Tuesday, September 15, 2009
QWERTY < DVORAK < Colemak < QGMLWY
No, I'm not going to try all of those keyboard layouts. I'm going to switch over to Colemak and see where the 193% greater efficiency takes me. Yes QGMLWY is better, but I'm not going through the steps of reading command line after command line to run in Perl. Colemak is easy to install.
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What's difficult about QGMLWY? With Portable Keyoboard Layout it's a walk in the park really. At least on Windows. Personally I tested Colemak for quite a while, but there were things I didn't like about it. QGMLWY was next on my list, and so far it feels great. (I found your entry by googling up "QGMLWY", curious what people have to say about it)
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ReplyDeleteI tried to install QGMLWY using PKL but it involved a whole bunch of scripting and stuff (not exactly a walk in the park) and I didn't want to go through with that. Basically the QGMLWY layout itself was never tested because I couldn't get it installed. Notice how I did put QGMLWY as ">" Colemak in the title. If you could help me at all I of course would give it a try.
ReplyDeleteSure! Well I'm far from an expert, and also not quite sure what the problem was.
ReplyDeleteI just downloaded PKL with the layouts (btw the one I wanted was in version 1, not version 2) from Carpal X website and it worked straight away for me.
The scripting work has been done and ready-made layouts are available to download: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?download
Note that versions 0.01 and 0.02 are somewhat different - the layout which I personally liked best (QGMWLY with ZXCV fixed and H on the extended home row) was in the 0.01 package.
Alternatively, you can use the tool called Microsoft Keyboard Layout.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/goglobal/bb964665.aspx
- it requires you to manually create the layout you want (remapping all the keys one by one), but it offers a nice user-friendly interface to do this. And once it's done, it's done. You create a DLL, you install the DLL, you get a keyboard layout no different than any other "official" keyboard layout in Windows.
It will be visible under Regional and Language settings, and you'll be able either to replace QWERTY with it, or to use them parallelly (switching via the Language bar or keyboard shortcuts) etc.
Hope it helps
While still testing I must say QGMLWY has me seduced.
ReplyDeleteAfter four days on Dvorak I just couldn't handle it anymore. I found the calpax site, downloaded Ukelele, created my QGMLWY keyboard and felt very comfortable after only a few hours. I believe some variation of this layout merits consideration.
For Windows installation files and other resources for the QGMLWY keyboard layout, go to http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?24167
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