Lenovo Tinkers With Larger Delete and Escape Keys 586
Slatterz writes "After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have decided the time is right to install larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range. While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century. What convinced them to make the size-change was doing some tests on users to see which keys they use the most. They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys that Lenovo hasn't made any bigger." The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.
Re:What Key Instead of CapsLock? (Score:3, Interesting)
They should just put CapsLock along with PrintScreen , ScrollLock, Pause/Break.
Re:Lenovo aren't the only ones (Score:3, Interesting)
well .. I for one don't. I own this one [logitech.com] and the double sized delete key WAS a factor.
Laugh as much as you want, but my keyboard is the input device I use the most, and I'm pretty sure this is true for a lot of /.'ers. I find it always mind boggling that people will pay incredible sums for their mices, but will get $9,99 keyboards with the argument that "it's just a keyboard, you know". A keyboard should be as ergonomic as possible, unless all you ever do is click links in your browser.
When friends give me a list of notebooks with similar specs and ask me to tell them which one to buy, my answer is always to open notepad or whatever is installed, type a few sentences and buy the one that felt best, even if it doesn't have the best specs or the best price of the lot. Incidentally, the chance that that they WILL use the delete key is quite high, and a big one you can hit easily with your pinky without looking for it is, in lack of any other word, awesome.
Changed Keymap layouts (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there's oodles of room for real improvements.
I love Sun Type5 keybards because the cut/paste & front/back keys is on the left hand side of the keyboard. Ditto super handy when your right hand is on the mouse.
Xix.
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Because some obsolete VT-52 or obscure Wyse terminal had it there? What are you going to do with the right ctrl key if you move the left one above the shift key? Place it above the right shift key where the enter key is? Or perhaps you'd leave the right ctrl key where it is and have an asymmetric modifier key layout?
No, the real problem with keyboards is the NumLock key. The number keys and cursor control keys should never have been allowed to mix.
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a Lenovo T400 and the placement of the DEL key always annoyed me. I use a program called KeyTweak (http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/) to remap my lenovo keyboard as follows:
Right CTRL key is DEL
Those silly keys to the right and left of the up arrow are HOME and END
And finally, drum roll please... the CAPS key is mapped to the TAB key so I have a gigantic space to mash my chubby fingers when looking for a tab stop!
Caps Lock Idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
DELETE FROM my.memory WHERE opinion = his
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COMMIT
Re:No need (Score:1, Interesting)
I could really use the CAPS LOCK key taken off. Completely. I've thought about just taking a screwdriver to the darned thing. I suppose _someone_ uses it, right?
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:3, Interesting)
The original function of Caps Lock is nuisance. If you are on Windows you can set Caps Lock to do an actually useful thing which makes your life a whole lot easier:
http://lifehacker.com/5278802/iswitchw-finds-windows-as-you-type [lifehacker.com]
Re:Caps Lock Idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because he doesn't see a reason for Caps Lock out there in his little business world doesn't mean the key isn't highly useful to application developers. I'll point out SQL capitalization standards as just one example.
DELETE FROM my.memory WHERE opinion = his
/
COMMIT
Well, if you have a proper editor you don't need to type those keywords in caps, because the editor does it for you automatically.
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:2, Interesting)
Or perhaps you'd leave the right ctrl key where it is and have an asymmetric modifier key layout?
As someone who maps caps to ctrl, yes. What's so wrong about it being asymmetrical? I at least had absolutely no difficulty with adjusting to that ctrl location -- the only problems was adjusting BACK when I used a computer without that.
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm using a Dragon 32, you insenstive clod
I've been collecting vintage computer hardware for the last few months, and I gotta say, my Tandy CoCo3 (128K version) has by _far_ the best keyboard of any of the 8 or 16-bit machines I've used. I never used one back in the day, so the mint condition one I just got last month _really_ surprised me with the keyboard feel. I also got a Tandy 102 that was still in its unopened box. :)
Back to the subject of keyboards, though, to say noone has been messing with the layout of keys is to be completely unaware of computers of the last several years. Certainly there's a small player in the industry called 'Microsoft' that has been making some fairly commonly found keyboards that have the keys normally found above the arrow keys to be arranged in strange and remarkably unpleasant ways. I'm pleased to say the latest entry in their 'Natural' line has returned those keys to the proper position - the MS Natural 4000 keyboard not only unbreaks the keyboard layout changes they made in previous keyboards, but also returns the tilt to the correct location - the front, not the back (which actually makes things WORSE ergonomically). Plus it's available in beautiful, beautiful black. :)
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe I didn't use it enough, but I always had trouble typing on one of those SUN keyboards with a few crucial keys in different places.
