I did it again... I made another keyboard tester

▼ The other day I noticed how dirty my VT420 terminal's keyboard was, so I decided to take off the keycaps to clean them.

Then of course it's always good to put the keycaps back where they belong. That's a task made a lot easier with a keyboard tester app such as the online one I made a while ago. However, I don't think the VT420 supports the latest Javascript features...

So I whipped up a command line keyboard tester: kbdtest.php. Save the page, rename to kbdtest.php, then run with "php kbdtest.php". Works on the Mac, haven't tested other systems.

The script draws an image of the main part of a keyboard, with the keys that should work displayed in red. Then as you type them, they're made the default color and bright or bold. Typing the same key multiple times adds and removes an underline. The first number is a count of how many different keys you've typed, the second one only counts printable characters and tab, backspace and enter. (Upper vs lower case is ignored.) When you've typed all 71 of those, the program ends. You can of course also use control C. When there's 8 characters left, the remaining ones start to blink.

Note the box drawing characters. These are actually produced by issuing an ANSI escape code to switch to the DEC special graphics character set. In that mode, the lower case characters become line/box drawing characters. Turns out: this also works in the Terminal on the Mac!

I couldn't find a workable way to get the actual keyboard scan codes or something similar on the command line, so I can't do anything with keymaps, like the web keyboard tester does. However, turns out you can still read special keys such as the function keys and arrow keys. These produce ANSI escape codes. And again, that works in the Terminal exactly like it does on the VT420 terminal.

Permalink - posted 2021-03-16

A new life for the 2003 Apple Wireless Keyboard

▼ Back in 2003, Apple released the Apple Wireless Keyboard:

(Not to be confused with later keyboards of the same name that look like laptop keyboards.)

The keyboard still works with an ancient MacBook Pro, but it won't pair with anything from the 2010s. That's too bad, because I think it looks pretty nice. So I decided to see if I could bring its essence into the 2020s by transplanting the keycaps to my Drop CTRL keyboard.

Here on the left is a regular MX style keycap, and to the right one from the AWK2003. Not so different.

Until we turn them over:

However, the AWK2003 keycap will fit on a Cherry MX style switch, especially a Kailh box switch:

But the fit is too loose. However, we can fix that with some teflon tape.

Three layers seems to work well:

And there it is: the Drop CTRL keyboard with 2003 Apple Wireless Keyboard keycaps:

The keycap profile is a bit different, especially on the bottom row, as you can see with the alt key:

It's not possible to replace the entire bottom row with keys from the AWK2003, as only the alt key has a standard size.

So I used the regular keycaps for the bottom row and the cursor keys:

With three layers of teflon tape, the keys mostly stay put, but this is what can happen after a good long typing session...

Permalink - posted 2021-03-05

Bringing some unity to international keyboard layouts

▼ As most people who’ve used a keyboard in (another) European country can attest to, all the other countries use really crazy keyboard layouts. An effort like EurKEY tries to solve this by coming up with a keyboard layout that works for all latin script languages. Apple’s ABC Extended (formerly US Extended) is also a pretty good effort.

However, coming up with a really good keyboard layout is pretty easy. Getting people to abandon the keyboard layout they’re used in favor of a “better” one to is the big problem. (Insert old joke: standards are great, there are so many to choose from!) So what I wanted to do is come up with something that works for people who find themselves behind a foreign keyboard, but also those who appreciate having a layout that makes it easier to type their most-used language.

This is the idea. On a keyboard where the basic letter and number keys are not where you expect, such as the Turkish F keyboard, you just can’t type. So if the A-Z, 0-9, the comma and period are in unexpected places, you really can't have international guests for your keyboard without changing keyboard layouts.

So A-Z 0-9 , . are in their expected (US / western Europe) locations:

For all the other letters, we accept that they can be in unexpected places. But we're going to help out visitors by having all those letters in a default backup location: if the normal key doesn't give you what you expect, just use alt. So when I type on a Spanish keyboard and I need the semicolon, I'm going to discover that that key gives me ñ instead. Rather than having to scan the keyboard to find the location of ; on Spanish keyboards, I can just type alt-; and get my semicolon. And of course alt+shift+; for : because shift+; produces (unsurprisingly) Ñ on a Spanish keyboard.

