[HN Gopher] A Mathematical Keyboard Layout (2018)
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A Mathematical Keyboard Layout (2018)
Author : susam
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-04-04 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (terathon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (terathon.com)
| layer8 wrote:
| Nice. An alternative is to use a Compose key. I have Caps Lock
| mapped to Compose, and for example Compose-g-D yields "D" ("greek
| D") and Compose-<-= yields "<=", etc.
| ducktective wrote:
| Are you using a custom `.compose` in your home? If so, doesn't
| it incur delay in other xkb functionalities (loading a custom
| file from ~)
|
| How do you type [?] (Unicode: U+2202)?
| leephillips wrote:
| I use the Compose file for this as well, in addition to
| configuring a "dead Greek" key for quick access to the Greek
| alphabet. I even have a few phrases, such as my email
| address, in there: works everywhere, from my editor to text
| boxes on websites. There are no delays.
| layer8 wrote:
| I use WinCompose (on Windows 10) with a custom .XCompose
| file. I don't use [?], but if I would I'd probably bind it to
| Compose-p-d for "partial differential". The default bindings
| are Compose-Compose-p-a-r-t and Compose-*-.-.-d, which isn't
| very convenient.
| jbj wrote:
| interesting, the "Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator" MSKLC seems
| to be moved, I just downloaded it one month ago to setup US
| English Internaitional to be identical as what is found on linux.
|
| New link is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/download/details.aspx?id=102... Remember to turn on windows
| features for old .NET before you install MSKLC
| chewxy wrote:
| C-x-8-RET has been most useful to me for unicode maths symbols.
|
| Having said that, I have a layer on my keyboard dedicated to APL
| symbols. I highly recommend QMK keyboards for shennanigans like
| these
| joeman1000 wrote:
| I like the approach that the AUCTeX and/or CDLaTeX modes in emacs
| take: if I want Greek letters or math symbols, I hit the
| backtick, then the mnemonic or binding for the Greek
| symbol/operator I want. I know you can't extend this to Twitter
| or something, but I would never want to anyway.
| (https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/11.88-extra/tex-ref.pdf)
| oddlama wrote:
| The older neo keyboard layout and its newer variants like bone
| (https://neo-layout.org/Layouts/bone) follow a similar approach
| to provide more symbols, and they're additionally optimized for
| typing.
|
| These layouts provide several additional layers which give easy
| access to ASCII special characters, greek letters and frequently
| used math symbols.
|
| Also there is layer 4, which is pure gold in itself. It provides
| cursor movement keys, backspace, enter and a numpad close to your
| home position. I personally couldn't go back once I had tried it.
|
| (Beware that these layouts include the umlauts aouss as they were
| designed for german writing, and make use of the additional key
| for '<' in the lower left corner of german keyboards)
| fogof wrote:
| > I can't stand using a hyphen to mean negative or subtract
|
| I wonder what the difference is. Maybe in unicode one is slightly
| longer than the other, but at the end of the day, aren't they
| both just a horizontal line?
| susam wrote:
| Compare the following two examples:
|
| 5 - 2 = 3
|
| 5 - 2 = 3
|
| The first one is correct. It contains the Unicode character
| 'MINUS SIGN' (U+2212). The second contains the Unicode
| character 'HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D) which is not suitable for
| representing the minus sign in mathematical typesetting.
|
| Also, see https://i.imgur.com/ngFI3JB.png for a few examples
| typeset with MathJax. The first example has a proper minus sign
| (correct) whereas the second one contains a hyphen (incorrect).
| By the way, in plain HTML, the character entity reference
| "−" displays the minus sign, although I just use MathJax
| when proper mathematics typesetting is required in HTML pages.
| Skeime wrote:
| In proportional fonts, the minus sign is significantly longer
| and usually slightly higher and thinner than the hyphen (so it
| lines up with the horizontal bar of the + sign). If you're used
| to it, it looks much better than a hyphen. (Similar to using
| real quotation marks instead of the straight ones etc.)
| hyperjeff wrote:
| Some nice symbol selection here. It's a great thing to customize
| your keyboard layout. On the Mac side, there's a nice tool called
| Ukelele: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
| 2grep wrote:
| Ukelele is one of those amazing apps that you love more the
| less you use it. I've been using this keyboard as my daily
| driver since 2007:
|
| https://github.com/2grep/ScienceNotes
| divbzero wrote:
| What about a keyboard layout for programming? Dedicated keys for
| "if", "for", parentheses, braces, _etc_? This can't be that hard
| to set up, there must be plugins in Vim, Emacs, and others.
| Talinx wrote:
| There's Programmer Dvorak with dedicated keys for ";", "{",
| "}", "[" and more.
| fstarship wrote:
| What advantage would this have over snippets?
| notagoodidea wrote:
| Could be done with qmk and any mechanical keyboard supporting
| it (and much more but it is common to hear about people having
| a vim layer).
| jake-low wrote:
| Very cool that the author had a custom keyboard made with their
| keymap printed on it.
|
| Personally I like being able to type math symbols on occasion but
| don't do so often enough to benefit from a custom keyboard layout
| that I'd then have to memorize. I didn't have a good way to do
| this until about a year ago, when I learned about Espanso [1]
| which is a cross-platform text expander. I installed it and set
| it up to substitute various (vaguely LaTeX-inspired) macros to
| UTF-8 strings. For example, typing the following keystrokes
| x = R cos(:phi) sin(:lambda :minus :lambda:nought)
|
| becomes x = R cos(ph) sin(l - l0)
|
| I chose ':' as a prefix for all my macros but this is just a
| self-enforced convention; you can configure a substitution for
| any sequence of keystrokes. Since I gave all the characters names
| that made sense to me, I don't have to think much when I type
| them.
