More symbols on keyboards...

[Skybuck Flying]

If you really want to sell more keyboards, you should invent a bigger keyboard with more symbols on it, so that programming languages can use more symbols.

For example:
[]
{}
()
<>
Is not enough anymore, need more of this ! =D

Bye,
Skybuck =D

[MitchAlsup]

I use <alt>[0 list of numbers] almost all the time
×
±
¼
½
¾
ö
.......
so can you..........the characters are there is you know how to access them.

[Quadibloc]

On Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 4:01:44 PM UTC-7, MitchAlsup wrote:
> On Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 4:23:04 PM UTC-6, Skybuck Flying wrote:
> > If you really want to sell more keyboards, you should invent a bigger keyboard with more symbols on it, so that programming languages can use more symbols.
> >
> > For example:
> > []
> > {}
> > ()
> > <>
> > Is not enough anymore, need more of this ! =D

> I use <alt>[0 list of numbers] almost all the time
> ×
> ±
> ¼
> ½
> ¾
> ö
> .......
> so can you..........the characters are there is you know how to access them.

On the one hand, anything that requires a lot of memorizatiion is,
in my opinion, impractical. However, I've put an icon for Character
Map on my desktop.

On the other hand, as a touch-typist, in my opinion, existing
keyboards are too big already. I would take the current keyboard,
and get rid of the ~` key - put the Esc key there - and the }] key
and the |\ key. The {[ key would become the [] key.

That doesn't mean, though, that we would have to lose access to
the ASCII characters on the keys that were removed. After all,
the CTRL key only produces a standard control character for the letter
keys from A to Z. It has no standard meaning for the other keys.

If you visit my web page, at the location

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/kyb0603.htm

and scroll down halfway, you will see the solution I've come up
with.

Ctrl-0 is NUL, Ctrl-3 is ESC, Ctrl-4 is FS, Ctrl-5 is GS, Ctrl-6 is RS, and Ctrl-7 is US,
taking care of the control characters that don't have a letter.

If you use the Ctrl shift with the _- key, you get ~, and if you use it with the += key,
you get `. And those characters can be marked on the keys.

Ctrl with [] gives |.

Ctrl with :; gives { and Ctrl with "' gives }.

Ctrl with ?/ gives \.

Very simple. And, as a bonus, I would change the <, and >. keys so that they
give the comma and period whether they're shifted or not, with < and >
requiring the Ctrl shift instead!

That gives a retro keyboard - 44 keys for printable characters other than
the space, and an old-fashioned big Enter key.

But what about more characters? Well, I think there's room for that
without a bigger keyboard.

There's a CAPS LOCK key.

It used to be, that when CAPS LOCK was pressed, you got capital
letters whether or not you used the shift key. This is unlike the
SHIFT LOCK key on a typewriter, which it replaced - there, you got
out of SHIFT LOCK state by pressing the shift key, not by pressing
SHIFT LOCK again.

But on a PC keyboard, when you hold down the shift key in CAPS
LOCK state, you get *small* letters.

Well, this is wasteful. Why not get 26 new characters that way,
characters useful for programming, like less-than-or-equal-to,
and so on and so forth?

But in my opinion, this doesn't require a new *keyboard* design
so much as a re-design of the *operating system*, so that a
keyboard arranged this way is what the computer expects to
have connected.

And while my design works well for the English-language keyboard,
a lot of languages need additional keys for letters. Of course,
there's already an AltGr key to help those languages out, and so
fitting them into 44 keys instead of 48 keys would *usually* not be
_too_ hard.

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, January 17, 2023 at 12:39:06 AM UTC-7, Quadibloc wrote:

> Well, this is wasteful. Why not get 26 new characters that way,
> characters useful for programming, like less-than-or-equal-to,
> and so on and so forth?

And what kind of new characters am I thinking of?

The most important ones to add for programming, obviously, are:

≤, ≥, and ≠.

less than or equal to, greater than or equal to, not equal to

Ones commonly found on typewriters, or associated with EBCDIC
would be

¢, £, °, ±, ², ³, ©, ®, ¶, §, ¬, ¼, ½, ¾

Cent sign, pound sign, degree, plus/minus, square, cube, copyright,
registered trade mark, paragraph, section, logical NOT, one-quarter,
one-half, three-quarters

I would also want to see the characters from the Algol 60 publication
language, and the odd characters from the IBM 1401 character set
available.

Probably I would emphasize programming characters, and put the
typewriter characters elsewhere, perhaps as an alternate to ASCII
characters: ` becomes degree, < and > become paragraph and
section, { and } become pound sign and 3/4, | and \ might become
1/4 and 1/2.

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, January 17, 2023 at 1:31:19 AM UTC-7, Quadibloc wrote:

> I would also want to see the characters from the Algol 60 publication
> language,

If I put them into a post, will they (∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨) be visible?

Apparently so, at least in Google Groups.

> and the odd characters from the IBM 1401 character set
> available.

At least one of those isn't defined in Unicode yet! But of those that
are, how about typing them?

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Thursday, January 19, 2023 at 5:21:25 AM UTC-7, Quadibloc wrote:

> At least one of those isn't defined in Unicode yet! But of those that
> are, how about typing them?

Apparently except for BLANK SYMBOL, only characters with a resemblance
are defined...

⯒, ␢, ⎷, ⋎, ‡, ∆, ⧻ are what I can find. And Unicode even has ⧺ as well. And
then, from EBCDIC, as well as the BCDIC commercial set, there's also ⌑.

John Savard

[David Brown]

On 19/01/2023 13:21, Quadibloc wrote:
> On Tuesday, January 17, 2023 at 1:31:19 AM UTC-7, Quadibloc wrote:
>
>> I would also want to see the characters from the Algol 60 publication
>> language,
>
> If I put them into a post, will they (∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨) be visible?
>
> Apparently so, at least in Google Groups.

They look fine here, in Thunderbird on Linux.

>
>> and the odd characters from the IBM 1401 character set
>> available.
>
> At least one of those isn't defined in Unicode yet! But of those that
> are, how about typing them?
>

You make your own X11 keyboard setup with more modifier keys and compose
key combinations. The only limits are your dexterity and your memory!

[Peter Lund]

Non-US keyboards usually have dead keys + the AltGr key for access to more symbols.
Windows 11 has <win> + '.' which is a lot more flexible (and user-friendly!) than your suggestion.

-Peter

[Quadibloc]

On Saturday, January 21, 2023 at 9:31:00 AM UTC-7, Peter Lund wrote:

> Windows 11 has <win> + '.' which is a lot more flexible (and user-friendly!) than your suggestion.

More flexible, perhaps. But how is it not user-friendly to have additional characters... that are
printed on the keys, and accessed in a conventional and standardized way?

My concern is that the physical layout of the keyboard should be changed to bring it into
conformity with the limitations of the human hand, so that all the characters can be reached
when touch-typing.

Using the Ctrl key on characters other than letters adds a few characters, enough that the
keyboard can shrink. A basic set of additional characters, accessed by shifting when in
CAPS LOCK mode makes sense for some programming languages, which, unlike C, use
only capital letters.

Of course there would still be an AltGr key. That is a necessity for many languages other than
English. And things like Alt+<number> are still necessary as a fall-back. But what I'm suggesting
is to have some of the most common extra characters made available in a more user-friendly
fashion; and this can be done without going to a bigger keyboard.

John Savard