So just one thing to remember: if a key doesn’t give you the letter you expect, try again with the alt key pressed. This way, it’s still possible to have different keyboard layouts for different languages, but without leaving foreigners who find themselves behind such a keyboard in the cold. So:

We can now type all the regular ASCII characters on any keyboard. Note that the alt and alt+shift combinations are always as specified here, even if that means that the characters with and without alt are the same, like on a US keyboard. This way, it's always possible to type the alt combination and get the expected result.

Keyboard layouts for different languages also use various alt key combinations to type additional characters and accents. That's a fairly big problem because those characters are usually not printed on the keys, so good luck finding out how you type a French ç with a German keyboard layout or a Polish ł on a Dutch keyboard. So part of the unified keyboard layout is having alt combinations for (almost) all characters used in (almost) all languages written with the latin script today. And use that set of alt keys with all keyboards, so these characters can be typed in the same way on all keyboards, even tough keys like - = [ ] ; ' / (without alt) are used for characters that make the most sense in the local language.

I think it makes sense to reuse Apple’s extended layout here, as this makes it possible to type any diacritic I’ve ever heard of and more. This layout allows for no fewer than 22 different diacritics using 22 dead keys.

A dead key works like this. Suppose you need an é, but there’s no é key on your keyboard. So you type dead key for the acute accent (alt-e) and after that the e key. Result: é. Need a ú instead? Alt-e and then u = ú. And so on.

The Apple extended layout also allows for another way to reach the same result: Unicode combining characters. With these, you first type your letter and then the combining character. So a and then alt+shift-e (for the combining acute accent) results in á.

The interesting thing about the combining characters is that unlike dead keys, they work on all characters and you can can combine as many as you like.

Because we had to evict a lot of alt and alt+shift characters from the non-alphanumeric keys, and because the combining characters mostly duplicate the dead key functionality, I’m getting rid of the combining characters under alt / alt+shift. However, those remain available using their own dead key.

I tried to move all the keys that need to be moved to a logical place, but this is of course debatable. æ and Æ went from alt(+shift)-' to alt(+shift)-R as that is the only place I could free up both the unshifted and shifted alt combination. I avoided having both alt and alt+shift dead keys under the same key in order to avoid confusion and to make the combining characters dead key work better.

I also thought that having dead keys for Greek characters as well as math characters was a useful EurKEY feature, so I’m adding those. And a dead key to cover business, currency and additional typographical symbols. Superscript and subscript digits 0 - 9 can go under the math dead key. (I’m not going to specify all the math and business characters at this point.) Those dead keys, as well as two “weird character” dead keys from Apple Extended all move to the bottom row (Z - M) with alt+shift.

Finally, I added the Turkish ı (latin small letter dotless I) because that one seems to be missing from Apple extended. There’s also the capital I with dot = İ, but you can simply type that using alt-w (dead key for the “dot above” diacritic) and then I, so like all other accented letters, it doesn’t get its own alt key combination. This is the result:

This leaves five alt combinations unused for now. That seems like a good number, allowing some room for future expansion, but not wasting too much real estate. Combining it all:

But really, that's just the start. The idea is to combine these new alt and alt+shift layers with existing keyboard layouts that conform to QWERTY, 0-9, comma and period, and thus have different layouts for different languages.

This means that people typing the “default” language can do so without having to relearn anything. At the same time, those who find themselves behind a foreign keyboard have a much easier time, as well as those of us who type in multiple languages.

If you want to see what the results look like, go to this page. You can select keymaps from a list and then click "unify". They will then be compared to the original. Green outline means no change, red means the unification rules were broken, and gray means there's differences, but they fall within the rules.

After quickly checking the list of keyboard layouts on the Mac, it looks like unification could work for the following layouts: Croatian, Danish, English, Estonian, Dutch, Faroese, Finnish, French (Canada), Icelandic, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portugese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish.

It won't work for French (because of the AZERTY layout) or Turkish, even Turkish QWERTY. German and other languages almost get there, but they use QWERTZ, with the Z and Y keys swapped. They could still benefit from the unified alt / alt+shift layers, though.

Permalink - posted 2021-02-05