mar-2014 02:42:43)
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Yes, your muscle memory learns n-grams. In your current phase that's not really necessary to think about as you still need to get the "1-grams" down. ;) For that, random strings might be okay – but personally I don't like doing that. Actually, one thing I like to do is to paste the 100 most common words in English into Amphetype and generate some lessons from that. This'll give you max "bang for your buck", as you train the stuff you'll be needing the most and thus gain speed more quickly; if you're serious about typing as a hobby you'll likely be doing just that eventually anyway.

Last edited by DreymaR (04-Mar-2014 07:20:11)

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Good luck on your Colemak learning journey.

Be sure to stick to it at least 20 days, and know well in advance that one day you will feel confused and cannot type well in both layouts.

When that critical moment come, be brave to go Colemak all the way.

Last edited by Tony_VN (04-Mar-2014 07:24:36)
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You're probably wasting your time with random sequences. Chess masters don't perform significantly better than novices when recalling random patterns. But they perform much better on patterns that have meaning. So unless you'll find some use typing random sequences, you should skip it.

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I think there is merit in doing random character exercises.  But not to excess.  It improves your adaptability.  You also get to practice less used keys.

Although tough,  after doing a few of these random exercises, typing 'normal' words, feels that much easier.

I've a tri-glyph list (or perhaps it's a list of six-grams, made up words of two common tri-grams glued together).  I've forgotten where I acquired it.  It's mainly gibberish, but also a good exercise.

The texts I've practiced the most are common word lists.

Last edited by pinkyache (06-Mar-2014 19:04:40)

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@DreymaR Thanks for confirming my thoughts.  I was planning on practising the common word lists, too, once I've done all the lessons, a bit before getting into punctuation.

@Tony_VN Thank you.  I'll be sure to keep in mind this supposed 'downfall' as I progress.

@youBane Rest assured, I have not.  The KTouch lessons are the same as the HTML lessons on the colemak.com website, which are collections of random words.

This post feels a lot easier to type than the last one was, and for that I am quite relieved in that my work is beginning to pay off.  I'll mention when I no longer need the keyboard image to help, and when I start doing stuff in Amphetype, for that matter.

On another note, as I do lesson GJ I notice that my right wrist is starting to hurt!  D: But after thinking on it for a few minutes, I realised that I was placing my index fingers on the two new keys in question.  Therefore, I had moved my wrists inward, and as such I had to reach further to hit the Enter key.  Nothing to really worry about, but I fear this lesson will be quite difficult to complete (I shudder to imagine B!)

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G and J are not supposed to be easy. They're put there because they're not needed enough to warrant better placements.

I use the Angle(Wide) mod, so for me the B is very easy. The price to pay for that is that the G is probably a little bit harder. Of course, my wrists love me for it.

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DreymaR said:

Of course, my wrists love me for it.

I think you could do with a little modesty; going around bragging about your international keyboard is likely going to get on my nerves.  No, I'm not going to relocate 'Z' for it, thank you very little!

Pointless controversy aside, I'm going to try lowering my seat and retracting the pegs in the back of the keyboard, maybe then my wrists will hurt less.  Heh...

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I don't think it's a good idea to do a lesson just on G and J.  Those are in unergonomic positions because they are rarer.



E̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶k̶e̶y̶b̶o̶a̶r̶d̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶ ̶q̶u̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶s̶.̶ ̶ ̶W̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶c̶l̶a̶i̶m̶e̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶a̶l̶y̶s̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶:̶
̶
̶I̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶C̶-̶v̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶r̶t̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶s̶w̶a̶p̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶b̶.̶
̶
̶I̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶C̶-̶c̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶y̶p̶e̶ ̶c̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶d̶e̶x̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶(̶s̶o̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶r̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e̶-̶h̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶r̶r̶a̶n̶g̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶,̶v̶,̶b̶)̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶r̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶z̶x̶b̶c̶v̶.̶ ̶ ̶F̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶b̶i̶g̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶,̶ ̶c̶y̶c̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶c̶ ̶-̶>̶ ̶v̶ ̶-̶>̶ ̶b̶ ̶-̶>̶ ̶g̶ ̶-̶>̶ ̶c̶,̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶w̶o̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶o̶n̶ ̶(̶v̶,̶ ̶b̶)̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶t̶w̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶(̶Q̶W̶E̶R̶T̶Y̶ ̶b̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶)̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶m̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶a̶s̶i̶e̶r̶ ̶Q̶W̶E̶R̶T̶Y̶ ̶v̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶.̶

From previous post, I'm guessing shortcuts matter to you.  Nevermind.



