Ergo ID

Overview

The Ergo ID system is a ergonomically efficient way to type out UUIDs on a QWERTY keyboard layout. It was specifically written for zet, specifically zetdo, as a faster, more comfortable means for managing tasks.

As an example, this UUID4 value:

6b73c608-f0cd-4f4b-97f7-11756e04f195

Would translate to the following ergo-id:

krlfukaq-paui-hphr-wlpl-ssljkoahpswj

It's honestly a pretty bonkers system. I came up with this idea while dogfooding zetdo. I particularly found typing UUIDs, even partially, to be a laborious operation, in particular when typing numbers on my planck keyboard.

I figured that while hexadecimal notation makes a lot of sense from a symbolic point of view, it's not great if you are tasked with actually typing them out. With my fingers resting on the home row, I thought about the issue. Next thing you know... Ergo ID!

Derivation

A UUID is a 128-bit number, usually represented as 32 hexadecimal characters with 4 dashes. It is the convention to represent those 16 hexadecimal characters 0-9 and a-f. In the Ergo ID system, these characters are replaced with easy-to-reach ones found on the home and top rows of the keyboard.

For a touch typist, the easiest characters to reach are on the home row without extending. On a QWERTY keyboard, these are:

asdfjkl;

These are all letters except for the ';'. That's a bit of an odd duck. ';' will be replaced with 'h'. it requires an extension, but it's not so bad. also, vi users will appreciate the hjkl pattern:

asdfhjkl

The next easiest keys are found on the top row without extension. 'p' has a bit of an extension, but it's not too bad (and it also feels slightly more comfortable than 'y'):

qweruiop

Together, these form 16 characters, which is how many we need to represent the hexadecimal characters:

asdfhjklqweruiop

0123456789abcdef

Sample C Implementation

Here's some starter C code, adapted from the weewiki source code. Each function takes in an input string, the input string size, and a pre-allocated buffer for the output string. The output string is assumed to be at least the same size as the input string (plus an extra byte for the null terminator), but does not do any checking so be careful!

This code is placed in the public code.

static const char *ergohex = "0??2a3?4d567??ef8b1?c?9";
static const char *hexergo = "asdfhjklqweruiop";

void hex_to_ergo(const char *hex, int sz, char *ergo)
{
    int i;

    for (i = 0; i < sz; i++) {
        int pos;

        pos = -1;
        if (hex[i] >= '0' && hex[i] <= '9') {
            pos = hex[i] - '0';
        } else if (hex[i] >= 'a' && hex[i] <= 'f') {
            pos = (hex[i] - 'a') + 10;
        }

        if (pos >= 0) {
            ergo[i] = hexergo[pos];
        } else {
            ergo[i] = hex[i];
        }
    }

    ergo[sz] = '\0';
}

void ergo_to_hex(const char *ergo, int sz, char *hex)
{
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < sz; i++) {
        if (ergo[i] >= 'a' && ergo[i] <= 'w') {
            int pos = ergo[i] - 'a';
            hex[i] = ergohex[pos];
        } else {
            hex[i] = ergo[i];
        }
    }
}

---

home | index