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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I got into alternate keyboard layouts and developed my own (roughly an optimized NIRO). When I tried using it on my small Surface Go I found that my fingers would 'jam' typing letters close together, so I leave that in QWERTY so it happens much less.

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We've had a few conversations on HN about how QWERTY may not be optimal for mobile swiping, but it's better than the layouts optimized for typing. Dvorak, with all the vowels on the left hand home row, would be terrible for swiping, what with all the English words just a vowel away from each other.

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.

Yes, normal Dvorak is not great for use on a smartphone, unless you usually type with both thumbs. For one thumb, especially swiping, I've found one-handed Dvorak for right hand to be a great fit. Works well for me on Multiling O Keyboard with vowel omission enabled.

Yeah, there is a conflict between "use your very best fingers for everything" versus "spread the work across fingers so that it gets done sooner."

I tend to favor the latter.

Everyone has their own style I would assume. I've been on a PC for 25ish years now and I still type with 3 or 4 fingers almost all the time. I've tried to be more disciplined but I manage 100ish corrected WPM and it gets the job done, I never find that I'm limited by my typing speed.

Yeah, I can do 100-120 but that would typically involve something unusual like retyping something I already see on screen. Creative tasks are typically limited by something else. Formal typing classes in middle-school were useless, but over the next summer some form of touch-typing arose anyway from arguing with people on forums and newsgroups. ("Home row? I dunno, I just put my hands wherever feels right.")

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

I can believe it. For a physical keyboard, I would much prefer a layout with a DVORAK-like home row, but probably not for mobile. The imprecision of touch and swiping text entry likely do markedly worse when high frequency characters are on top of each other.

I'm sure somebody has created a software keyboard where the more used characters are simply larger than the less used ones.

I believe software does that, in that characters are disambiguated in part based on previous characters, even without swipe typing. That means each character is mapped to a secondary keyboard layout where certain keys' "hitbox" are enlarged.

I found the opposite when I went through a split keyboard phase and did Colemak-DH layout. As far as english goes I found that a lot of words had a smoother "flow" when it comes to finger location.

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.

My WPM also dropped, but I kept with it because (1) I actually do very little typing compared to thinking (and had to resort to online typing practice to build up muscle memory), (2) my hands are far more comfortable and don't experience cramps or pains anymore.

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