Even without an international keyboard, the wide (not angle) mod is still possible; it would displace the quotation marks to the top row.  Something like this:

colemak-wide-basic.png

Last edited by lalop (09-Mar-2014 12:45:19)
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lalop said:

I don't think it's a good idea to do a lesson just on G and J.  Those are in unergonomic positions because they are rarer.

The point of doing lessons for any keys is to better your meemory of where they are, regardless of their position.  I only did it a few times though, now I'm done.

lalop said:

Even without an international keyboard, the wide (not angle) mod is still possible; it would displace the quotation marks to the top row.

DreymaR was correct in assuming I had enough already.  I didn't mention the wide mod because I had nothing to say about it; I considered it but really the benefits don't appeal to me.  I should mention I have fairly long fingers so all the pinky keys are easy enough to reach for what it's worth.  The only key I would get benefit from using a wide mod is AltGr (I always just called this Right Alt until very recently!) hit with the right thumb, but all I use it for are “alternate quotation marks” and 'é', as it's used in 'Protégé'.


...Also I've started with Amphetype!  After the first day, I've figured out the basics and the gui, then came across my first problem.  I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, and if that's the case (and no-one can answer off the top of their head) someone could direct me somewhere more appropriate.

Sometimes it says I've misspelled the second space between sentences.  I assume the cause of the problem is that the text editor the author used replaced the default character the spacebar creates with different space character; I recall there being around six different ones littered around Unicode, probably made for different character sets or purposes.  I'd expect Amphetype to convert characters that can't be typed yet are trivial enough to be swapped with a more convenient one, but that's not the case as is obvious that I must use “” rather than "" for quotations.  Either it's this or some other crazy problem is at stake, but I'm not pondering what else could be the issue...

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Sadly, vanilla amphetype is not very good at converting such characters. My fork adds some basic conversion (needs to be manually specified; search Text.py for "input_replacements") and discards all other non-ASCII text.

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Dekshuduph said:
DreymaR said:

Of course, my wrists love me for it.

I think you could do with a little modesty; going around bragging about your international keyboard is likely going to get on my nerves.  No, I'm not going to relocate 'Z' for it, thank you very little!

Pointless controversy aside, I'm going to try lowering my seat and retracting the pegs in the back of the keyboard, maybe then my wrists will hurt less.  Heh...

WTF? Random pointless rant troll mode much?

If you want to discuss the merits of keyboard modifications, you'd likely do well not to alienate those who try to help. Even if they contribute their own anecdotal experience. If your nerves cannot handle that, maybe you need mindfulness exercises more than you need keyboard advice. Really.

Last edited by DreymaR (11-Mar-2014 09:30:51)

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lalop said:

Sadly, vanilla amphetype is not very good at converting such characters. My fork adds some basic conversion (needs to be manually specified; search Text.py for "input_replacements") and discards all other non-ASCII text.

Thank you, I'll be sure to give it a shot.

DreymaR said:

WTF? Random pointless rant troll mode much?

If you want to discuss the merits of keyboard modifications, you'd likely do well not to alienate those who try to help. Even if they contribute their own anecdotal experience. If your nerves can handle that, maybe you need mindfulness exercises more than you need keyboard advice. Really.

You're right, that was wrong of me to say.  The way you worded that post made me think you were being coy and arrogant about the way you type compared to me, so I became aggressive in turn.  I apologize, for what it's worth.


I made myself a personal reference image because the recommended one from the website is ugly in my opinion.