Sun does a couple other dumb things though, like make backspace 5 times harder to hit.
The ctrl-caps switch is really the only thing right about those keyboards.
I don't know what I'd want in its place, because for Windows typing, the common CTRL functions (X,S,V,C) are all easiest as LCTRL chords, and anchoring your left pinky to where Caps lock is to type these I think feels unnatural.
See, I disagree. After getting over the "wtf" moment with the Sun keyboard that introduced me to the ctrl-caps thing, that position felt like the most natural thing in the world. (Interestingly, the ergonomically split keyboard was much the same.)
You could also rig it up so there are TWO left ctrl keys, at least until people get used to the new location.
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree about NumLock, except of course in the case where there's not room for a navigation block. I keep NumLock off when navigating web pages, because the numpad puts all the navigation keys in reach without moving my hand. I hardly think that's a pressing enough use to justify the feature. Software is, of course, perfectly capable of ignoring NumLock. IIRC Plan 9 always keeps the NumLock LED lit and treats those keys as number keys.
Re:No need (Score:3, Interesting)
Or you can learn to use a machine and stop doing things that they cannot do. That may be the first step in solving your crash problem.
Re:Nineteenth Century (Score:5, Interesting)
You had backspace? I had to disconnect the carriage and slide it to the left.
Ah, yes, life before backspace erasure. Keypunches. Flexowriters. Baudot teletypes.
I have this Teletype Model 15 keyboard [wikipedia.org]. (That exact keyboard; the picture in Wikipedia is of my machine. Yes, I need to machine a new space bar.) Each key has a travel of about half an inch, and produces not just an audible "click", but a "whir-chunk" as the keyboard encoder, which is a mechanical device with cams, does a parallel to serial conversion. There's a speed limit; once you've pressed a key, you can't press another one until the encoder is finished. There is no key rollover, but you can't push two keys at once because the encoding mechanism prevents it. There are 32 keys, since this is a five bit code and they're all used. There are two shifts, FIGS and LTRS. The keyboard just sends those; it itself has no notion of shifting.
There's one unused key, the "blank key", which sends the all ones character. My software for the machine uses that as backspace, typing a "/" followed by the letter just deleted. The machine itself has no backspace capability. So you can't backspace too much, or you hit the right margin, for which I delete the whole line.
This is 1930s technology. There were printing telegraphs and stock tickers back to 1870, so electrical keyboards do go back to the 19th century. Edison had a machine with a semicircular keyboard (not for ergonomics; the keys radiated out from the center of a round machine). Linotypes (which, amazingly, appeared in 1886) had entirely electrical keyboards, with separate keys for upper and lower case letters.
Teletypes loosely followed the Underwood typewriter layout because the Model 12 Teletype (the first one that worked well enough to deploy, from 1921) was a heavily modified Underwood typewriter. Computer keyboards since then have a direct line of descent from the original Morkrum Model 12, through decades of Baudot machines, and into the ASCII era.
Re:No need (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you insane? NumLock is autorun on most MMOs, you'd force people playing WoW to actually press and hold a button on the keyboard!
Re:HERE'S AN IDEA (Score:3, Interesting)
Dear Lenovo:
Put together a netbook, and make absolutely, positively sure to put the track point on it. I'll buy two.
Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score:3, Interesting)
It hurts to hunt CTRL from the fucking corner. Better have both. Capslock is useless, either kill the fucker or hide it behinf FN-this or that.
I have capslock mapped as CTRL on my ubuntu boxes and on my mac - matter of clicketi-click via preferences.
Re:HERE'S AN IDEA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No need (Score:3, Interesting)
The Command Key was used for those sorts of things long before Windows 95 introduced the windows key.
Also, it is in the same position as the Alt key on a PC keyboard.
Re:HERE'S AN IDEA (Score:2, Interesting)
...don't buy one if you're not planning on buying a new one in 2 years anyway...
I'm not really planning on it as long as my 11 year old Toshiba(445CDT) holds out. The only glitch so far is that the cd-rom slowly went "blind" and can't read anymore.
The really real problem: no use of the thumbs (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the real problem with keyboards is the NumLock key.
Really? It's never a problem for me.
I think the really really real problems of keyboards are:
The Kinesis Ergo Elan keyboard fixes some of this. Do yourself a big favor and get one.
(I'm not a paid shill, but a very happy customer.)
Re:No need (Score:2, Interesting)
Always changed autorun to the * key, so i didn't have to worry about the state of my keypad.
That was before I got bored of WoW, though.