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Your keyboard layout is broken

snprajwal.com

27 pointssnprajwal43 comments

This article would be a lot more interesting if it also mentioned any of the downsides of switching to a non-default keyboard layout. They just mention switching to Colemark as if it's the obviously superior option and you'd be a fool for not switching. Depending on what you're doing, I hope you enjoy a lifetime of fighting with keyboard shortcuts, or having to constantly remap keyboard shortcuts for every single new program. And hopefully you're not interacting with other people's devices or having other people interact with yours, because nobody else is going to be sharing your non-default keyboard layout.

It would be cool if web browsers provided better tools for handling diverse keyboard layouts. You can implement customizable shortcuts if your app merits that level of complexity, but if you just wanna implement a few default shortcuts they can end up in really awkward positions for non-default layouts. Unfortunately for most developers supporting multiple keyboard layouts is probably really low in their priority list.

I use Colemak-DH (modified version of Colemak that has less lateral hand motion - found I was getting slight wrist strain with normal Colemak). I find it more comfortable than Qwerty. I have not had any issue with keyboard shortcuts - Ctrl-Z/X/C are in exactly the same spot and Ctrl-V is shifted over by one key. Most shortcuts are placed to be memorable (e.g. Ctrl-F for Find), not to be ergonomic, so the keyboard layout doesn't really matter. The only place I've really had to customise is Vim, where I've remapped the motion keys back to where they are in Qwerty (actually shifted over by one to j/k/l/;).

On Gnome, switching keyboard layout is very quick and easy - there's an icon in the top bar by default - so I can use that when other people want to use my computer. When I use others' computers, I have to look at the keyboard but it is not too much hassle for me as I don't do this very often.

The main issue I've actually had is remapping Caps Lock to Back Space - not trivial to do in Gnome (required creating my own layout in XDG).

You can rebind caps to backspace in GNOME. I think you use GNOME tweaks. I've done it on all of my computers.

I did this initially, but I believe it didn't work for all applications - some were still registering it as Caps Lock (e.g. VS Code IIRC).

Oh shucks, I should have known you would have tried it. Sorry, I was hoping I had a silver bullet for you.

No worries, worth a try!

Wouldn't it be easier if you could just have one software that by default maps certain actions to existing keyboard shortcuts...something like a one to one conversion?

> The Colemak layout was designed with the capabilities of modern keyboards in mind

But it wasn't! Modern keyboard is precisely what the author describes in the following bullet points: split and ortho (though it shouldn't be linear, our fingers have different lengths). He also forgot to mention utilizing your strongest fingers with a thumb cluster instead of that dumb long spacebar

None of the popular QWERTY alternatives have been designed with a proper ergo keyboard in mind, not to mention all the other modern keyboard features like home row modifiers.

(I don't know of any layout development algo and its resulting layout that takes those things with an actually typed training corpus into accounts, but would be happily proven wrong)

Workman [0] was designed to be used on an ortho keyboard, though it is also usable on a normal keyboard. I suppose it's tricky to design for many modern features as they are not yet standardised between keyboards.

[0] https://workmanlayout.org/

I got myself an ortholinear split keyboard (moonlander). I used to get some wrist pain every now and then but the biggest game changers were switching escape with caps lock. The great thing about the moonlander is that I have backspace, enter , delete and space on my thumbs instead of my pinkies (not including space obviously) and I have to say that when I am in the zone, it is noticeably more comfortable.

When I first got it I was ready to return it after a week. I must have been typing around 10wpm at the beginning. I'm not back to around 80-90. Was it worth it? I think so, the macros and multiple layers are nice but I don't use them a ton. The ability to really relax my shoulders has certainly helped reduce some of the neck pain I experience but after tons of working out and strengthening at the recommendations of physio I imagine my personal issues with neck pain are more manifestations of minor anxiety than physical deficiencies with posture.

I recognise that's not the point of this article but I just thought to mention that it doesn't magically fix everything. But it does make long sessions more enjoyable and comfortable.

The entire article is moot, because the story of qwerty keyboards being layed out that way is a myth. Nothing more. People can type in an astonishing speed on normal layouts.

https://wiredpen.com/2022/05/12/origin-myths-qwerty-and-dvor....

