A few weeks ago a blog post on catonmat.com showed pictures of the old terminal that Bill Joy used when he created VI. Terminals back then didn’t have arrow keys so if you wanted to move the cursor around you held down some kind of modifier and hit the H, J, K or L keys. And they were labeled as such. This news didn’t really interest me because I’ve read that somewhere before but when someone on my twitter stream posted a picture of the keyboard I noticed how much it resembles my Mac’s keyboard layout.
Since I live in Japan I use a Mac with a Japanese keyboard layout. The standard Japanese keyboard layout is a little hard to get used to at first because while it is a QWERTY keyboard some characters are in different places. The placing of the double quote character and the left and right parenthesis eventually grew on me, but I always had a nagging feeling that the Japanese keyboard arbitrarily changed the locations of these very important for programming keys for no good reason.
When I saw the keyboard layout of the ADM3A I realized that it was in fact kind of the opposite. The US keyboard layout has changed significantly since the 70s, but the Japanese keyboard didn’t. Apple even keeps the position of the CTRL key where it should be (To the left of A).
I think this might be one of the reasons that I’ve grown to like the Japanese keyboard layout.
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