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Diffstat (limited to 'SW/kblayout/document.en.rest.txt')
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diff --git a/SW/kblayout/document.en.rest.txt b/SW/kblayout/document.en.rest.txt deleted file mode 100644 index f609813..0000000 --- a/SW/kblayout/document.en.rest.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ -Optimize keyboard layout -======================== -:CreationDate: 2003-01-28 10:09:25 -:tags: - software - - keyboard - -I'm sure you, too, know the history of the Sholes ("QWERTY") keyboard, -that was designed to avoid that too fast typists jammed mechanical -typewriters. You would know also that the Dvorak layout is cosidered -by many to be faster and more effective. - -When I tried to learn to use the Dvorak keyboard, a friend of mine -asked me: «Why don't you write a program to measure your keyboard -usage, and then obtain a personalized layout?». In a moment of -crazyness, I decided to do just that. - -The first program is freq.pl_, which reads the files given on the -command line and produces a probability matrix, writing it into the -file whose name is in the ``$MATRFN`` variable, default -``/tmp/freq.matr``. Actually it sees the text as a Markov process over -the characters with memory 1, and extracts the transition -matrix. Note: the elements are frequencies, not probabilities. The -optional normalization is left as exercise to the reader. - -The second program is freqdump.pl_, which is probably -useless. I've written it (three or four different versions) to have an -idea about the frequencies. Give it a look if you want. - -The most useful program (I hope) is optkeyb.pl_, which starting -from the matrix (as usual, filename hardcoded) and the QWERTY layout -searches by stochastic gradient descent a better layout. In other -words, it calculates a value for the layout (sum over the pairs of -keys of their distance times the frequency of that pair), then tries -to exchange two random keys looking for a better result. To avoid -local minima (there are a lot) it starts by randomly exchanging -``$PRE_SHUFFLE`` pairs, and if it doesn't find a better layout for -``$STARVATION`` tries it starts again, after having written the -locally optimum layout at the end of the file ``/tmp/layouts``. It -uses curses and the corresponding Perl module ``Curses.pm``. - -To avoid bad things, like numbers scattered between other keys, it's -possible to set into the ``%locked`` hash the keys that must not be -moved. - -To give yoy an idea of the results, after some hours of computation -the best layout was:: - - ` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ; = - - x w h t s a l b y ' j q - z \ [ c i e r u p . , - k v f d n o m g ] / - -Bear in mind I use a IBM U.S. keyboard, and where the ``q`` is, -there's usually the backslash/pipe key, which is larger than the -others, so I should have locked it... - -To have an idea of the optimization, the value relative to the QWERTY -layout is 10.190.280, for the one above is 6.797.370, meaning a 34% -reduction in the space travelled by the fingers during writing. - -.. _`freq.pl`: /src/freq.pl -.. _`freqdump.pl`: /src/freqdump.pl -.. _`optkeyb.pl`: /src/optkeyb.pl |