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Heh, it's okay. Nice follow-up.

That's a good image and I agree that the "official" one isn't (plus, I don't like its fingering scheme). To promote it, consider editing [ img ] tags into your post so people can see it straight away!

Also, should you be interested there's also the "IBM-style" images I made (as shown in my sig post); if you know your .svg you may edit that further as you wish. Looks as if the links in my original post are broken now (as I lost my old university account), but I'll fix that eventually.

   Cmk-ISO-AWideOff_90d-FingerShui.png
   I like img tags! :)

Last edited by DreymaR (11-Mar-2014 11:01:07)

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QR72RHn.png

I used the lighting plugin in Gimp to make the bevels; the filters in Inkscape all look too fancy for my tastes, and I'm not willing to drop into the filter editor just yet.  The drop shadows were easy enough, though.  I based the shape on the keyboard I use, on the bottom-right corner the arrow keys are tucked in so I took advantage of the space ;)

Last edited by Dekshuduph (11-Mar-2014 20:34:10)
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That's beautiful, grats!

Personally, I'd drop much of the text and only leave the symbols on Shift/Enter/Back/Tab at least. Probably the other gray keys too, actually. They aren't the focus of the image and people know what they do anyway. At the least I'd chuck them into a separate Inkscape layer and hide it most of the time.

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And now for something completely different:  Why hasn't this been done before?

nMaJBcn.png

For discussion, I'm going to refer to this as the Raise Mod.

Disadvantages:  The upper row is more staggered than the lower row; these more common keys are a bit harder to hit than the less common keys below.  I have not come up with an idea on how to use this for ISO-105 keyboards.
Advantages:  Shift and AltGr are special because they can be pressed with the corner of one's palm.  The pinkies and right thumb no longer have to move to hit these keys.  This incorporates concepts from both the Angle and Wide mods into an ISO-103(?) keyboard without requiring ‘Z’ or the apostrophe to move.


The reason I'm posting this in my experiences thread is because this is personal.  If this has already been brought up and/or is a terrible idea for a very obvious reason, then it'll be here rather than on its own topic.  If anyone wants to adapt this or start a more serious thread for discussion on it, I'll be fine if they put it in their own thread without credit to me.

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Interesting. 

My suggestions:

  1. The left hand number row's rightward-curl seems very uncomfortable to me.  I would shift QWFPG to the left by 1, with the bonus that G becomes much easier to reach.

  2. Since you become pretty close to the right backspace, you could potentially get rid of one of the backspaces.

  3. Because shortcuts are fairly stretchy, i would put ctrl either at QWERTY Tab or QWERTY caps.   In the current position, stuff like Ctrl-f would be fairly hard to reach.

Personally, I couldn't abide palm-pressing, though that may be due to my laptop keyboard. 

That said, I probably would not use this kind of layout due to the right hand number row's leftward curl.  Also not sure about the space bar.

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lalop said:

The left hand number row's rightward-curl seems very uncomfortable to me.  I would shift QWFPG to the left by 1, with the bonus that G becomes much easier to reach.

This idea is very uncomfortable for me, personally.  To hit ‘P’, for instance, would press against the middle finger; more so than it does already.  Moving the upper row inward feels helpful for me, but may be less so with an ergonomic board or for those too used to touch typing with the stagger moving the upper row to the left.

Since you become pretty close to the right backspace, you could potentially get rid of one of the backspaces.

The backspace remains for those who currently use caps as a QWERTY wrapper, and as a bonus could be closer.  Also, I don't know what else would go there, the way I have it set up at the moment.

Because shortcuts are fairly stretchy, i would put ctrl either at QWERTY Tab or QWERTY caps.   In the current position, stuff like Ctrl-f would be fairly hard to reach.

‘QAZXCVB’ remaining was one reason I chose Colemak, to preserve shortcuts, so moving Ctrl up in line with the rest of the keys is what works for me.  I can hit Ctrl-F fine, but I assume you must be using a mod that raises Ctrl.

Personally, I couldn't abide palm-pressing, though that may be due to my laptop keyboard.

