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Diffstat (limited to 'SW/kblayout/index/document.en.rest.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | SW/kblayout/index/document.en.rest.txt | 59 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 59 deletions
diff --git a/SW/kblayout/index/document.en.rest.txt b/SW/kblayout/index/document.en.rest.txt deleted file mode 100644 index e56d458..0000000 --- a/SW/kblayout/index/document.en.rest.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,59 +0,0 @@ -Optimize keyboard layout -======================== - -I'm sure you, too, know the history of the 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 usally 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. |