The health and usabilty issues of the QWERTY layout do not disappear like a debunked historical myth.

But yes, people can adapt to a lot of poorly designed interfaces!

I'm skeptical that QWERTY causes RSI (or at least, causes more RSI than any other layout). I struggled with RSI for over a year and tried all sorts of things. Today I'm typing this comment on a QWERTY laptop keyboard in a position that would cause an ergonomics expert to faint, with no pain at all. Evidently the layout was not the problem.

What's the position? I use a steeply tented split keyboard for neutral wrist position.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it was a better position -- it is objectively atrocious. My hands are flopped over the keyboard with my wrists resting on the edge, and my right hand is skewed diagonally, with the wrist near the corner and the fingers on the home row.

It is not uncomfortable at all, and I can seemingly type as long as I want in this position without causing injury. The problem was in my head.

There are several aspects to keyboard interfaces that the article does not catch:

  - The physical device:
    - The "key board": Keys that are aligned in straight lines are not aligned with your hands.
    - The wrist bend affects people differently and can cause strains
    - Physical design to lower wrist strain is an almost entirely separate research area than optimal keyboard layout.
    - The optimal physical input device (in terms of input bandwidth) is hand-shaped but is more difficult to make.

  - The layout:
    - This article only discusses permutations of letters for increased bandwidth and less strain.
    - Considering computer users can "easily" reach 80-120 wpm with QWERTY, speed is a moot point for non-competitioners.
    - Few people learn a new layout and have a confirmation bias when they do; real usage data is scarce.

Real-world experience differs slightly; e.g. I have more race conditions on Dvorak than on QWERTY because of left/right-hand speed differences. Dvorak does succeed at distributing consecutive letters between the hands, but I never had problems with accidental twiddles on QWERTY. Would you rather be fast or accurate? For most people, the trade-off is somewhere in the middle.

The layout is about much more than permutations of letters. Anyone who tried to or aspires to run Kmonad, Kanata, or Neo2 or who have a window manager with custom keybindings that control their environment, or who type with more than one kind of keyboard (e.g. pinyin, cyrillic, greek), or who need to type special unicode symbols that don't have a key combo in traditional layouts (math, emoji): The bar for keyboard input is higher, and I don't know any project that attempts to unify these. My "keyboard" is a combination of many open source tools, some of which work better than others, others have a steep learning curve, yet others are only documented in foreign languages.

[0]: https://github.com/kmonad/kmonad [1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_(keyboard_layout) [3]: https://www.neo-layout.org/

Race conditions are a good point. I remember on DOS I had a batch file DRI.BAT because I would often type DRI or IDR instead of DIR. Oddly I have no problem with ls and rarely type sl even though L and S are hit with different hands; either my typing has improved or there is something different about those key positions.

There is a Linux package called `sl` that launches a steam locomotive ASCII animation to annoy the typer. :-P I think the difference might be that three letters is less of a conscious and more of a motoric action, e.g. you get the first letter for free.

This is all fine and good, but besides the mechanical legacy myths there is also the need to use diacritics, symbols, etc. I intend to try something different (an http://artsey.io left-handed keyboard, which seems like a decent thing to try using over Summer break with a minimalist on the go setup), but I’m much more interested in 60% QWERTY and a good window manager as a productivity booster.

The placement of punctuation is the reason I believe Dvorak is better than most other optimized layouts. They may be optimal for their metrics, but their metrics are bad.

I have been thinking about trying a one-handed layout lately, the one you link is intriguing!

Boy I can't wait to remap my entire vim/vscode config, relearn a lifetime of touch typing, and have my computer inaccessible to anyone else who wants to use it for a +30% typing efficiency

I moved to Dvorak in about… 3 weeks. Love it now! I printed out a paper with my split keyboards layout, and just stopped looking at it over time. You can toggle back to Qwerty with one click.

I switched from QWERTY to Colemak-DH and it barely made a difference, not for speed and not for type comfort. It was a fun brain rewiring exercise though.

