Emacs Keyboard Design 19: Emacs on Every Desk

An emotional flood of pragmatism and market demand is forcing me to struggle to keep my head above water on this one which answers a simpler question:

1. How to get Emacs and an Emacs suitable keyboard into the hands of every computer user everywhere?
2. High quality, low cost, flexible, and familiar.

• Thoughts and changes from 18
  • Switch with staggered querty. It might be painful to switch. Pain ain’t a great motivator in this scenario. Goal is to learn and use Emacs, not suffer inflammation.
    • Personal experience on staggered qwerty has convinced me that pain will come to switch to a grid layout. Don’t want to try. Don’t want others to try. Don’t want pain to be a reason to avoid an Emacs keyboard.
  • Keyboard needs to be black and white, everything else is too distracting
  • Only used HID Spec for keys
    • Don’t write a HID spec to do more, not now
• Build
  • Start with ANSI 104
    • Make it easy to see what keys need to stay, or not
  • Row 6, the F keys don’t need any spacing
    • By the time you reach that far, it is hard reach, so linear is fine
  • Add F13-F24
    • They are in the spec, use them!
  • Add F13-F24
  • Handle every key to the right of Enter
    • Keep PrtSc, Insert, Home, delete, end, pgup, pgdn, arrow keys
    • Delete ScrollLock, Pause/Break, NumLock
  • Add a Fn key
    • Put arrows on jkil
  • Placed a cluster for inser/delete, and navigation, print screen
  • Modifiers
    • Make them agnostic, use the real names
    • Only need 1 key width
    • Don’t need 6 width for spacebar
    • Modifers go out from common to uncommon so
      • left to right: C, M, s, H, A, G
      • On both sides
      • Emacs modifiers are more important to put then near space bar
      • OS modifiers are still an easy reach
• Thoughts
  • Easily use all Emacs and OS modifiers in familiar positions
  • Rest of layout is undisturbed
  • More F keys
    • Grid like because it is already a reach
  • Fn key is knew, an simple
  • Felt like the spacebar was too small so
    • Moved Alt up by Shift, this resulted in
      • Manual Meh key
  • Remember to keep C-A-D available on Win

Addendum: <2016-04-22 Fri 14:40>

Added legends on f and j.