“QWERTY wasn't designed to solve type bar jamming” [pdf]
repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp
repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp
And yeah -- if you look at the bottom two rows of a QWERTY keyboard, you can still see what remains of that alphabetical ordering, being left-to-right on one row followed by right-to-left on the row below!
That was absolutely the result of moving to a 2d-ui: icon spam and little discoverability. I can't say I've ever wanted an icon toolbar when I have a menu right there that's activated by common keystrokes without clogging my screen.
Of course, some people only know "save" as a floppy-disk icon. Good luck raising them the remaining way.
The reproducibility crisis struck early, it seems.
Odd to see no mention of the Linotype layout, also known as the "Etaoin Shrdlu", given that was also a common competing keyboard layout in that era.
An alternative layout with commonly used symbols on the home row makes the QWERTY deficiencies immediately apparent. Significantly less effort required for writing prose when using something like DVORAK.
In the end I went back to a regular qwerty because my WPM on split keyboards/colemak-DH was considerably worse even after many months of practice.
I tend to favor the latter.
I have no brain-scan science for this, but it feels like queuing up things into my touch-typing hands frees a different brain-circuit to think ahead a bit more, while at the same time their unfinished task keeps me from being distracted too far off-course.
__________
> "Technicians? I somehow pictured you putting all this together with your own hands."
> Yenaro spread his hands—pale, long-fingered, and thin—and stared at them as if surprised to find them on the ends of his wrists. "Of course not. Hands are to be hired. Design is the test of the intellect."
> "I must disagree. In my experience, hands are integral with brains, almost another lobe for intelligence. What one does not know through one's hands, one does not truly know."
-- Ceteganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold
As it is the UIO vowel complex is a frequent problem with swiping. I'd like to see U and O moved away from each other, in theory.
And while this is speculative, given how close typing speeds seem on a cursory search between layouts, this suggests to me that the vast majority of the performance comes not from the layout, but from touch typing and effective use of multiple hands and fingers at the same time. All layout agnostic skills.
This is not to say that on an input method level, things cannot be further improved. I sometimes see stenography [0] related software and demonstrations on YouTube for example. It also isn't to say that there cannot be a benefit health wise (i.e. ergonomically) to alternative layouts. It's just that for speed I'm not convinced it affects much, and so I think it's the wrong thing to try and change. Especially considering that sometimes things that are suboptimal can be better by being the standard.
But outside that, I find I can’t really think meaningfully and simultaneously type that quickly for a sustained amount of time.
Maybe very fast typing speeds are more useful to stenographers?
Personally I clock in around 110 wpm at my fastest (in English), and I'll only reach that in practice when I have intense disagreements with people over the internet (colleagues, friends or randoms). Outside of that, it's barely useful.
That said, I don't know if any work as professional stenographers.
I have considered switching to Colemak, which is supposed to have less of that, but as a 100+ wpm typer of Dvorak it really is diminishing returns.
I am a Dvorak user and this happens to me too. I thought it happens when I'm stressed out.
I personally went QWERTY -> Dvorak -> Workman. While I spent under 2 years with Dvorak, I have been using Workman for over 3 years now and think I'll likely stick with it. There are other crazy layouts like QGMLWB and Halmak, but I think their higher on-paper efficiency comes at the cost of other things, and Workman seemed like it struck the best balance to me. I had comfort/ergonomics in mind and was trying to get away from some hand pain which seemed to only switch hands going from QWERTY to Dvorak, but is now gone with Workman.
It seems that keyboard layouts have evolved quite a bit since those days.
I think we're I to adopt my split columnar ergonomic keyboard now I would just stick with qwerty. I think the keyboard helped me more than the layout.
Doing just this is actually why I changed layouts again. I built a Pinky4 split columnar stagger keyboard. A few months later I was used to it, but still had hand pain using Dvorak. The layout really is what made a difference for me. I still use that keyboard, but with Workman now.
Workman on ergo seemed to do the trick?
Dvorak is awful for the shell, but actually not bad for vi. Do you have any experience with Workman and vi?
You really had to give the keys a hard whack and had to push them all the way down. It was pretty heavy and the hammers could really get stuck. All this did really limit typing speed.
When I was in school we had an optional typing course and I was encouraged to do it as a computer nerd. But I never thought it was relevant as they didn't even use electric typewriters. They wanted to teach the ability to hit every key with the same amount of force. A skill that is completely useless these days obviously. These days we hit keys with the least amount of force and our colleagues thank us for it :)
The keyboard arrangement was incidentally changed into QWERTY, first to receive telegraphs, then to thrash out a compromise between inventors and producers, and at last to evade old patents.
They were future proofing though: the "I" is between "8" and "9", so they were optimising for the next 130 years, not merely coming decades.
Why are the keys angled up and to the left — for both hands?
Was this to solve the type bar jamming?
Or is that also an urban legend?
I know there are modern keyboards that solve this, by either splitting the keyboard and angling in the natural direction of your fingers (so to the right for the left hand, and vice versa), or just ortholinear keyboards that have straight rows of keys (but still angled ergonomically).
But that ridiculousness has lived on, such that even “economic” split keyboards will still angle both sides to the left.
Really? I see them all over the place. They're very rarely used for typing (except by hipsters in parks) but the are tons used for decoration or in historical scenes.
(Z an Y are swapped... mostly a non issues, except with some games, where Z and X are some gameplay controls, and we have a Y down there)
The actual shorthand would be written on paper, with the typewriter being used to expand it to a more readable form.
If they wanted to resolve the ambiguity it makes sense to move SE and Z further apart so the operator does not easily make a typing mistake in addition to the recognition mistake easily.
> In order to evade the patents that were assigned to the Type Writer Company, WS&B slightly changed the design of No. 2 including the keyboard arrangement (Fig. 9), where M was moved next to N, and C was exchanged with X. It was the QWERTY keyboard arrangement as seen nowadays.