For me the largest impact in getting rid of wrist and hand pains (besides good adjustment of chair and table and regular exercises) was switching to a Kinesis Advantage. Besides being split, tented, and having column stagger, the key wells put my hands at a much more natural position and makes keys easier to reach. The thumb keys also allowed me to unload the pinkies a lot.

At this point I can’t really go back to a flat keyboard for daily use. They just feel bad.

I also made a Dactyl (meh) and put in an order for the Glove80, which I am really looking forward to try.

But I wouldn’t really recommend a switch to Colemak, it’s not really worth the effort. Also, a subset of the Colemak community is quite obnoxious. You’d think they are interested in alternate layouts, but they have a tendency to attack anyone who proposes something that is not Colemak.

The Kinesis Advantage solved my severe wrist pain as well. It was a huge QOL improvement, and I can’t imagine ever using a keyboard that doesn’t share its same shape.

But holy cow that learning curve was steep. I switched to Colemak at the same time and thought I was going to lose my mind relearning all the Vim shortcuts. Worth it. But my goodness.

Actually it works great.

It's some old QWERTY keyboard that came free with a prebuilt my Dad bought 20 years ago and it's still going along just fine. It does what I need, when I need it, and I don't even have to think about it. It seems like you think about your keyboard quite a lot.

I would recommend not doing that.

I recommend using the standard QWERTY keyboard. Your typing skills will be easily transferable, as this is the keyboard layout you'll encounter on almost all other computers. It works great with the default key mappings and shortcuts for the majority of software out there. You'll spend exactly 0 seconds tweaking and adapting those shortcuts to your keyboard. And although you may type a little slower on your QWERTY keyboard, you'll still type faster than the speed of thought.

In this way, I think you'll find you have more free time to pursue more fruitful things.

I find the concept of learning colemak very intriguing. The qwerty layout is just so strange in some aspects. But the problem is that for my career (hospital medicine) I'm going to need to use random computers all the time. There's just no way to reliably use colemak. I talked to my hospital IT about whether they could attach an alternative layout to my account but it just wasn't in the cards.

In my office I have a moonlander where I use Qwerty but with home row mods which I think are great. But it always takes me a second to readjust back. I don't think I would enjoy going between colemak and qwerty on top of that.

I use Colemak as my daily driver, and I find it incredibly difficult to switch back and forth with QWERTY. The muscle memory just no longer works. Others say it’s easy for them, so YMMV.

I had such severe wrist pain on QWERTY that the switch wasn’t an option.

I just can't imagine trying to switch. I just don't have the time to commit to relearning a new keyboard layout anyways. The home row mods/ortholinear layout are enough of a mental switch for me.

I used to have wrist pain from typing, but found when I started to focus on my ergonomics my symptoms improved. (thanks to the hospital ergonomics people for fixing my setup). I use a Planck with laptop and even on a 40% kb you can practice better posture to put less strain on your hands

I have a colemak-dh split and can still use qwerty with some adeptness, but I also dont touch a qwerty board very often (once a week or so for a few minutes). I think the split between forms helps, possibly thats an unspoken reason why some people can flip between better than others (whether thats split, ortho or 36key, etc to "normal qwerty").

I have no doubt that the standard keyboard QWERTY layout is broken, but I really wonder whether it's broken in an way that's particularly important to most users of keyboards. I totally understand looking for a more ergonomic design of the physical layout - I've long used the relatively straightforward split keyboards, and find them physically more comfortable, and I can see for people who type a fair bit, going even further with those changes being helpful. But changing the logical arrangement of the keys doesn't seem to me to be of much benefit to MOST people who type. Most of us aren't particularly limited by the speed at which we type. People who spend most of their day producing code or written text in bulk are exceptions, but the way I see most people working, navigation and think time are the limiting factors in productivity, not character production. So, while I get that QWERTY is sub-optimal, I'm not sure I see that the juice is worth the squeeze in changing it, for most people.

And if that's the case, there isn't much hope for industry-wide change.

maybe it is more for future generations hoping the computer train?

after all, everyone starts without any skill at touch-typing, so why not teach them something better?

Because there must be a coordinated effort to change the default or at least increase the diversity of layouts. Otherwise it's like teaching esperanto, putting them into a very small minority for little benefit.

