Using EPKL at School.

[UnifeGi]

Hiya everyone!!

So, I thought of making a post discussion here since I'll be using EPKL at school. I'm a teen, as a minor myself but however, when I initially asked my informatics teacher if I would be able to use EPKL on the school laptop¹ from the informatics classroom. Her response at first was a 'no'- but then when I showed her the EPKL GitHub repository for more context of me explaining, she said that I might be able to use it!
especially since it's portable, well-maintained, doesn't modify anything critical on the system-side (I think), wouldn't affect the laptop in a "negative" way at all (really hope so though)

I do feel kinda guilty-ish that I had to use a third-party program to do this in the first place. but it's one of those cases/exceptions to a rule where, when you don't use QWERTY², you just feel hesitant & that it's super essential that you'd need to announce it for a permission from an IT teacher or anyone whose in a higher position that you have to use a third-party program to do tasks normally. Otherwise you're not using you as your fullest potential.

Oh uhm, I would really love to hear your thoughts about how relatable it was in your experiences - as it seemed in my first part of the post!

and I wanna say my thank you and many appreciations to DreymaR for making EPKL and dreymar.colemak.org webpage!
I genuinely just love that now there's an up-to-date program way of using alternate kbd layouts! before, I used to use keyboard-design.com as a way to download and use layouts portably. but since they use PKL for Windows as a legacy program, I wanted a more up-to-date version. even if the PKL worked-- I just felt like if there was a newer version, I would rather use that instead ><

and to everyone reading, have an amazing week throughout.
especially since it's Halloween too. Happy Halloween of the 31st!! (*＞ｖ＜)ゞ@゜+
<3

Footnotes

1. I think that's the laptop model we use in our informatics classroom, unsure exactly 100% if that's the right model though.. it is similar if so.
   Just that, it's within the informatics classroom school-owned, not ours that we take home with. ↩

2. In my case, I use Graphite in my daily life, not using QWERTY anymore not even with my phone~
   I have my experience slightly documented in my Keyhero profile for anyone curious. ↩

[DreymaR]

Thanks for the praise! And I'm very happy that EPKL is useful for you, and that you'll likely be allowed to use it.

You're right: EPKL runs without any installs, and doesn't change any system parameters or settings. The worst it can do is pretty much to get itself stuck, which a refresh (Ext-tap then 5 for me) usually takes care of.

Hopefully, you can convince some of your fellow students or teachers that Extend for instance is a very useful tool for computer work. If not, their loss. Heh.

It isn't easy to convince IT departments of allowing a program like EPKL on their computers. I work at a hospital, and while I could use PKL on my work computer a decade or so ago I can't now. Not at all. So at work I use my laptop with EPKL but for the work computers I have a couple of USB-2-USB remapping "QUICKIE" devices. They're nice, but they did cost money to buy and of course they can't hold tables of dead keys, layers, sequences and PowerStrings like EPKL can.

If something turns out to be incompatible with EPKL, you can have it auto-suspend itself based on which program is currently active. I do that for games, but then I have an installed layout underneath so I can keep typing on my layout in-game (I too use a Graphite variant these days, you know). An MSKLC-based layout does have to be installed, but if it's compiled with MSKLC in a supervised environment I say that's safe too. An IT department may, of course, elect to disagree with that assessment.

I didn't see a reference to the old PKL at Keyboard-Design.com? That site itself is a one-man venture, and while it's chock full of layout proposals they don't seem to have a lot of traction in the AKL movement as such. I'm not sure about the details behind that. On a side note: It would seem that his KLA analyzer is a rehash of older analyzers, which fails to include some popular metrics that newer analysis is concerned with?

[UnifeGi]

Yay!! Thank you so much for commenting and sharing your experience (⭒•͈ 𓎺 •͈ ) (I genuinely love reading them so much~)

Oh, I do have to first mention that I'm from a special high school, so I really don't have great English at all. But I do hope I could try to convince my peers & my teachers to try out Extend, although-- I don't really have any experiences with Extend as I haven't used EPKL as much since I don't use Windows as a daily OS on my main system ╥﹏╥
But I might try to get Extend working on Linux if it would be possible... and hearing that Extend was extremely valuable from the feedback online and helped people so much, I really have to try it out with my own pair of eyes.

Oh right, thanks for mentioning! I really didn't reference the PKL at keyboard-design.com site as in-depth.
So, when I go to keyboard-design.com, I would use ILLDB¹ to do a search for 'graphite' to obtain this text link: graphite.en.ansi.
Then once that, scrolling a bit down, and would have seen this text below:

Download the Computer install files for Linux, MacOS and Windows (Untested ALPHA/BETA. Use at own risk. Includes ahk, keylayout, klc, pkl, tmk, xkb).

to which, it's previously how I used it on my systems. And it does have the old PKL for Windows (from 2008.09.01, ver. 0.3) that I've wrote in my first post.
Just in case, the readme file from the zip file reads as:

These install files are generated by Keyboard Layout Files Creator
Source: https://github.com/39aldo39/klfc

Keyboard-design.com created the input Json files which
are proceesed by KLFC.

Exercise due caution.

Use at your own risk. Files are supplied "as is" in good faith.

I might have been too excessive (and perhaps too literal?) but I felt the need to provide as much information as I've thought.
but they do seem to use KLFC².
Essentially, that was the program I've been using before, and I'm really happy with EPKL existing!
And from now on and then, I'll be using EPKL wholeheartedly (✯◡✯)

I wanna say a thank you again, I really appreciate your comment so much! and re-reading it too.
I really hope you have days where you feel happy! (≧◡≦)

Footnotes

1. It was found on Tools (a button link from the navbar at the top of the page) on the first section where it says 'Keyboards'.
   It does actually genuinely seem like this page has a lot of various links in it? Might be worth a look maybe! ↩

2. I did find this GitHub issue "dead key is not defined" when converting from .klc  39aldo39/klfc#35, was made since June of 2021, and even had EPKL mentioned in it! although it was for a different point, but still- it was really interesting since I thought at first that KLFC was pre-dated and EPKL was newer than it. ↩