Editing 1806: Borrow Your Laptop

[[White Hat]] asks to borrow [[Cueball|Cueball's]] laptop to do an upload. Cueball permits this, but immediately begins rattling off a list of very unusual key- and mouse-bindings that he has applied to the device. In the caption, [[Randall]] states that he himself tends to continually re-configure computers that he owns in weird ways, eventually rendering it unusable or at least unpleasant to use for others.

Of the three items in Cueball's list of customizations only the first and half of the second change seems like a real and relevant change.

At first he has programmed the computer so that hitting both shift keys simultaneously will change the keyboard back to QWERTY. The {{w|QWERTY}} keyboard is the standard in the US (as well as some other places using the roman alphabet). This implies that Cueball prefers a different keyboard layout but doesn't need the printed letters or the laptop itself is not standard US. But Cueball has to write his own software for this because the two shift key pressing without any other key wouldn't trigger anything in a standard OS.

The first part of the second point on the list Cueball has changed his keyboard layout that {{w|capslock}} acts as the {{w|control key}}. Swapping capslock and control is a common thing to do in the world of computer freaks on Unix or for users of [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey the Emacs editor]; the "Caps Lock" key (immediately to the left of the "A" in a traditional layout) is much easier to reach for a touch typist than the more out-of-the-way "Ctrl", and the latter is often used more frequently, especially by programmers.  

But the second part where Cueball says he has then moved capslock so that it is activated when hitting the {{w|spacebar}} makes less sense. It is quite impractical, as the spacebar is the largest key and likely normally not be used for anything other than spaces. It would make the common accidental application of caps lock more likely. And more worse he doesn't tell White Hat where he has put the space bar function, making it impossible to write a simple text.

Finally Cueball goes out on a limb with an impossible setting, which is that his scroll wheel  [[:Category:Time travel|moves through time]] instead of through "space" (as in up and down on the screen), but only when using {{w|Touchpad#Operation_and_function|two-finger scroll}}, which is often used on {{w|Touchpad|touchpads}}/track pads for laptops as a gesture for scrolling. This refers to {{w|spacetime}}, a common model in relativistic physics.

The title text may suggest that "moving through time" may pertain to undo/redo, or perhaps browser history.

Finally it becomes clear these three settings are not the only important changes, as Cueball's list continues with at least one other point which he doesn't get to finish in the comic.

In the title text Randall says that he would actually find a feature where the scroll wheel was mapped to send a stream of undo/redo commands kind of cool. But he doesn't think that the software could keep up with such a feature. Such continuous {{w|undo|undo/redo}} action would produce unexpected and chaotic results. This could also indicate that this was a similar feature that Cueball was referring to when talking about moving through time. So not as in the computer traveling through time, but rather scrolling through the previous actions performed on the computer, as in moving through the computers past.

**Supporters claim that typing speed is faster on a Dvorak keyboard, although this is still contentious, and this is a reason Randall often makes jokes about it.  

**The laptop has most likely a standard QWERTY keyboard, but if Cueball can type blindly in Dvorak he would not be troubled by the fact that the keys typed a different letter than what is on the keyboard's key.  

***In the recent comic [[1787: Voice Commands]], which did reference Dvorak directly, Cueball is shown to be able to speak the QWERTY version of a Dvorak keyboard layout, proving that he really knows by heart the relation between these two settings used on a QWERTY keyboard layout.

**The same problem would arise if the computer is set to another language than what the keyboard was meant for, which often happens in countries where the second language is English.