Neo Layout 2.0

Following up on my first post concerning the neo keyboard layout I took the time now to switch to the second revision of the layout. While the layout is still tagged as in development, things seem to have settled down and most changes seem to concern changes on the more obscure symbols. I was motivated to switch after I found out that changing the keys in Macbooks is trivial and needs just a little bit of time and care. Thus I embarked on flipping the keys out and ended up with a very nice looking keyboard without any stickers anymore.

Then I couldn't resists Apple's design any longer and gave in and ordered one of the pretty new keyboards after Google confirmed that those keys were easy to move, too. Typing is really great on it. Though for some reason I totally forgot about the German keys when I ordered it here, oh well, those are easy to remember. As long as I don't see a Qwerty layout I don't get confused about it. Obligatory picture of changed keyboard:

The killer feature is actually the one thing that made me hesitant to switch until now. The special characters involved in coding and web stuff are all elsewhere, namely the main rows where your alphabet resides but are triggered by a new modifier: caps-lock / # (in Qwertz). In the image below you can see that level highlighted, with some stuff removed, since 4 symbols on a key makes it hard to see the usefulness. The original can be found in their SVN repository.

Some characters are notoriously hard to reach on the the Qwertz keyboard, like Shift + 7 for /, which now is Caps Lock + I which I can reach with one hand, neat! Another great example is that are now on one key each which otherwise is made through a change with shift on one key and that's just really easy to mess up when writing HTML/XML and you end up with ><. in="" this="" article="" for="" example="" adding="" links="" worked="" a="" lot="" nicer="" than="" i="" was="" used="" to.="" the="" master="" plan="" actually="" getting="" alternative="" layouts="" like="" dvorak="" into="" people="" hands="" intended="" might="" be="" someone="" to="" come="" out="" with="" changeable="" keyboard.="" what="" basically="" referring="" is="" href="http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/">Optimus Maximus keyboard but instead of OLEDs which need power and are costly we use e-ink and skip all the “multimedia” keys on the left. Who needs dedicated keys if there are already, like, a hundred displays one can hack something into. I imagine it would look pretty cool for your number block to spell out a message to get your attention for incoming mail should you want to. The main reason why this makes sense for something like NEO 2.0 is their crazy approach of multiple modes, push the modifier and if you don't release it within 3 seconds you see the active level layout. Depress it and the base level is back. Someone needs to pitch this to Cherry or a similar manufacturer …

P.S.: Those three dots above are actually one single Unicode symbol, which is now mapped to Shift + ., pretty nifty, eh?