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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, there is no gain whatsoever in adopting a keyboard that puts all the most used characters in the home row if you're just tapping with two thumbs.

A better layout for smartphones, if one had to design it, would try to put all characters in two circles around the thumbs, while putting symbols and the least frequent ones towards the centre, requiring some extension of the thumbs to reach.

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There's a Japanese smartphone layout which is really fast. It's based on the number pad.

There are 9 base consonants (K S T N H M Y R W) and 5 vowels (A I U E O), and every syllable is either vowel or consonant + vowel. Digits 0-9 on the number pad correspond with the consonants (including "no consonant"), and then you swipe in a different direction for a different vowel (4 vowels for swiping in a direction, 1 vowel for not swiping).

Nice, big chunky buttons you can press with one thumb on one hand, and each time you press one of those big, chunky buttons, you get an entire syllable. After a little bit of practice, I can type on this layout much faster than I can type in English, even though my Japanese is not very good.

I switched to this keyboard for my Wanikani reviews because I find I make fewer typos with it, but I personally find it slower than the QWERTY-based romaji input.

Words that use unvoiced, full-size kana are super fast (especially if it has a bunch of あ vowels like あたたかい, which takes 4 taps and 1 swipe instead of 8 taps in romaji), but words with lots of voiced consonants and small kana need you to tap the modifier button a bunch (e.g. ざっぴ requires seven taps+swipes, instead of just 5 taps on the romaji input).

There's also an English implementation of this same layout concept on Android and iOS called MessageEase[1]. I've been using it for almost 10 years now and have been quite happy with the support over time.

You can consistently type without looking at the keyboard once you learn the layout, which I've found to be great for note-taking

[1]: https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php

The gain is probably to have a consistent layout across devices.

There is no need. It's a different type of muscle memory.

I've been learning to use a split ortholinear keyboard, and it exercises a different type of muscle memory than a regular keyboard, which is even different than on-screen keyboards. I have a different layout in each and I haven't lost any speed whatsoever.

I disagree. When for one reason or another I have to use a phone that uses qwerty I have to hunt and peck, with a large emphasis on "hunt".

I wouldn’t be so sure. I (a QWERTY user) remember picking up my first phone with a non-numeric keyboard (Nokia E63, a Symbian-based QWERTY-keyboard phone) and instantly starting typing with my thumbs virtually blindly. I expected a long learning period; there wasn’t.

I have been typing Dvorak for about 15 years, give or take (I had been typing qwerty before that). A couple of years after the switch I started to play World of Warcraft, and I thought it was too much effort to rebind all the keys (they assumed qwerty), so I just played it on qwerty. My brain quickly learned to associate the game with the keyboard layout, so I would type qwerty at full speed when chatting in-game. Typing qwerty on someone else's computer was much harder and required some conscious effort. I wonder if mentally switching between keyboard layouts is similar to switching between speaking different languages.

I have an en-Intl Macbook that I work on personal projects on, and a Swedish Macbook for work. I find that I can swap between them fairly trivially, but as soon as I open Slack on my personal machine to quickly respond to a work query I’m completely at sea.

This is an interesting anecdote. Despite a longtime interest, I've been hesitant to bother trying alternative keyboard layouts because even with only really minor changes to shortcuts (capslock replaced with ctrl, emacs text navigation bindings for all apps) typing on an unfamiliar computer is almost comically bad, but I have gotten used to specific apps that don't play nice with my bindings (I'm looking at you Github text boxes stealing ctrl+e!).

It does seem to require some mental "switch" or trick. If I look at the keyboard (assuming it's got QWERTY on the keycaps, which all of my keyboards have had), it "reminds" me to type QWERTY and I can do it. It's not really full-speed or facile but it's good enough and it's not hunt-and-peck, anyway. If I look away, I cannot type QWERTY.

I picked up dvorak over summer vacation in high school because I was having bad wrist pain. My high school wouldn't let me use dvorak, so I painfully had to re-rewire my brain for qwerty in our high school labs.

I quickly realized that my brain would use dvorak for my mechanical keyboard at home but would only use qwerty on the soft keyboards at school.

Split orthogonal isn't at all comparable to a different layout.

Note that this also affected iPadOS where many of us have a full keyboard. It was a real pain switching between the 2 when going from computer to iPad. Thankfully, they added it to iPadOS, too, so now I don’t have to.

iPadOS has supported Dvorak for Hardware Keyboards for a long time. There's a separate picker for Hardware Keyboard Layout than Software Keyboard Layout.

Fair point, but even the on-screen keyboard on iPads is basically full-sized so it makes more sense than on a phone.

There used to be a keyboard layout designed specifically for handheld touchscreen devices called Fitaly[1]. I used this layout on my Palm Pilot back in the day.

[1] https://textware.com/fitaly/fitaly.htm

Fitaly is neat, but it's optimized for a single stylus with high precision, rather than two thumbs with low precision.

Another cool one is minuum in minimode. The prediction's so good that you just have to approximately hit the key https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whirlscape...

One downside was that it seemed to have memory issues but this was years ago on a Samsung GS5.

I don't know if it's a common feature or just part of the Samsung Keyboard app, but when the phone is rotated it does seperate they keyboard quite nicely so you can access each half with your thumbs. Space in the middle is a little wasted though.

I don't know if it's a common feature or just part of the Samsung Keyboard app, but when the phone is rotated it does seperate they keyboard quite nicely so you can access each half with your thumbs.

Available on iPads, but not on iPhones at this time.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207521

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