Perspective, If Not Expertise

After some thought, I decid­ed that I did­n’t real­ly need the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion oper­a­tor (dead­key + “equals”).  After all, it has been more than a decade since I was intro­duced to Algebra—when the “x” shape tran­si­tioned from oper­a­tor to operand.  I next thought about what might be a suit­able addi­tion to that key, both in terms of sim­i­lar con­text and a sym­bol which I might actu­al­ly use.  The result is that ver­sion 1.1 of Rob’s Dvo­rak Inter­na­tion­al Extend­ed key­board lay­out (that’s the name used in the file itself) includes the often imi­tat­ed “does not equal” sign.

Yes, friends!  No more set­tling for the hor­ren­dous­ly wide “=/=,” no more dip­ping into your cod­ing lex­i­con for “!=,” now you can sim­ply use dead­key + “equals” to get ≠!  Not only does that put the new char­ac­ter in good com­pa­ny, it also makes it sim­ple to remem­ber: what could be sim­pler than Right Alt + “=” = “≠” (type that three times fast)?

Also new in this edi­tion of the lay­out is a new way to down­load it. You can down­load the file direct­ly, or down­load a bzipped tar­ball which con­tains every­thing (includ­ing pre­view images for each edi­tion of the lay­out). Of course, this post would­n’t be com­plete with­out a pre­view of the new layout.

For more infor­ma­tion, please see my orig­i­nal announce­ment of the layout.