Re: how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way?

On Mar 20, 9:07 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 16, 6:17 am, rustom <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Rustom,
>
> Some sort of shorthand writing can indeed improve one's typing of
> natural language by a lot. I haven't studied any particular shorthand
> system, my impression is that there are quite a few.
>
> ( indeed, Wikipedia lists about 40.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Shorthand )
>
> shorthand systems are designed for professional dictation clerk or
> similar. Shorthand system has little offer specific to emacs for
> improving speed of writing natural lang or programing. (abbrev system
> and templates (e.g. yasnippet) are much more useful)
>
> also, there are several chording systems or chording keyboards over
> the past decades. In general, they are not practical. Some of them are
> envisioned to replace the standard keyboard, but they have their own
> problems. The first adoption problem is that chording system requires
> learning to use, while keyboard doesn't. For vast majority of
> computer users, hunt & peck works well because they don't have a need
> to type much. Note that Wikipedia also has a few articles on the
> various chording keyboards.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Chorded_keyboard
>
> from a research point of view, one could imagine a input device that's
> radical and so well designed, so that it takes ergonomics from the
> ground up, where the hardware naturally fits the shape and movement of
> human hand, and uses perhaps chording chord chording. And perhaps
> comes with a fancy integrated pointing device. And perhaps uses a
> software layout (of the chording) based on a shorthand systems, and
> for various programing languages too... often, radical general
> solution as innovation without a immediate, concrete, specific problem
> it solves, is not likely to become adopted anytime soon.
>
> (PS thanks Rustom for the email notice. Sorry for the delay in
> replying. Also, thanks Alan Mackenzie et al. I haven't yet studied
> your advices in detail. )
>
> Xah

Hi Xah.
I guess my own post was a bit rambling so my point was a bit lost and some other stuff got emphasised.
I was saying more or less what you are saying -- viz
chording systems are (probably) fantastic research ideas but too impractical.

Top frequency 24 words (or 26 since I expect 'I' and 'a' to occur there) -- 30 %
Next 100 words -- 35 %
Next 500 words -- 30 %

Assuming you do get something like this, setting up 125 abbrevs and taking say 2 weeks to learn them, will it not make your typing almost halved. [I am assuming that the average length of even common English words is about 3.5 chars whereas the average length of these abbrevs will be about 1.5 (1.25 if you take weighted averages, 1.1 if you add common phrases).

On Mar 16, 10:18 am, "B. T. Raven" <ni...@nihilo.net> wrote:
> Your modest proposal is brilliant in some as yet to be specified way.

Yes it is brilliant. (I of course did not invent it, its from http://www.freewebs.com/cassyjanek )
My 'specified way' of analyzing this brilliance is thusly:

Compression (as in gzip LZ jpeg etc) has some key ideas
a. Huffmann coding
b. Length encoding
c. Right amt of lossiness

This lady (without evidently any background in CS!! ) has taken these ideas and made a system that migrates these ideas from the digital 2-it (aka bit) world to the 26-it biological box atop our shoulders.

Now what I am trying to do is burn some new firmware (and sweating with the heat!!)

From:	Rustom Mody
Subject:	Re: how to change C-x prefix to C-k in a clean way?
Date:	Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:19:02 +0530