The older neo keyboard layout and its newer variants like bone (https://neo-layout.org/Layouts/bone) follow a similar approach to provide more symbols, and they're additionally optimized for typing.
These layouts provide several additional layers which give easy access to ASCII special characters, greek letters and frequently used math symbols.
Also there is layer 4, which is pure gold in itself. It provides cursor movement keys, backspace, enter and a numpad close to your home position. I personally couldn't go back once I had tried it.
(Beware that these layouts include the umlauts äöüß as they were designed for german writing, and make use of the additional key for '<' in the lower left corner of german keyboards)
Very cool that the author had a custom keyboard made with their keymap printed on it.
Personally I like being able to type math symbols on occasion but don't do so often enough to benefit from a custom keyboard layout that I'd then have to memorize. I didn't have a good way to do this until about a year ago, when I learned about Espanso [1] which is a cross-platform text expander. I installed it and set it up to substitute various (vaguely LaTeX-inspired) macros to UTF-8 strings. For example, typing the following keystrokes
x = R cos(:phi) sin(:lambda :minus :lambda:nought)
becomes x = R cos(φ) sin(λ − λ₀)
I chose ':' as a prefix for all my macros but this is just a self-enforced convention; you can configure a substitution for any sequence of keystrokes. Since I gave all the characters names that made sense to me, I don't have to think much when I type them.
A few of the substitutions I get the most mileage out of:
- The Greek alphabet, both upper and lowercase (:theta → θ and :Omega → Ω)
- Double-struck letters for numerical sets; e.g. :RR → ℝ
I do something similar with espanso on Linux, but I chose / instead of :, and my commands are mostly Latex commands. On Windows I do it with AutoHotKey. I have superscript and subscript numbers too.
Nice. An alternative is to use a Compose key. I have Caps Lock mapped to Compose, and for example Compose-g-D yields “Δ” (“greek D”) and Compose-<-= yields “≤”, etc.
I use WinCompose (on Windows 10) with a custom .XCompose file. I don’t use ∂, but if I would I’d probably bind it to Compose-p-d for “partial differential”. The default bindings are Compose-Compose-p-a-r-t and Compose-*-.-.-d, which isn’t very convenient.
I use the Compose file for this as well, in addition to configuring a “dead Greek” key for quick access to the Greek αλφαβετ. I even have a few phrases, such as my email address, in there: works everywhere, from my editor to text boxes on websites. There are no delays.
On Win10 the quick and dirty solution is to select a character on its own, copy it to the clipboard, then, in your clipboard history, pin that particular selection. Nearly every time you use it you'll have to scroll to the bottom of your clipboard history and then probably back up again a bit, but that's not all that bad.
I like the approach that the AUCTeX and/or CDLaTeX modes in emacs take: if I want Greek letters or math symbols, I hit the backtick, then the mnemonic or binding for the Greek symbol/operator I want. I know you can’t extend this to Twitter or something, but I would never want to anyway.
(https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/auctex/11.88-extra/tex-ref.pdf)
Some nice symbol selection here. It’s a great thing to customize your keyboard layout. On the Mac side, there’s a nice tool called Ukelele: https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
You can get an APL keycap set for your existing Unicomp keyboard, or do a custom order for any of their models. They will even print you custom keycap sets: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/Buttons
Buckling spring is just a superior (although less durable) key switch technology than the Honeywell switches used in Symbolics keyboards (and most other keyboard switch mechanisms as well). One thing that the Symbolics keyboards did right is having both the APL and Greek legends on keycaps.
But none of this matters if you do not have the right software. GNU Emacs greek and TeX input-methods, and the C-x 8 iso-transl keymap (which you can extend) makes writing mathematical symbols really easy.
This has inspired me to try to make my own custom keyboard. Does anyone know of a good keyboard remapping tool for the Mac? I have BetterTouchTool, but I've found it's not reliable on my machine. (And probably other people's machines, which is why it includes a "Restart" option in its menu.)
I like the keyboard company the article links to, but the keyboards it offers don't have the full range of function keys that macOS supports (It's four short). Are there other custom-printed keyboard companies I should consider?
To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.
If you want to do something like the article, with a custom layout (e.g. defining characters for Option and Shift+Option), then what you want (as hyperjeff mentioned above) is Ukelele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/
I wrote myself a very similar keyboard layout a while ago: https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey. It differs in being primarily oriented towards linguistics rather than maths, but I’ve ended up being able to type almost a superset of the same symbols that this one allows. Aside from this, the main difference appears to be that Lengyel’s keyboard layout is more ergonomic, at the cost of allowing less symbols.
Readit News
These layouts provide several additional layers which give easy access to ASCII special characters, greek letters and frequently used math symbols.
Also there is layer 4, which is pure gold in itself. It provides cursor movement keys, backspace, enter and a numpad close to your home position. I personally couldn't go back once I had tried it.
(Beware that these layouts include the umlauts äöüß as they were designed for german writing, and make use of the additional key for '<' in the lower left corner of german keyboards)
Personally I like being able to type math symbols on occasion but don't do so often enough to benefit from a custom keyboard layout that I'd then have to memorize. I didn't have a good way to do this until about a year ago, when I learned about Espanso [1] which is a cross-platform text expander. I installed it and set it up to substitute various (vaguely LaTeX-inspired) macros to UTF-8 strings. For example, typing the following keystrokes
becomes x = R cos(φ) sin(λ − λ₀)I chose ':' as a prefix for all my macros but this is just a self-enforced convention; you can configure a substitution for any sequence of keystrokes. Since I gave all the characters names that made sense to me, I don't have to think much when I type them.
A few of the substitutions I get the most mileage out of:
- The Greek alphabet, both upper and lowercase (:theta → θ and :Omega → Ω)
- Double-struck letters for numerical sets; e.g. :RR → ℝ
- :infinity → ∞
- :neq → ≠
- :pm → ±
[1]: https://github.com/federico-terzi/espanso
How do you type ∂ (Unicode: U+2202)?
Of course you HAVE already turned on your Windows 10 clipboard history, RIGHT? ;) https://www.howtogeek.com/671222/how-to-enable-and-use-clipb...
https://github.com/2grep/ScienceNotes
You can get an APL keycap set for your existing Unicomp keyboard, or do a custom order for any of their models. They will even print you custom keycap sets: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/Buttons
The trackball Unicomp is IMO the best keyboard being manufactured (right now they are out of stock until Q3 2021): https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/ClassicTrackball
Buckling spring is just a superior (although less durable) key switch technology than the Honeywell switches used in Symbolics keyboards (and most other keyboard switch mechanisms as well). One thing that the Symbolics keyboards did right is having both the APL and Greek legends on keycaps.
But none of this matters if you do not have the right software. GNU Emacs greek and TeX input-methods, and the C-x 8 iso-transl keymap (which you can extend) makes writing mathematical symbols really easy.
I like the keyboard company the article links to, but the keyboards it offers don't have the full range of function keys that macOS supports (It's four short). Are there other custom-printed keyboard companies I should consider?
[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey
[1] https://github.com/akamchinjir/osxkb
Get a clear or white keyboard cover. As a last resort spray paint one white.