Even as a technical user for decades I find it too burdensome to swim upstream with a niche layout, and I already have remapped copy-paste.

well, all we can do, is all we can do…

if swimming upstream is that hard (and i agree that decades of professional usage on a X layout is hard to give up); at least when teaching someone you could say something: “here is the layout you should use! i know mine is different and i can type typewriter with one row in case i want to impress someone but yours is better, like minor chances of getting a RSI and general efficiency when typing stuff…”

FWIW I did try an alt layout a while back. It was just too disruptive because it required changing so many shortcuts.

As more jobs come to benefit from shortcuts, QWERTY becomes more entrenched.

Maybe, but all that kind of assume you will only type on personal devices, or at least do 99.9% of your typing on personal devices.

When I worked in Europe for roughly 1 week of every month, I was largely flummoxed by the occassional need to use a foreign keyboard mapping (a German keyboard has y and z reversed from the English layout, as I recall). Just that and a few other differences for symbol keys meant that every time I had to use a keyboard not my own when in Germany, I went from being a fluent touch typist, to a hunt and peck typist. Same for French keyboards, which had several key re-arrangements relative to English that I no longer remember. If I taught my kids on Dvorak (which I considered, as they were home schooled), that would have been their experience on every device they encountered outside our home. I'm sure they would have loved me for it.

I started with Colemak 4 years ago on an Ergodox EZ because of RSI, and switched to Halmak on a Moonlander keyboard since then. Never would want to go back.

But, to highlight some downsides: You need a custom config for most programs and games! My vim config is full of remappings. And I spend a lot of time in the setup menus of games before actually plaing.

I've never been convinced by the home row argument. I type by using key combos, so what matters to me is that common letter sequences can easily be pressed with two separate fingers without effort. For example, English has a lot of words starting with consonant+R+vowel, such as the word "crash". That's a particularly bad word for me to type on qwerty, because I have to stretch one finger down and one finger up then roll by hand upward. To make matters worse, my pinkies are not particularly strong, so I tend to use my ring finger to press the A. I wish there were a less commonly used letter in that home row position.

Colemak looks slightly better than qwerty for some key combos, but not better enough to switch. If there were a layout that optimized typing of common letter sequences, I might be tempted to try it.

if you want to get your feet wet, do it right :P

https://engram.dev/

Autokey or kmonad for editing Copy, Paste, Cut etc. shortcuts and you are golden!

Standard caveat of using a nonstandard layout is likely to break shortcuts in the OS and programs, be a hassle for games, and cause trouble when using common computers.

Also loving the "QUERTY" is suboptimal; use "DVORAK". "DVORAK" is suboptimal, use "COLMAK". "COLMAK" is suboptimal, use "COLMAK_DH". Can't win!

I started bringing my guitar into the office when I got pains in my hands when I was 25. They faded and haven't been an issue since. I don't know that it's playing a stringed instrument specifically, just having a way to exercise and move the fingers in a different way.

All these alternate layouts seem to be optimized to minimize finger movement in English, but that's not really how things work in practice.

For one thing, there's more than English.

Then, it's not just about finger movement, but about easy movements. For example 're' seems common in English, and is really easy to type as a 'roll' in qwerty.

'n', 'u', 't' 'v' are all really easy to reach with the index finger in qwerty, so it's not just about the home row, but about easy-to-reach keys.

Also a lot of keyboardists are programmers, so there's the whole story of punctuation. Let alone software keyboard shortcuts etc.

I've found it's better to configure your software than to change your keyboard layout. For example I'm learning Janet (a lisp-like) currently, which allows kebab-case variable names. Wow, it's such a blessing to be able to type without shift-modifyer, 'vector-embedding' instead of 'vector_embedding' or 'VectorEmbedding', and [1 2 3 4 5 6] instead of [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], etc.

I'm personally of the opinion that the social difficulty of switching layouts is too great and I'd compromise with an ortholinear split qwerty board, which should alleviate most of the problems associated with typing.

I would add that the size of the keys is also off. My hands are significantly larger than others using the very same machine…

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