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    Shifted Hands for Punctuation

    • Started by youBane
    • 1 Replies:
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    • Registered: 26-Oct-2013
    • Posts: 71

    Lately I've been toying with the idea of shifting my hand position for punctuation. Normally, parentheses and brackets are fine where they are, but they're used a lot in programming. I hate having to use my ring finger repeatedly because it's a weak finger. It comes up with (), [], and <>. I think it's a mistake to move the punctuation keys as I imagine was done for programmer dvorak, because it's easy enough to slide my fingers over just a little to get the punctuation to line up with my index and middle fingers. Also, I prefer a symmetry between the aforementioned punctuation. I don't like how () lines up with Ring and Little fingers whereas <> lines up with Middle and Ring fingers.

    However, in practice I find this isn't as big a concern as I thought it would be, because of code completion. I rarely type the closing bracket. Instead I type Tab.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
    • Posts: 5,343

    I agree. I tend to use the middle finger on 3/4 and 8/9, as it is a strong finger and it feels natural; I do consider it a matter of individual preference as my layout image shows. It makes more sense to me to assign two number row keys to the strong middle finger and one to the weak ring finger than vice versa.

        Cmk-ISO-AWide-35_60d_FShui.png
        "Finger Shui" colored Colemak AngleWide(/) layout.

    The brackets on index fingers works well enough for me, even if the inward stretches are long. Brackets are common in coding, but I'm fine with it.

    Particularly bad is bracket same-finger! When making an empty pair of brackets/parentheses, it shouldn't be a same-finger bigram. So again, using the middle finger on the 9 key this is fine and if I'm to type an empty pair of square or curly brackets I can use both index fingers on the middle keys (although for curly braces it's really too much and you'd be tempted to use a sticky shift or something...).

    Last edited by DreymaR (02-Nov-2015 15:59:12)

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