Huh, I didn't think of that.  That's a big hit.

That said, I probably would not use this kind of layout due to the right hand number row's leftward curl.  Also not sure about the space bar.

Maybe this argument should be grouped with the one about the left hand's rightward curl.  I'm thinking a fix to this in particular would be to switch the upper and lower letter keys row, effectively making it into an upside-down mod.  I don't see what you mean about the spacebar, but I'll chalk it up to short fingers.

These arguments lead me to believe that even if someone developed this for PKL and XKB, for instance, it would be very obscure because I designed it with my personal situation in mind: longer fingers and a larger, desktop keyboard.  There could be variants based on the arguments you posed, Lalop, but it would still be debatable.  I suppose it was a nice idea, at least, and I'll learn from it however it turns out.




...EDIT.  I should also post regarding the mod of Amphetype you made.  I'll mention real quick that the dark theme seemed to come out of nowhere; if Vanilla used system colors, which I can't quite be sure of, what exactly were you trying to accomplish?  The next note is that the character replacement you mentioned is an improvement, and yet it just deletes unidentified characters (including the strange space I had been complaining about).  This means that there will only be one space after sentences and some words are just... mashedtogether.

To practice with, I tried a real story, but it ended up being too slow, and since Amphetype doesn't show page breaks I didn't know where scenes were changing.  This lead to lack of comprehension.  So I then chose a big heap of junk that would be easy fodder for me to mindlessly type.  The text in question is a jumbled heap of narrative cut out from a story I've read before.  It's the strangest thing, though: while I'm typing this, I get floods of anxiety and my whole body becomes really sore.  I would hope that I've grasped Colemak enough that it in itself wouldn't be a problem: I've surpassed my current QWERTY speed and am almost 4/5 of the way to the former speed (38 now, as to ~50 before).  I just don't know what's going wrong 6_9

Last edited by Dekshuduph (16-Mar-2014 04:52:56)
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OTTOMH, Cevgar proposed this a while back (but I won't search for it right now). I believe he called it "liftoff" or something, similarly to your "raise". :)

My feeling is that it can get uncomfortable for those of us who like to rest their wrists much of the time. Also, the 2-row downwards curl feels brutal on my carpals. YMMV. ;)

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Quick update: I haven't done much reading lately, so I haven't found an excuse to really get into Amphetype.  I've been distracted by design stuff and I've been working a little bit with MessageEase, which I found in the topic here discussing it.

I'm posting now because I just had a really weird experience.  I'm at a friend's house and they gave me an old computer to use, and I had my flash drive with me.  I open up PKL after I notice the strange typing I did in the web browser but it doesn't work!  AVG pops up and says it is securing a virus, then the tray icon goes away and pkl.exe is no longer on my flash drive.  I had never really thought that it could be considered a virus.  So now after my friend logged me into administrator and I uninstall AVG, I'm typing this with QWERTY.  Yes I will redownload PKL in a moment, but typing like this feels like a new experience.  Earlier, it felt more frustrating, in that I would constantly be scanning the right side of the keyboard looking for 'E' until my brain kicked in and reminded me where it was.  Now it just feels sluggish, I'm no longer using my ring finger like I used to as much at all and I'm making quite a few typos (most notably some missing 'E's).  This is just tiring, now I'm going to go download it, the uninstall is done.

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That's probably a post for the technical forum.

Software that intercepts keystrokes is in a very privileged position and rightly should be viewed suspiciously.  That's why I am very distrustful of binary blobs sitting at that level.  Removing your anti-virus program seems over the top too.  Especially if it really was an infected file!

These executables should be signed or at least should have published checksums so you can verify their integrity a little.  I'd have thought that a suspicious file might have been quarantined by the anti-virus program.  Can't you green-light it or add an exception?  False positives do occur.

Simple text file configurations loaded via a keyboard layout helper/configurator in the OS would seem a better way to do this.  IMHO.  But that's another topic.  Either way, sounds frustrating.

Last edited by pinkyache (22-Mar-2014 11:31:20)

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