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keydowns.md

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Motivation

People often discuss human computer interaction (HCI) "ergonomics". This has many dimensions. One is data entry. Such conversation is often less objective than it might be, and one way this is true is measuring only numbers of bytes &| rendered string lengths. keydowns is an attempt to elevate the conversation ever so slightly by making it trivial to copy-paste into a terminal to measure needed keyboard depressions to enter a string.

Doing this in one's head/manually is not so hard, but it is also monotonous, and error-prone. So, a little program can help.

Usage

  keydowns [optional-params]

Return min key downs needed to enter all lines on stdin, optimizing SHIFTs.

  -s=, --shift= string "~!@#$%^&*()_+|}{:\"?><" in addition to 'A'..'Z'
  -v, --v       bool   false                    err log counts & strings

Example

$ keydowns -v
awk -F, 'BEGIN{a=1;b=2;c=3}{print $a,$b+$c}'
rp -d, -fa,b,c 'echo s[a],b.f+c.i.float'
^D
51 awk -F, 'BEGIN{a=1;b=2;c=3}{print $a,$b+$c}'
41 rp -d, -fa,b,c 'echo s[a],b.f+c.i.float'1234
92

The byte-length measurement makes it seems like the Nim is "4 bytes easier" while it is 10 fewer keydowns. I mostly wrote this program because I had a vague sense that Nim generally scores well on this metric compared to other PLs.

More examples are in the rp docs and limited only by your imagination.

Caveats

Some people don't enter via keyboards at all, but rather with voice or other interfaces. This metric obviously does not apply there.

Real people may or may not optimize their use of the SHIFT key or of Caps-Lock modes; keydowns always does. So, in some sense it is a lower bound.

Defaults are set up for a US-style keyboard and people and societies can & do re-map keys. --shift allows some adaptation to that. An ambitious person can adjust their keyboard mappings to their input text families to minimize this metric (at some perhaps significant re-learning costs) making it useless. I don't do that. So, I don't find it useless. :-)

Presently keydowns does not optimize for keys which are traditionally unmodified by SHIFT. The headliner example of this is the space bar where you can continue holding SHIFT across the space in "{ }". My own typing rarely optimizes for this, but since it is possible, the program should grow an option to measure both ways.