fat-finger on backspace may set CapsLock

[fabi1cazenave]

When typing on a new keyboard, it can happen that the left thumb hits two keys at once:

• the home key (Backspace), which acts as Nav by default (hold-preferred)
• the tucked key (Shift), which acts as CapsLock in Nav

Thus, every Backspace has a risk of triggering a CapsLock. A way to prevent this would be welcome.

[mperez-cdf]

New to Quacken and small keyboards with three keys by thumb, it indeed happened quite often to me.

To me caps lock is not very useful so I moved it to VimNav + ! (qwerty) (the k in ergo-L) to be sure to not set caps lock by error.

I think the problem may arise only in the case of 3 keys per thumb. In that case, both Nav/VimNav+P qwerty are empty so it might be a good idea ? (edit : maybe because of the design of Chouette keyboards ?)
Or in sym+shift instead of a redundant Num but we'd lose the ease of [0] etc.

[fabi1cazenave]

The other issue with CapsLock in the Nav layer: it makes it difficult to type numbers and symboles in Shift+numbers (e.g. the $ sign). In Ergol, yping 1234€ in NumNav requires:

• pressing nav
• typing 123 on the numpad
• releasing nav
• pressing shift
• pressing nav
• typing 1 again (€ is shift+1 in Ergol)

CapsLock in Nav+Shift is easy to remember, but probably not as handy as I thought.

[MathildeMousset]

It is true that since we moved CAPSLOCK to shift, I have activated it by mistake more often. On the othe hand, I have also used it more often, because it is convenient and easy to remenber. All in all, I thought it was mostly a skill issue on my side.

I however added an access to the numrow again to test what you mentionned in your comment yesterday, and it is true it is a pain for people who use the NumNav to print this sord of sequence. Maybe you are right, and it brings more complications than anticipated.

Maybe it is a bad idea, but what about bringing it back to Nav-[A]. I think it used to be here in a previous version of one of the Nav layer. There is nothing in it in the Vimnav layer, and the escape of the base-variant could move to Nav+Shift intead? Or is it too far from specs?

[fabi1cazenave]

Specs may move a bit. We started from Arsenik, then explored how two or three keys per thumb could offer, and made a couple changes that will be backported to Arsenik for consistency.

However, this Caps on Nav+Shift might have been a mistake, yes. These unwanted CapsLock are totally a skill issue: experienced users never notice them. But Ækeynox aims to fit beginners’ needs as well, and this looks like a conception mistake.

I’d like to keep Nav+A as “select all” along with cut/copy/paste. Maybe a solution would be to swap Escape and CapsLock in NumNav: that would be less intuitive to learn, but safer to type.

No rush. Let’s take some time to experiment.

[MathildeMousset]

Ah, I forgot the convention is to use qwerty, not azerty, sorry. I meant Nav+q, basically the same idea as you to swap Escape and Capslock.
(notice how I am still trying to move than escape out of its sad corner…)