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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

Reading through his blogs, he keeps saying that one of the advantages of his layout is intentionally alternating keys between hands, and slags colemak for being "really bad" at that.

But when I was reading up about the colemak, they claimed that was done on purpose -- that in fact, at high speeds, coordinating alternating keystrokes between hands is very difficult, and that it's actually a lot more efficient to have "rolling" patterns where a single hand can type a sequence of characters in a smooth motion. I can definitely say that the "inter-hand coordination" is the source of an awful lot of my typing errors.

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Made the same observation! And the rolling patterns are better if they go from in the pinkie-to-index direction than the other way around. An example of how Halmak does not take this into account is how the h and t keys are placed. It immediately jumped out at me as a Dvorak user.

>at high speeds, coordinating alternating keystrokes between hands is very difficult

It's for this reason I believe the traditionally wide spacebar should be split up into a number of different keys. Having two sets of Shift, Control, Alt, and the Windows key on either side of the keyboard seems less sensible than one set that can be accessed by either thumb.

I for example use a custom layout that splits the Spacebar into both Space and Shift. Now I don't have to shift my hands to the left/right to capitalize a letter, make an exclamation/question mark, make a double quote, etc.

The myth of alternating-hand advantage probably dates to the era of mechanical typewriters, when hammers arriving from opposite sides of the machine were less likely to jam.

Alternating hands was certainly better for my hand joint issues. I found Dvorak not really faster, but more comfortable, and the alternating hands is a big part of that. Alternating hands is much better than consecutive keys far apart on the same hand, and way better than consecutive keys on the same finger.

Actually they were more likely to jam. They hit the same place and if you hit a left and right key at the same time, they'd invariably jam, which necessitated going in and manually prying them back free (the keys sort-of fit into each other)

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