|
| A few of the substitutions I get the most mileage out of:
|
| - The Greek alphabet, both upper and lowercase (:theta - th and
| :Omega - O)
|
| - Double-struck letters for numerical sets; e.g. :RR - R
|
| - :infinity - [?]
|
| - :neq - [?]
|
| - :pm - +-
|
| [1]: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso
| leoc wrote:
| Obligatory old-timers the APL keyboard
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)#/me...
| and the Symbolics LM-2 "space cadet" keyboard:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard#/media/Fi...
| It seems that Dyalog is selling new keyboards for its APL, too:
| https://www.dyalog.com/apl-font-keyboard.htm
| https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/images/Business/products/us_r... .
| sedachv wrote:
| Get the real deal: https://www.pckeyboard.com
|
| You can get an APL keycap set for your existing Unicomp
| keyboard, or do a custom order for any of their models. They
| will even print you custom keycap sets:
| https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/Buttons
|
| The trackball Unicomp is IMO the best keyboard being
| manufactured (right now they are out of stock until Q3 2021):
| https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/ClassicTrackball
|
| Buckling spring is just a superior (although less durable) key
| switch technology than the Honeywell switches used in Symbolics
| keyboards (and most other keyboard switch mechanisms as well).
| One thing that the Symbolics keyboards did right is having both
| the APL and Greek legends on keycaps.
|
| But none of this matters if you do not have the right software.
| GNU Emacs greek and TeX input-methods, and the C-x 8 iso-transl
| keymap (which you can extend) makes writing mathematical
| symbols really easy.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The new official French AZERTY standard is pretty good too :
|
| http://norme-azerty.fr/en/
|
| _Hopefully_ the various administrations will start to push it to
| replace old keyboards...
|
| There's also a BEPO version, which would have been even better,
| but I guess that would be too much inertia to fight?
| airstrike wrote:
| Seems weird to have specific keys for a e e when you could just
| combine them e.g. '+a '+e as is the case in the US
| international keyboards. Ditto for c
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That's because those are _extremely_ common in French.
|
| Also why c was moved to C, since it's much less common.
|
| And now since you can do both of these methods, you can
| _finally_ write upper case properly in French on Windows !
| leoc wrote:
| It seems impressive in general. But are users _still_ going to
| be stuck with the awful pox that is an important hold-to-use
| modifier key, Alt Gr, that appears on only one side of the
| spacebar? All this statistical analysis and the result is
| another layout which is deeply incompatible with proper touch-
| typing?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, that would require even more radical keyboard layout
| changes I guess ?
|
| And I assume that less common characters have been put there
| ?
|
| But I assume that you're talking about {}, which some
| programmers use quite frequently, and which are still locked
| behind AltGr, though in a better position than before?
|
| (Also, there's always Alt+Ctrl, though it's certainly not
| ideal either...)
| leoc wrote:
| I'm talking about the fact that there's only one Alt Gr, on
| the right of the spacebar, but many characters behind an
| Alt Gr modifier on the right-hand side of the keyboard. You
| can't type any of those characters using the correct form
| for touch-typing, which is to hold the modifier key with
| one hand while pressing the letter key with the other.
| https-bot wrote:
| https://norme-azerty.fr/ is the HTTPS version of http://norme-
| azerty.fr/ you used that also works and with 100.00% similarity
| on their contents.
|
| (I'm a bot, see https://github.com/fishy/https-bot for source
| code)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Hmm, weird that Firefox just landed me on the http version by
| default??
| jtvjan wrote:
| You can use an add-on like HTTPZ[1] to load HTTPS versions
| of sites automatically.
|
| [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/httpz/
| an_ko wrote:
| A stricter version of this (which I prefer) is baked into
| latest Firefox: Tick _Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all
| windows_ at the bottom of about:preferences#privacy. It
| upgrades to HTTPS whenever available, and otherwise shows
| you a warning that you 're about to load an unsecured
| HTTP site.
| reaperducer wrote:
| This has inspired me to try to make my own custom keyboard. Does
| anyone know of a good keyboard remapping tool for the Mac? I have
| BetterTouchTool, but I've found it's not reliable on my machine.
| (And probably other people's machines, which is why it includes a
| "Restart" option in its menu.)
|
| I like the keyboard company the article links to, but the
| keyboards it offers don't have the full range of function keys
| that macOS supports (It's four short). Are there other custom-
| printed keyboard companies I should consider?
| limeblack wrote:
| > Are there other custom-printed keyboard companies I should
| consider?
|
| Get a clear or white keyboard cover. As a last resort spray
| paint one white.
| kps wrote:
| If you want to do something like the article, with a custom
| layout (e.g. defining characters for Option and Shift+Option),
| then what you want (as hyperjeff mentioned above) is Ukelele
| https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
| remolueoend wrote:
| Depending on your version of MacOS, I'd recommend Karabiner-
| Elements for remapping: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
| vander_elst wrote:
| I guess a possibility would also be to use one of these
| https://ergodox-ez.com/. They allow quite some customization.
| codethief wrote:
| I wrote myself a small plugin for Sublime Text that allows me to
| enter common math symbols as unicode characters by virtue of a
| selection popup. So, for instance, I hit Ctrl+m, type "subs" (for
| subset - it does fuzzy matching), hit enter et voila, I get
| "[?]". Finally, math in LaTeX is no longer a pain to read!
|
| While it works very nicely, it's of course unavailable outside
| Sublime, so I've been looking for alternatives and came across
| the following projects:
|
| https://github.com/ibus/ibus (example:
| https://github.com/sphaerophoria/ibus-memebox)
| https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji/
|
| Hopefully at some point I'll find the time to adapt them to my
| purposes.
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