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Comment by blister | Hacker News Reader

This was a fascinating article. The first thing that jumped out at me when I reached the end was "there's no way this would ever work."

I am a Swype user and love the product, but I'm reasonably fast at typing on it because I know the QWERTY layout like the back of my hand. Switching to a new layout would bring me back to a crawl. I'd probably be better off typing on a 9-digit pre-smartphone keypad at that point.

Cool things to consider though. I love the idea of an alternate and more efficient keyboard, but at around 140wpm, the idea of mentally and physically training myself to learn a new one at this stage in the game is sub-optimal.

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There was a submission on here a while about stenography and stenotype keyboards (actually it was about an open-source library for them called Plover [1]). These are the machines used by court reporters to achieve the fastest typing speeds (which in some ways makes them superior input devices that we could learn from). One thing that struck me was that over time each stenographer develops their own "dictionary" by essentially defining macros in the embedded software.

This got me thinking - what if we made a product like this that was given to children, that gradually mutated over time, learning from the usage? Ideally by the time they get to high school they would have these input devices that more organically map to their brains and they would be able to effortlessly type at extreme speeds. We might even be able to solve the sharing problem if the configuration is pure software, like the keyboard with OLED displays in each button. But that also might not be necessary if they were portable/virtual/wearable such that it would be natural to carry at all times.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510409

I actually don't think it would be that bad. Learning T9 wasn't so hard. And I believe that the muscle memory for typing and swyping is totally different, at least based on my anecdotal evidence:

I've used Dvorak on all my computers for about 10 years, but my phones are still QWERTY. I've tried switching my phone to Dvorak, but found that the typos were much worse (because dvorak clusters all the most used letters on home row, which is close to the "worst" swype layout in the article).

For the times I tried Dvorak on the phone, retraining myself was indeed cumbersome, but I don't think it was too bad. I thought that it would be easier, since I had Dvorak in my brain, but the muscle memory for hitting a key with a certain finger moving a certain direction is totally different from swiping or taping a certain location on the screen.

I use dvorak on all my computers, but in my experience dvorak on the phone is terrible because the vowels are clumped together.

I'm the same - I have been using Dvorak for twelve years, but that's all about muscle memory with both hands, I struggle to type with it without two hands in place. When I jump onto a colleague's computer I can use QWERTY OK because my brain reverts to the old four-finger typing I used to do. I'm much faster at Swyping on a QWERTY keyboard, though, because it's a different paradigm entirely - it's more about movement than keypress.

Being used to qwerty you (and I) would probably take months, maybe even a few years to get used to change.

But people who are only now getting into tech (and kids) can learn this layout as a first layout. Within a generation, it's possible to have people using entirely this ultra-efficient keyboard.

IMHO, the only downside, is that it does not take into consideration non-english. I use the same keyboard for English/Spanish, but I suspect that the new layout will not perform equally well on all latin-derived languages that currently use the same qwerty layout.

I'm a SwiftKey user but I rarely use the integrated Swype because the prediction engine is ridiculous. It usually predicts what I'm going to say in two letters per word. It can be logged into your Twitter, Facebook and Email (iirc) to learn your sentence patterns. It feels slightly creepy but it's unnerving in its accuracy. Maybe I just say the same stuff a lot?

The thing is, while I used to know QWERTY fluently, since I switched to Colemak a few years back, I have to hunt and peck a bit on QWERTY keyboards. But it's not a problem when using Swype.

I think this is because you're looking at the keyboard anyway. My guess is that whatever layout you use, it won't be hard to memorize when it's right in front of your face as you use it.

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