dustypomerleau

An introduction to alternative keyboard layouts

This is a post to satisfy your curiosity about alternative keyboard layouts, why some people use them, and whether they're for you. It is intended to discuss the topic in broad terms, but I will share my personal preferences towards the end. Due to time constraints and my own limited knowledge, I will focus on layouts optimized for the English language (ANSI variants, with an occasional nod to ISO).

First off, it's important to understand how much debate there is about how we got here: I will not even attempt to settle the issue of who invented the 'first' typewriter layout, because the modern device had many predecessors going back centuries. The usual legend of typewriter evolution holds that American Christopher Latham Sholes debuted the typewriter in 1868 with a 2-row layout that was (nearly) alphabetical. A horizontal stagger between the rows made room for the lever arms attached to each key:

 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E

atljeremy

/*
    Examples:

    var date: NSDate
    date = 10.seconds.fromNow
    date = 30.minutes.ago
    date = 2.days.from(someDate)
    date = NSDate() + 3.days

    if dateOne < dateTwo {

Chaser324

Whether you're trying to give back to the open source community or collaborating on your own projects, knowing how to properly fork and generate pull requests is essential. Unfortunately, it's quite easy to make mistakes or not know what you should do when you're initially learning the process. I know that I certainly had considerable initial trouble with it, and I found a lot of the information on GitHub and around the internet to be rather piecemeal and incomplete - part of the process described here, another there, common hangups in a different place, and so on.

In an attempt to coallate this information for myself and others, this short tutorial is what I've found to be fairly standard procedure for creating a fork, doing your work, issuing a pull request, and merging that pull request back into the original project.

Creating a Fork

Just head over to the GitHub page and click the "Fork" button. It's just that simple. Once you've done that, you can use your favorite git client to clone your repo or j