fvogel's blog

IOI 2022 Keyboards
By fvogel, history, 3 years ago, In English

Hello Codeforces,

Looking at the IOI regulations for keyboards and mice, the following are allowed to be brought by the contestant:

  • keyboards (without wireless, calculation, and/or programmable functions),
  • mouse (without wireless and/or calculation functions) and mouse pads,

It is worth buying a wired mechanical keyboard for IOI in order to get used to it?

What are your thoughts on this? For those who have already been to onsite IOIs, which keyboards did you use?

  • Vote: I like it
  • +22
  • Vote: I do not like it

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

Auto comment: topic has been updated by fvogel (previous revision, new revision, compare).

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3 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +57 Vote: I do not like it

If it's in a country you're not used to, I'd recommend bringing something. 2019 ICPC World Finals in Porto had a mini disaster with the keyboards: they were a super weird format that nobody was used to and you had to memorize a command to change the layout, and even after that, some of the keys were combined, so it really threw some people off. About 75% of the questions asked after the practice finals were "can we please have a new keyboard/are we allowed to saw these three buttons in half/how do I use normal keyboard bindings".

Even if you changed it to normal bindings, the labels on the keys didn't match what they keys did for special characters, so if you didn't memorize what all the shift+number combos were, it was a huge pain.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Oh that must have been really disturbing.

    Which keyboard is in your opinion the best one? (knowing that it has to be wired and without calculation or programmable functions)

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      3 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +11 Vote: I do not like it

      I think in general for pure typing speed nothing really matters too much for me personally other than the layout. But if you made me pick one, I'd get brown switches.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +16 Vote: I do not like it

    I remember in Minsk 2017 I spent the night practicing writing on an US keyboard (not the physical layout — the actual keybindings) because the keyboards lacked the key between Shift and Z which made it impossible on the Estonian keyboard to write <>. The weird operating system we were forced to use also didn't have the capability to change keybindings besides switching between a fixed number of layouts, so I had effectively no choice but to just learn the US keybindings in one night.

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    3 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it

    I use this Japanese keyboard with misplaced special character keys. Now i can't use a normal keyboard :(

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