Re: [9fans] kbd.c

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

>Whatever your personal taste, the HH keyboard is a crock.  I think
>it's a mistake to go in one direction or the other based on that
>oddball.  The vast majority of keyboards have a caps lock and I think
>it's reasonable to assume one is present.
>
>Moreover, I believe the right mechanism is a form of shift key, since
>it is a shifting mechanism being proposed.  If some Uzbek has a Happy
>Hacking Keyboard he'll just have to cope.
>
>-rob

I don't want to start a flame war on this, and I am hesitant to take
issue with a renowned Plan9 guru, but I think that criticism
of the HH keyboard is a little strong. My only real gripe with it is
the lack of separate backspace and DEL keys. In general I like the small
footprint.

My personal pet hate is the bloating battleship keyboards that seem
to be inflicted on us by the MSWindows world, with so many superfluous
keys that it gets hard to find the ones I actually need (like the
shrinking space bar, which is barely an inch and a half wide on my
notebook... ) not to mention the amount of desk space they waste :-/

Personally I could quite happily do without numeric keypads, and
caps lock has only ever been a source of annoyance.
I'm not even sure about function and arrow keys, which I use so
infrequently that I find the HH approach of overloading them on the
numeric keys quite an acceptible compromise.

My other keyboard gripe are 'important' keys, like the control key, which tend
to wander about from keyboard to keyboard.

Anyway, my request would be - don't use the 'silly' keys just because they
are there, otherwise we will end up being stuck with them for ever,
even after sanity is restored.

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk