Slashdot Mirror
Beyond Dvorak via Genetic Algorithm
ColonelPanic writes: "I switched my computer keyboard to the
Dvorak layout
about a year ago. But now I've gone and done
something really outlandish. I tried to discover the most efficient layout possible with a genetic
algorithm. It's weird-looking, but I am typing
with it now. I put the
gory details up on the Web."
ADT GAC CCG AGA TAA CGA
What happens when you need a different letter?
...But are we going to see this (and others, such as dvorak) keyboard layout widely used?
As a note, for those who don't know, the current (QWERTY) layout was devised so that typists (on ancient typewriters) could *not* type so fast that they clogged up their machines.
Or something like that. In any case, i am using my calc's ABCDEF layout, LOL!
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Can someone please post mirrors to the code? The link to the .tar.gz doesn't appear to be working.
Does this mean that your descendants will have 104 fingers?
Results:
left
right
left
right...
I can imagine Lisp programmers would want the parentheses '(' and ')' keys to be in a more accessible place than above the 9 and 0 characters.
What do other think - Should keyboards be dynamically reconfigurable dependant on the programming language in use ?
Definitely someone with too much time on their hands....*YAWN*
All very well, but not much use to most of Slashdot's readership...
What enquiring onanists need to know is which keyboard layout is fastest using just one hand....
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
I appreciate that he uses a lot of text for analysis. Ten years of email and C++ code are nice additions. However, the inclusion of the King James Bible and a few other works may have skewed the results somewhat, as shown by the presence of the word "thou" in the most-often used words list.
ok, so lets say that you do switch and start using your new fancy keyboard layout. How long will it be before you forget how to type on a qwerty keyboard? Think of the trouble you will be in when you try to use someone elses keyboard. Plus programs, like video games, that come with keys programmed to do certain tasks are usually setup to keep the keys together on a qwerty keyboard, and will have to be remapped every time you install a game. Lastly, my hands have never gone numb from typing on a qwerty keyboard.
That web page has some messed up links going to it's own filesystem:
The problem I've had with non-qwerty keyboards is that unix seems to be designed for qwerty, as you'll notice most of the common commands (ls, ps, pwd, cd) seem to be fairly "comfortable" to type, whereas when I was playing around with using dvorak once for a few weeks, it just felt much more awkward to type unix commands.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
How much faster does the keyboard layout makes you, then?
Like, how do you score on this test?
The code: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz
:)
pdf: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.pdf
the experiment run: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.output
strangely the keyboard map is correct...
I am curious as to if there is a way to remap the physical keyboard. This would be useful if you were accustom to one keyboard layout, so that you could take you keyboard with you and not have to worry about remapping in the OS.
You know what I really should do? There are certain words I *always* mistype with QWERTY, and I'm convinced it's partly the fault of the layout... I should use a genetic algorithm that evaluates based on speed *and* on letter arrangement, somehow. Not sure how to do this... but right now I'm running this command to see what words I mispell most often when using instant messenger:
nice cat ~/.gaim/logs/*.log|fgrep 'me:'|ispell -H -l|sort|uniq -c >~/badwords 2>/dev/null &
I love UNIX.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
...algorithms for various programming languages? Maybe as the input file for C, feed it the Linux Kernel source :)
* Every position has an assigned cost that's looked up from a table. The OEU/HTN positions of Dvorak have no cost. A and S are 1 unit; I and D are two; P and GCR are three; Y and F are four; ", QJK, MWV, and L are five; : and Z are six; and X and B are seven.
* Using the same finger twice in succession on distinct letters costs 10 units.
* When two keys in a row are struck with the same hand, it costs two units if they're on different rows or on the bottom row, and one unit if they're not adjacent.
* If three or more keys are hit in succession by the same hand, one unit is charged for each key after the second.
Using this algorith, it doesn't make sense to me, at least, to use 4096 random generations and then "evolve" them. I would be curious how a keyboard layout designed based on which letters are typed the most would compare. Using the point system above, it seems to me that it would make sense to put the most commonly typed letters in the 0 position (say a,e,i,t,r,s) and then the next most commonly typed in the 1 position (o,n?) and so on.
wouldn't it have been better to use the linux kernel source code instead of the works of shakespeare, assuming of course that his job involves a lot of programming.
According to the description in the article the algorithm has random seeding, mutations, a ranking function and survival of the fittest - but it doesn't have genetic exchange. New layouts are not chosen as combinations of two or more existing layouts.
Genetic exchange is very important for rapid evolution. The Earth was just a big bacterial soup for two billion years. Then sex was invented and then things started to get more interesting very quickly.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Different people would have different text samples that are representative, and possibly slightly different rules for evaluating the costs (although this would be very hard to quantify) ...
... no two keyboard layouts alike.
Just imagine all the slashdotters optimizing their own keyboard layout to their own individual circumstances
now whose going to test alternate layouts for the sl-5500/blackberry thumb-board layouts?
meh.
A friend does PC support (including telecommuter support) for a large retail company. A woman called in, to say that her home PC was acting stangely, and not typing the keys she pressed.
My friend went to her house with a new keyboard. When he looked at the old one, he saw that the keys were arranged alphabetically. with 'a' where the q is supposed to be, 'b' where the w is, etc.
She explained that she was having trouble finding the keys, so she rearranged them so she could find them easier.
Think you can do better? My score is only 20593!
Nice work.
I am working on a similar project: to create an international (european languages) dvorak-like layout for programmers or multi-lingual people.
In Europe, there is about one qwerty-type layout for each language or country. Most languages have some special characters (èàéüäö etc). If you want to use characters from another language, it may not be possible or require some special (difficult to remember and different for each layout) sequence.
What I am looking for is direct access to all special characters used by swedish, french, german, italian, spanish and programming languages (èàéäüö[]{}$# etc). Using dvorak as basic layout to build upon.
I will post more on this as soon as I have finished (after summer vacations)
My conclusion, few people (including myself) are willing to relearn and use a nonstandard keyboard. The querty is a good keyboard (if you live in the 1800's, are right handed, and use a manual typewriter). It was intentionally made to slow people down, so that they didnt jam the keys. And, all in all, its good enough for me to type this and many other things today.
We had a concerted effort at my company years ago to see if the Dvorak keyboard would improve performance for randomly selected users. It failed. Any difference in performance was offset by the difficulty in switching back to the Qwerty away from the workplace.
Until a completely new input system comes around, we're stuck with the Qwerty for better or worse.
Phoenix
His little test is a neat idea. The one potential cause for concenr I could see would be that he was influenced by literature praising dvorak in defining penalties for various tasks. I personally think the penalities are likely accurate, but to a QWERTY advocate, research that show dvorak is bette rby using dvorak based criteria would be begging the question...
That aside, I really agree that dvorak is a better keyboard layout, and his final layout's resemblance to dvorak testifies to the advantage of dvorak. I've never been able to type fast at al in QWERTY, and it always hurts quickly (unless I hunt and peck, which is my general method). With dvorak I can touch type comfortably for a long time, and much faster as well. While his final keyboard layout may be marginally better than dvorak, dvorak remains the better choice for much the same reason qwerty is used, you can set up a dvorak layout on almost any system and os, but with this funky layout, you need to be running X....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It is a good thing to remember that genetic algorithms are not garanteed to converge (generate the best layout). Also, the author doesn't seem to make the best layouts reproduce; it seems to me that this is one of the key features of genetic algorithms, so he may be missing some good layouts out there.
For those interested in genetic programming, OpenBeagle, a very good genetic programming program is available at http://www.gel.ulaval.ca/~beagle/ It's made in C++ and it's LGPLed.
What's so great about skipping?
First of all, it's a great workout. You'll find that skipping is less strenuous than running and it's a lot more fun. We recently found a study that reports that skipping burns more calories than running! Another difference between the two is that running comes from our fight or flight reflex, so it is a fear based activity. Skipping, on the other hand, comes from a place of happiness and joy. You can definitely feel the difference.
Read More...
You wasted a lot of time and effort finding a way to remap the keys on your keyboard to allow yourself to type faster. But you know what? Who needs to type faster? I mean, I know how to type on a QWERTY keyboard, and I can do it pretty well. The time it would take me to get used to a new layout would be greater than the time I would save by typing that little bit faster. Once you are typing fast enough, that's fast enough. Unless you plan on typing a copy of War and Peace.
While I believe you wasted a lot of time and typing faster is silly, I do think that we can apply your program to other things. For example I could log keypresses during games of counter-strike and possibly find a better key layout for myself based on my style of play. Pretty much anything we want to find the best of. Maybe we could possibly apply this to networking to map the network in the best possibly configuration for speed based on bandwith.
Good ideas that could be used to achieve better, useful, goals.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
All these layouts and evaluations are based on a) american keyboard layouts and b) the English language.
Even the regular QWERTY layout has some differences in other languages (ex, the 'Ç' in portuguese keyboards, the 'Ñ' in spanish keyboards, etc.), and the letter frequency is completely different. Most languages don't use the 'W' at all, and very rarely use the 'K'.
Most languages also have some specific 2-letter sequences that don't appear in other languages. In English you have 'th' and 'wh', for example. In Italian you have 'gl' and 'gn', in Spanish you have 'll', in Portuguese you have 'lh' and 'nh', etc.. These can make a big difference to the "perfect layout".
There are also some ridiculous mistakes such as the official french keyboard (which is AZERTY, and not QWERTY, BTW) not having the capital letter 'Ç', meaning you can't type 'Ça va?' (a very common sentence, meaning 'How are you doing?'). In the portuguese layout, the 'Ç' is a separate key, so you can use it to type 'ç' or 'Ç' (with shift). When I was working in Paris a couple of years ago I often wished I had my portuguese keyboard, not only because I'm used to QWERTY and kept making mistakes on their AZERTY keyboards, but also because it's actually easier to type in French with a portuguese keyboard.
Personally, I'm quite happy with the QWERTY layout; I would only change a couple of letters.
But I do wish people who write software would realise not everyone in the world uses the same keyboard layout they do, and that in other countries the same signs are often in different keys, making some key combinations impossible (ex., in the portuguese keyboard. the signs '[' and ']' are typed by pressing AltGr+8 and AltGr+9, or Ctrl+Alt+8 and Ctrl+Alt+9. So, when a program assigns some function to the combination Alt+[, it usually won't work on portuguese keyboards). Even worse are the programs (games, especially) that read they key's position instead of the character. So I press '' and get '=', I press '\' and get '~', I try to type 'ã' and get '\a', so on.
[sarcasm]
And of course, no keyboard is complete without the Windows "system keys"...
[/sarcasm]
RMN
~~~
QWERTY is a standard, all the schools, businesses and all other public facilities have them, maybe you could bring one to work, that's about limits your possibilities when you're outside your house. If you had a keyboard with E-Ink on the key tops, which every user could map as he/she pleases, you could get this to work, but which School/Business/Public facility would spen extra money on something they're sure no one would use ?
This is an interesting experiment. Too often, we simply accept the old "one size fits all" approach to hardware, when software gives us the ability to customize hardware to suit the needs and preferences of the user. What I'd like to see is a program that would let each user cook up his own "natural" layout, based on the size of hand, special needs (e.g., a person who is missing a finger), and, most importantly, the types of mistakes that the typist makes. Qwerty, remember, was designed to make typists type more slowly, so they would type more accurately; we should now be able to design custom keyboards that will let individual typists type both quickly and more accurately.
[this
The difference in score between this new layout and Dvorak is not statistically significant enough to be able to say anything interesting about it. It's all reliant on the particular scoring mechanism that he has devised, which while no doubt not a bad scoring mechanism, is not flawless enough to be able to say definitively that it is better than Dvorak.
The idea to have a program learn the best keyboard
layout is nice- I like the "evolve" program.
The optimal keyboard depends however on the chosen
language as well as the type of documents (running
"evolve" through latex, html, pure text docs gives
different results). Therefore, not only every user
will have a different optimal keyboard, the optimal
choice will also depend on the occasion. It might
be more efficient to add suitable shortcuts to the
editor vi or emacs and spend the time learning those.
I personally find it more crucial to have a good
keyboard (prefer the "happy hacking" keyboard), where
some keys like Esc, Ctr, Tab etc are at the correct places
and no unnecessary keys bother me.
I also have already quite a bit of trouble to type
on a European keyboard, where for example y and z
are replaced. Takes me always hours to adapt even
to such small changes.
This site is pretty interresting but most of the links comes with file:// .... I guess there's only one person on Earth for who this site's okay... Well, come on, revize a lil' :P
One problem with computer solutions like this is that it is easy to believe that the result is the objective best result, because the computer says so. But the computer was programmed by a human; a human chose the cost function for the various keys. By changing the cost function (ie how long it supposedly takes to type keys in a given location) the keyboard layout result will be changed.
To get a layout truly optimal for humans, it would be necessary to train humans in each new layout, then measure their speed. Obviously this would take too long. But it must not be forgotten that unless this were done, the objective solution provided by the computer is dependent on the subjective choice of cost function.
Can anyone suggest a nice way to change the 'physical' keys on my dell laptop, I was thinking of alphabet stickers, any nicer way though??
I was doing:
right
left
right
left...
I went from QWERTY to Dvorak, and yes I did have problems with QWERTY. It wasn't forgetting it was confusing the two different layouts.
But now I'm keyboard bilingual, having had to use other people's computers and work computers, so it's just a matter of getting started on the correct layout, and my hands do the work.
Anyhow, for all you DVORAK sceptics out there, just conside that for a software engineer typing ability is a key skill. If you use QWERTY and strain yourself (much more likely with QWERTY), it may cost you big. So play it safe, use Dvorak.
In the United States, the most common keyboard layout for computer keyboards remains the one designed by Christopher Sholes for the original Remington "Type Writer" in 1876. This layout is commonly called QWERTY after the order of the first few letters on its top row.
: ; , .
/
/
Other layouts exist. I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for about a year now. I like it a lot for my daily work, which involves a lot of typing. I used to feel a numbness of the backs of my hands after a long day with QWERTY, but I don't with Dvorak. And quantified measurements bear out its efficiency relative to QWERTY.
But Dvorak designed his layout in the 1930's without the aid of computers. It contains a couple annoying features that lead to common errors in my typing. Could a modern genetic algorithm and a huge input sample discover a better arrangement? I had to give it a try. The results surprised me!
I limited this experiment to the 30 keys under the four fingers of the two hands. They include the 26 letters of the English alphabet and four punctuation symbols (comma, period, quote, and semicolon). (A QWERTY layout typically has the slash in this region instead of quote.) Other punctuation was ignored.
First, I needed a quantifiable metric by which one keyboard layout could be compared to another. I constructed a function the measures the amount of "work" needed to touch-type a given text with a given layout. This function estimates total finger travel, with some extra penalties in some situations and some bonuses in others. Specifically, I simulate the typing of a (single) word with these rules:
All 8 fingers start on the home row.
An index finger stretch to the center costs 1 unit.
Fingers of the same hand can't be on both the top and bottom row. When a top-row or bottom-row key is to be hit, each finger on the bottom or top row (respectively) moves to the home row, and that costs 1 unit each.
After that, if a finger has to move up or down to hit the key, it costs 1 unit. An additional unit is charged to move to the bottom row (except for the index finger in its natural column) or to move an index finger to the top row in its unnatural center column. Furthermore, moving a pinky up or down costs an additional unit. I have weak pinkies.
Hitting two distinct keys in succession with the same finger is really bad; 3 more units are charged.
An extra unit is assessed when nonadjacent fingers of the same hand are used in succession and they are not both on the home row.
But adjacent fingers are charged a unit to hit keys on distinct rows, and one more if there's adjacent movement between the top and bottom rows.
When a shift key is used, the fingers of the shifting hand move to the home row for free afterwards.
My work estimation function simulates the typing of words, not simply digraphs and longer sequences. So it captures the effects of fingers being left on whatever keys they are on after they type the letters.
I also needed a corpus of sample text. I collected about 20 megabytes of English from Project Gutenberg. I used the King James Version of the Bible, the complete works of William Shakespeare and (naturally!) Charles Darwin, the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Melville's Moby Dick, the Education of Henry Adams, and other works. To that I added a decade of sent e-mail (bodies only) and about 100,000 lines of C code. This corpus therefore reflects my own typing to some degree by intent and other people would surely observe different results.
The total input size is 4293746 words in 3307922 bytes. There are 88732 distinct words that appear more than once, where a word is defined as a contiguous sequence of characters that can be typed with the thirty central keys. The most frequent words are:
240036 the
140994 of
140641 and
92363 to
69993 in
69255 a
51265 i
50069 that
37358
37291 is
36819 for
32300 with
30704 he
30079 his
29071 be
28690 as
27130 it
25650 not
22020 this
21603 have
21467 by
21402 but
21241 my
21001 on
20928 was
18867 you
18067 if
17949 from
17483
17330 are
17058 which
16973 all
16958 they
16587 or
14853 will
14809 at
14768 we
14362 shall
13701 their
12595
12416 so
11985
11518 had
11454 an
11307 thou
11037 your
10377 sv
10296 him
10257 when
10155 one
Next, I constructed an evolutionary framework. After trying several, I ended up with a scheme in which a pool of 4096 keyboard layouts compete with each other. The layouts in the initial pool are entirely random. In each generation, they all race to "type" a word list, and their per-word times are multiplied by the word frequencies in the input sample. After the race, the fastest half are kept, and the other half of the layouts are sent to the showers. The pool is then repopulated by generating a single mutation for each survivor. The mutations are made by permuting keys in the layout, with a 50% chance of swapping two keys, a 25% chance of swapping three, a 12.5% chance of four, and so on.
The evolutionary framework itself had to evolve. It was challenging to find a scheme with sufficient mutation possibilities that would allow a medium-quality layout enough time to improve itself with multiple mutations before getting eliminated. I also learned that it was important to track only distinct layouts, for otherwise a single good one would rapidly fill the pool with identical copies of itself.
When no new best layout has risen to the top of the pool in some number of generations, the round stops. The best layouts are stored away and the pool repopulated with random keyboards. This allows a fresh start after one layout has populated the pool with itself and its mutations.
Last, there is an "all-star" round in which the best survivors from all the rounds compete. The Dvorak and QWERTY layouts get seeded into this round too for fun.
Enough detail on the experimental framework! Once I was happy with the evaluation function and evolutionary framework, I was fascinated to watch it run in real time and see the intermediate results. I kept a running display of the top five layouts in each generation. Usually, layouts with different home row orders will battle it out until one has proven itself superior. It would only take a couple of generations for a round to produce something better than QWERTY. And it quickly became clear that putting the vowels on the home row of the left hand, which is a cornerstone concept of the Dvorak layout, was not seen by the algorithm as optimal.
What came out of the exercise, afterovernight? Here is the winner, which I am using now to type this note, as well as the Dvorak and QWERTY layouts with their scores:
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout
a o e u i d h t n s 12189785
; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing
a s d f g h j k l ; 25390660
z x c v b n m , . '
. u y p q k l d c g Best evolved layout
e a i n w r h t s o 9640479
' , ; f z j m v b x
The next step was to actually try using the layout. I spent a couple days with it, and learned that my layout evaluation function was just too smart for its own good. Too many words involved complicated patterns using the fingers of the right hand. The word bottom convinced me that Dvorak was on to something when he designed a keyboard that maximized alternation between the hands.
So I updated -- simplified, really -- my evaluation function. Now I charge points when too many keys are hit in succession by fingers of the same hand, with some credits for hitting adjacent keys. Specifically, the new simplified rules are:
Every position has an assigned cost that's looked up from a table. The OEU/HTN positions of Dvorak have no cost. A and S are 1 unit; I and D are two; P and GCR are three; Y and F are four; ", QJK, MWV, and L are five; : and Z are six; and X and B are seven.
Using the same finger twice in succession on distinct letters costs 10 units.
When two keys in a row are struck with the same hand, it costs two units if they're on different rows or on the bottom row, and one unit if they're not adjacent.
If three or more keys are hit in succession by the same hand, one unit is charged for each key after the second.
Much simpler! So I ran the experiment again. What did I see?
' , . p y f g c r l Dvorak layout
a o e u i d h t n s 32129548
; q j k x b m w v z
q w e r t y u i o p Sholes' layout, with quote replacing
a s d f g h j k l ; 59514344
z x c v b n m , . '
k , u y p w l m f c Best evolved layout
o a e i d r n t h s 28281895
q . ' ; z x v g b j
That looks way more usable to me. But (perhaps not surprisingly), it sure looks a lot like Dvorak, too, and is not quantifiably all that much better. Note that the simple goal of hand alternation did bring the vowels all over to the hand opposite the one with the T (which my program automatically places under the right hand). But it pulled U out of the home row so that R could live there.
Other differences from Dvorak are not that profound, and seem to correlate pretty well with a simple letter frequency analysis. I note that H was put where Dvorak has N, perhaps so that SH would be seen as using adjacent fingers. And P and Y swapped places.
Now I'm going to try this second layout for a day or two and see whether it's sufficiently (subjectively) superior to Dvorak to be worth the hassle of switching to it...
I used xkbcomp to remap my keyboard; here is the file if you are crazy enough to want to try it yourself.
In all, this little program required about 500 lines of C.
A better picture of the second layout is here in a PDF file.
Computational Madness in a round package.
the cat isn't necessary -- fgrep should be able to handle both a file name or a <
I like unix too.
Interestingly enough, acording to some people, the Dvorak keyboard isn't noticably more efficient than QWERTY in terms of typing speed. This article from the economist discusses the issue. It's mostly a light summary of this paper. Anyway, it's something to think about. Especially when you consider how long it must take to retrain yourself to type on a new keyboard.
I wonder what would come out of the genetic algorithm if "first post!" was the text that what used as the sample.
Seriously though, I type nothing like Shakespear or the text in KJ Bible. I can hardly even understand the KJ Bible.
This also brings up the topic of purpose built keyboards. Would a "Linux Kernel Hackers Keyboard" fed by the kernel source be much more efficient than QWERTY? For that matter, could each programming language have a "most preferred" layout? How about professions?
I would be very interested to know how much the keyboard changed as different texts were put into it. Also what the increased profficiency was over other keyboards in the "set."
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
It sounds like management just got sick of hearing complaints from those who didn't want to learn a new keyboard, and so found a convenient excuse to give up the project.
There no longer seems to be any legitimate reason to keep QWERTY on any modern machine, either at work or home. The whiners could have easily set up their home machines to use Dvorak.
Working on the other half of the input process? Genetic techniques could yield a faster typist, without wrist problems.
Any female geek wanting to do some experimenting?
uh-oh. you know, if jwz was annoyed by all the keyboards out there when he wrote xkeycaps a few years of people messing with this and submitting their own keyboards should really piss him off.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
many have mentioned that his sample seems arbitrary, but what if we did the same thing as he for a coder of a specific language? The optimal layout for C, perl, Java, etc. That could be an interesting way to escape sore wrists...
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Hi, I downloaded the file to change my keyboard layout and also printed out the PDF file - I'm all ready to go except I do not know how to easily change the keyboard layout. Is there an easy command that I may use to change the keyboard? Thank you.
And he spilled his seed onto the ground
Once upon a time there was a tiny computer called Sinclair ZX-8, which had an horrible membrane keyboard, very difficult to type.
Nonetheless, typing in it was fun because it had a BASIC keywords assigned to keys. I sometimes overlaid such keys with new assignments, making typing dependent on the application.
This is not easy with traditional PC-keyboards, though.
On the language issue, yes, this guy's work loses a lot in other languages: in English, e.g., the most frequent letter is "e", while in Portuguese "a" occurs the most. I use both languages during the same day, there wouldn't be a perfect layout for both.
Besides, and maybe more importantly, keyboard layouts must be somewhat standard because of "hand memory". Try switching daily layouts (e.g., from work to home) and you'll see what a mess.
Remember back in the days of MS-DOS 5 and manuals that actually contained information? Perhaps not, but I do. There used to be included full information on language layouts used across the globe and how to make your keyboard use them.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, Brazil had two keyboards and one was magnificent in its simpliciy and usability. It was a standard US keyboard but when wanted an "é" you typed "'" and "e", when you wanted an "è" you typed "`" and "e". It was beautifully simple to use until you wanted a "~" when you had to type "~" twice or a "`" when you had to type "`" twice which is hard to remember when typing at speed.
It was a good keyboard and I used it until Win95 came along and I had to use it to use Coreldraw 2. It may not be what you want because it uses the standard QWERTY keyboard.
IBM did this in 2k1 for PalmOS PDA's, and called it ATOMIK (Alphabetically Tuned and Optimized Mobile Interface Keyboard). It's from our Alphaworks, and is designed so that it has:
e yboard.htm and scroll down for a list of very good research papers.
1. Higher movement efficiency than any other existing touch keyboard.
2. Alphabetically-tuned layout: Generally, letters from A to Z run from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the keyboard. This layout helps novice users find letters that are not yet memorized.
3. Letter connectivity of common words: Many common words or comment fragments of words, such as "the" and "ing" are totally connected.
You might want to take a look at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/u/zhai/topics/virtualk
Michael C. Hollinger
...it was a Ask slashdot submission, and read: "I swtchrd my computre keybord to teh Dvorka layoot bout a yaer ago. But nbw I've gonn nad donn somethng raelly ouhlnadsh. I trid to discovr teh most efffcinet layoot posibel wth a getetic algorthm. It's wetird-lokng, but I m typnig wth ti noow. I ptu teh gorry detials up on the Web. Wht I sak is hw teh ehll do I chnage ti bak?!
Where did these assumptions come from? I've got about 15 years of piano playing under my belt, and I find the standard "touch typing" rules very strange choices indeed. I type in a pretty free-form style at about 150wpm, depending on coffee. So, I'll disprove these assumptions one by one:
Not to discourage trying to find new keyboard layouts too much, but it's best to start really from scratch and question the basis of all the original assumptions. The rules need to include:
My theory about carpal tunnel and other typing related injuries is that "touch typing" is actually to blame. It encourages stiffening of the wrists and hands, discourages stretching, and generally leaves your hands as weak as they were before you started typing.
My advice to anyone that uses classical "touch typing" is to learn to the point of about 40wpm, and switch to improvisation. My advice to anyone wanting to switch to Dvorak for speed, or to reduce strain: it's ultimately limited by the speed of one-key-per-hand switching which is about 120wpm. From my experience with both, you're better off sticking with qwerty and going free-style.
when there's a finite number of layouts? Yup, just 265,252,859,812,191,058,636,308,480,000,000 possibilities. I'm sure the guys at distributed.net would love to set up a project to figure this out.
- danboo
Or maybe they're more advanced?
This was one of the most interesting slashdot articles that I have ever read! Bravo!
God is real unless declared integer
It sounds like the interesting possibility almost grasped here is the possibility of producing a self-customized layout on the fly.
hook the keyboard driver and tokenize input into words (corrections included where possible), feed through a spell-checker (to find what word was likely the target), and re-insert as input through the algorithm. Admittedly, this makes it more of a neural-net than a GA, but it is continuously evolving, and eventually, you should even out on the best keyboard layout for what you type on a daily basis
I expect my '_' key to end up somewhere on the home row in a couple of weeks (programming = bad typing habits)
You'd think anyone with a detectable brain could be a troll.
This post clearly demonstrate otherwise.
Not just is it idiotic, but it totally lacks trolling power.
Gee, attend some trolling course or something. This is disgusting to read.
Use a Brazilian ABNT-2 keyboard, if you can get one... it's very compatible to the US standard and has the "ç" key.
My brother has a Portuguese (i.e., designed for Portugal) keyboard and many of the problems come not from the language but from the key arrangement (like those you described well).
HTH.
James Burke should be required reading in American High Schools.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
The link to the code on the provided web page is broken.
The proper address to the location of the tar.gz file is:
http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.tar.gz
--R
I would benefit greatly from a keyboard that would allow me to type pretty much non-stop with my left hand. I'd much rather be able to keep hold of the mouse in one hand and keyboard in the other, rather than switch my right hand back and forth all the time. This is probably not very feasible, but at least a situation where the least used keys like x,q,w,z are all moved to the right area replacing m,i,o,p. I could probably type a few words out in the time it takes me to get my hand off the mouse (or page up/down, arrow keys) and centered on the home keys.
Surely, the genetic algorithym came up with one glaring conclusion after 100k lines of C code: SWITCH THE SHIFT POSITION OF BRACES AND BRACKETS.
And why is the minus key non-shifted, while the plus key is.
There no longer seems to be any legitimate reason to keep QWERTY
laziness, resistance to change, popularity...okay you're right, no legitimate reason.
" It was intentionally made to slow people down, so that they didnt jam the keys."
c on omist.html
Grr, didn't I just go over this a few days ago?
Everything you ever thought you know about the QWERTY layout was *wrong*.
http://www.independent.org/tii/news/liebowitz_e
The only key on my keyboard that is starting to show signs of wear is the backspace key. Surely that should have been taken into account, especially if you are using the KJB for a word list.
What about them? kyllä 1334 mutta 1112 vähän 1111 jotain 1066 tulee 988 mitään 953 vielä 930 sitten 911 mitäs 889 pitää 864 These are the most used words on my class' irc-channel. Would you please tell me how much faster your keyboard layout would be on these words? I'm bit drunk, mod me down or just ignore me.
The author's list of rules is predicated upon many assumptions about the act of typing. Has any been verified scientifically? I think not. To discover whether the Dvorak keyboard or any other keyboard provides verifiable benefits beyond QWERTY would require extensive training and testing of a large sample population.
Of course, if you like Dvorak and any other layout better than QWERTY, then you should use it.
Ya a womans brother is convicted of a crime so you sentance her to be gang raped, gee ya that sounds like an advanced justice system!
Can somebody tell us how a Windows user can switch keyboard type?
The current QWERTY keyboard design came about in the early 20th century, because typewriters which had efficent keyboard layouts were jamming, and there was no anti-jamming mechanism except to slow the typist down. However, once there was an anti-jamming mechanism, the amount of money lost from the industry created to basically teach people how to type quickly was so ingrained that nobody wanted to get rid of it, even though they could get to a better alternative. Humans are actually capable of going much quicker, but the current QWERTY layout was designed for intentional inefficency.
This is the sort of thing one would expect to see in SIGCHI conference proceedings. Although there were no experimental controls or peer review of the results, it is telling of Slashdot's influence that such results are published on Slashdot first. As is, the quality would be top notch for a commercial rag such as Dr. Dobbs, and with just a bit of polishing would be published in an academic journal, serve as a Master's thesis, or even -- with quite a bit of "pushing" (expanding) of the ideas -- serve as a PhD at some schools.
Anybody else here old enough to remember the Apple II+ with the DVORAK/QWERTY switch right on top of the keyboard? Before that I had a IIe that I switched with a jumper on the MB. But when you rearranged the keys you were left with a lumpy keyboard because of the pitch of the top of the keys are different row to row,which I guess would still be the case today now that I look at my current keyboard.
How, exactly, do you rip off open source, you fucking moron? Also, to call Mac users 'lemmings' is the single most idiotic statement I've heard *today* (I have to deal with Windows people a lot, so I hear many idiotic statements, explaining why your particular level of un-telligence will be so short lived in my memory, soon to be replaced by some other brainwashed fool's statement). Next, saying that Mac users are an 'infestation' is just plain stupid. Apple has it's own section: If you're not interested in it's content...don't read it. I could degenerate (like you) into poorly conceived 'witicisms' (and I use the word sooooo loosely) like 'Windoze' or 'Piece of Crap=PC' and the like...but I'm better than that.
regards,
rprebel
Enjoy every day like it's your last. One day you will be right.
This is not the first time someone does this kind of research.
:p df
If you are interested, I think this paper is better
www.pl.ecp.fr/~yannou/Publis/ Ants%20keyboard%202001%20-%20Wagner%20&%20Yannou.
If comfort is your goal, have you tried hunt and peck?
I was a hunt & pecker for 20 years and never experienced stress or fatigue while typing. I did start to experience these when I started to learn to touch type. I believe this was because my hands were free to adopt a more natural variety of positions instead of always returning to the fixed position over the home keys.
Hunt and peck may not be as fast or accurate as touch typing (which is why I currently use Dvorak), but I think there are advantages in comfort which are overlooked.
<-- You are here.
These are some very interesting insights, and I really hope you'll get together with the author of this piece and perhaps work out some optimized layouts based on these criteria.
... completely self-taught by simply doing, and I'm the fastest typer I know), though not to strike different keys with different fingers like a pianist, but rather to make the reach for some of the more distant keys more comfortable.
/.
... I played with dvorak once, but didn't find the improvement worth the trouble. This, on the other hand, would be more than worth the trouble.
1) I move my hands as well when I type (no formal typing education at all
This does result in typos, however, some of which people will doubtless see here on
2) Your insight on the natural position of the fingers is brilliant, if obvious (as most brilliant things tend to be, in retrospect).
A layout and typing regime based on home keys as awef and jio; would be very interesting to develop, one allowing hand movement a la a pianist and one (which I personally would prefer) assuming the fingers return to their home coordinates after each letter is typed.
Indeed, I would break the possibilities out into several options:
1) awef jio; homekeys, no laterial or vertical movement
2) awef jio; homekeys, vertical movement but no laternal movement
3) awef jio; homekeys, vertical and lateral movement
4) awef jio; homekeys, lateral movement but not vertical movement
and then see which of the 4 results in the easiest, and quickest, typing movement.
I would surmise that #1 would be preferred by many who already know how to type and might not be able to make the adjustment to MOVEMENT like a pianist might, while those starting from scratch would find one of the other three more natural and useful.
An improvement of this nature is something I would be willing to try a new keyboard layout and typing regime for
A final aside to purists who are griping about the author's unfortunate use of the word Universal: with the exception of most physiscists and astronomers, virtually everyone misuses the world 'universal', be it a movie studio, a beauty pagent, a mechanic, or any number of other contexts.
It was obvious from the context of the discussion that the author was working on an optimized keyboard for use with the English language, so obvious as to not even warrant a comment. The fact that the author wrote the article in English, sampled English works (and programming languages) in his study, and published in that very same language, to a web site located in the heartland of America (Michigan) targeted at English speaking readers, should have provided a big enough clue even for those who are clue-challenged.
Non-english speakers screaming and yelling about how this (obviously) doesn't apply to their language are belaboring the painfully obvious, and come across more like that quintessential, insecure adolescent boy who, during a lecture on female sexuality stands up and declares "but boys are different!"
Of course an optimized german keyboard likely won't use the qwerz layout, but something very unlike qwertz, very unlike dvorak, and very unlike a keyboard optimized for English. Ditto for French, not to mention numerous languages that do not even use the Roman (or Cyrillic) alphabets, such as Hindi, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese. Pointing this out in the context of this discussion is akin to pointing out that a study on the aerodynamic properties of a piston-driven propeller don't map well to the art of flavoring a Hollondais sauce with the proper mix of spices, to which the 'universal' (in an earthly sense) response is generally something on the order of: No shit, Sherlock.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Remember this neat keyboard system (it was on slashdot, but I didn't find the linke...)
why use the present design of a key board anyway?
You could store your personal layout (suitable to your personal preferences, what you type most often, etc)on your PDA or online and what ever keyboard you use you simply upload your profile and the keyboard is remapped.
You could even develop your profile, with a long running algorithm that makes adjustments as you type moving frequently used letters to easier keys to use for your fingers if you have bad arthirtis, etc.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
i had enough trouble switching from a standard keyboard to a MS "natural" keyboard -- it took me a month to stop typing qqq.xyz.com into my web browser instead of "www".
of course now that i have retrained myself to use touch type on the natural keyboard, i am a mess when I type anything on my g'friend's iBook...
damn laptops and those smaller keyboards.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
The algorithm he used was NOT a genetic algorithm, although it could be called an evolutionary algorithm. comp.ai.genetic FAQ
The portuguese layout is absolutely fine. I can type easily in all major languages. Stuff like Ñ, ö, Ý, û, etc., that don't even exist in Portuguese are very easy to type using the portuguese layout. The most common symbols are also in the right spots, so you don't have to keep pressing shift to get them. Unlike some "hacks" that existed about 15 years ago, the current standard Portuguese layout (based on QWERTY) is very good.
;-)
The "problem" is not the layout. The problem is programs designed for a specific layout that don't let you redefine your keys, and programs that simply don't support accented latin characters like 'é', 'ô', 'ã', etc., which are used by a lot of latin-based languages. Why should a keyboard be "compatible" with the american standard, when the americans write using latin characters...? Or, conversely, why should american keyboards look like, say, polish keyboards when they don't use any of those symbols? The computer should adapt to the user, not the other way around.
[tease]
Just because English is such a primitive language doesn't mean everybody else should be forced to put up with its limitations.
[/tease]
RMN
~~~
Whose image was this keyboard layout? Who is he to play at being God?
This is a good example of everything that's wrong with the world; just like GM foods. I don't want some Frankenkeyboard, that might spread its genes out into the environment, anymore than I want frankenfoods, we'll be knee deep in genetically modified keyboards next. Contact your congressman. This has to be stopped.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
What if you constantly write code, and do more mundane typing on the same computer? You'll end up with the model leaning back and forth between optimized for programming and plaintext, how's that any better than qwerty or dvorak?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
The 'french' always have there own quirky systems.
e.g.
Metric
Secam
Montreall
There own special time.
The own 0' latitude (well they wanted it!)
There own language (i.e. They hate slang from other languages creeping into french).
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I am not unhappy with the keyboard layout. QWERTY may slow down people typing in English (although that wasn't exactly its purpose) but works quite well for Portuguese (as I said, I'd only change a couple of letters).
What I am unhappy about is software that isn't designed or tested to work with different layouts (portuguese or other). Which can be easily solved by letting the user redefine the keyboard shortcuts, and letting people distribute adapted shortcut files.
RMN
~~~
What I'd be really interested in seeing is a keyboard where each key is a small hi-res LCD display. Not do-able today, maybe, but imagine the things you could do with this.
It would not only allow for self-customising layout, but also things like when you press [shift], letters go upper-case, and the positions of the ''1'' and the ''!'' are reversed. When you press CTRL or ALT, the keys that do have functions assigned could get highlighted or something. The font of the letters could change according to the font you're writing with, or with the display font you're using... PC games could take advantage of this in very cool ways... all kinds of stuff.
I'm pretty sure this isn't really possible right now, but I can guess at some of the stumbling blocks. Durability would be one problem, although you could embedd the LCD in transparent keys. The contacts per key to make this happen would be ridiculous... managing 101-104 little displays would be an interesting problem.
Just an idea.
+1 Informative? What? Becuase he has a spellchecker?
Having used an Atari ST for a long time, I always found it a bit stupid that there aren't 'Help' and 'Undo' keys on PC keyboards. I thought it would be temporary, and they would eventually be added. Instead, what they did add were the (completely redundant and extremely annoying) Windows system keys (or 'winkeys', as some people call them).
At home I've been using the same keyboard for 15 years (a Cherry G81-1000, that looks and feels like the old IBM keyboards), so luckily I don't have to put up with those keys (when I have to use other keyboards I keep hitting them instead of Ctrl / Alt), but I still miss my 'Help' and 'Undo' keys from the ST.
Most programs now use F1 as the 'help' key. Doesn't make much sense but at least it's standard. Sort of. Some programs use Shift+F1 or Ctrl+F1. But 'undo' is nowhere near as standard. Some programs use Ctrl+Z, others use Alt+Backspace, and so on.
Personally I'd like to see dedicated keys for 'help' and 'undo', where repeatedly pressing Undo would do multiple levels of undo and pressing Alt+Undo would do a Redo (ie, undo the last undo).
What do you think? What keys should be added to (or removed from) PC keyboards?
RMN
~~~
What about rearranging the positions of keys like "Home", "End", "Del", "BkSp" etc.? A good keyboard layout should also take into account the possibility to correct typos and move around in the text quickly, especially when it comes to writing program code.
Don't drink and su! antidisestablishmentariazationally
I tried creating a keyboard using a set of Perl programs I wrote and ended up with all the punctuation in the home ruw. :(
Someone you trust is one of us.
How come? Primarily because the basic idea of minmizing finger movement is largely irrelevant, specifically, the critical path is the amount of time it takes your brain to decide what movement to make rather than the time it takes for your finger to make the move. Further, coincidentally, the QWERTY keyboard was designed to optimize for alternate hand typing (left, right, left, right) whereas quantitatively Dvorak tends to require more single hand typing (left, left, left, right). This is a disadvantage because our brain is capable of multitasking, deciding what to do with the left hand while the right is moving.
Consequently, although Dvorak is apparently slightly quicker to learn, you are more likely to improve speed by training to get better on QWERTY rather than relearning Dvorak.
See link here.
Okay, say you've convinced me... care to explain exactly what typing "free-style" involves?
What I would like to see is a good programmer's keyboard designed for C, C++, and Java programming.
The current QUERTY (and DVORAK for that matter) layout requires too much use of the pinky finger (the weakest finger). I feel some of the keys would benefit from being moved elsewhere, for example the following:
SHIFT and ENTER.
I use shift so often I wish it were located in the middle of the space bar where I could hit it with my thumb.
I also wish common symbols used in programming didn't require shift all the time (i.e. *, +, ", {, }, &, !, %, (, ), and # (for shell scripts/Perl)}. My home keyboard is an improvement (a Northgate OmniKey/Plus) since it has a dedicated "*" key and the function keys at the left.
Also, for X I really like the added keys Sun has (like front, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, etc.)
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The word "universal" actually never appears in my note. And the first four words are "In the United States..."!
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
The word "universal" actually never appears in my note.
/. posts including the "this is too English-centric anti-American nonsense that always seems to get modded to +5 no matter how inappropriate it is (remarkable how provincially prejudiced many of those who accuse Americans of provincialism are, isn't it?), then rebbutted some of those arguments without going back to reread the article again. You're right ... the criticisms wouldn't have held had you used the word 'universal', but in fact you did not, making their criticisms even more asinine, their +5 moderation even more idiotic, and my expression of annoyance at their attempted, and less appropriate than usual, policing of 'international political correctness', even more justified.
Excellent point.
I read the article, then read the
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Basically, what he has done is created a personalized keyboard, well-suited to the things which he frequently types.
Different people type different things; thus, different optimal results will be seen.
I'd also suggest that he try using a Bayesian Analysis to do this study; Bayesian Analysis and GA are very close to one another, but Bayesian Analysis is faster and is more widely accepted/used.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
So everytime somebody comes up with a (allegedly) better keyboard layout using new technologies or new "optimized" assumptions, a new keyboard layout will come on market?
:-)
Sounds like the software development industry in general: learn a new language or paradigm every 5 years. (Just to find out that they keep reinventing LISP without knowing it
If that kept happening, then perhaps what is needed is a programmable keyboard where the letters (including image of them) change to your personal preference. Then again, if you know it well enough, perhaps you don't need to see the letters.
Table-ized A.I.
A few months ago I got interested in Dvorak kayboards and was doing some research.
I read a story about a General who lost an arm in WWII and had Dvorak design a special one handed keyboard for him. Dvorak made two versions, left and righ.
I would imagine this would be the best solution for impoving your typing speed while punching the Bishop.
A few years back, Gateway 2000 sold a keyboard called the AnyKey. it had an extra set of function keys down the left side and buttons to remap keys. All the changes were done in the keyboard itself so it worked in DOS. My friends were envious when I could do all the DOOM cheat codes with a single keystroke on my 486SX/25!
If you use a macintosh you get this functionality, and I like it even better than the AZERTY layout we have to suffer with in france (I am an an expat though, and not used to the layout). On a mac (yes with os x as well) you can press option-e then a letter to get an "", as in été, option-i plus a vowel to get a an in hôtel...etc, see keycaps for details. Its not as fast for typing at speed, but its a very functional and simple solution to this problem. And it gives you a keyboard that works for all the rømäñ letter languages.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
It would be interesting to see some of Dvorak's and Sholes's notes on why they designed their layouts the way they did.
Actually... it was not designed to make them type slow specifically, but was designed so that the strikers for letters that often followed each other were widely spaced to prevent jamming.
Dvorak can be somewhat faster, but more improtantly, it's more comfortable.
The difference is often exaggerated.
In a way. Qwerty was designed to keep mechanical typewriters from jamming, which meant physically separating the keys for common digraphs. This requirement is somewhat incompatible with the requirement that common digraphs be quickly typeable, hence some slowndown.
If Sholes and Densmore had just had computers to run evolutionary algorithms on, they presumably could have designed a better layout for mechanical typewriters... :-)
these results are flawed on so many levels i don't .. those .. 99% of the rest
think it necessary to even point them out
that know don't need to be told, and the slashdot
staff wouldn't grok if you pounded it in to their
skulls with a ball-peen hammer
of you are in the same ignorance-boat, so what is
the point?
please, the lot of you - get off the planet so the
rest of us can get some peace and quiet.
Get the TypeMatrix keyboard. It was like $100, but I've been using it for a year and it's awesome. Basic features are that it's really slim, and the keys press lightly like a laptop keyboard. Also, it has a hard-wired switch for Dvorak, with both QWERTY and Dvorak letters etched into the keyboard. Highly recommended for the er33t.
Philosophistry
The keys of my keyboard don't fit this way :) The + and - stick out very high.
k,uypwlmfc/=
hmmmmm, qwertyuiop sounded better
Only an undersexed geek who jerked off one to many times to japanese tentacle porn would think a society where a women is raped every 2 hours and gang rapes are ordered by the courts is advanced.
LOL.
When he put all that C code into his sample, I was thinking of all the times I have to reach for the parenthesis and the hyphen when writing Lisp code. Now Emacs makes Lisp quite a bit easier but it would be cool to have the parens where the T and Y keys are on the QUERTY keyboard and perhaps the hyphen where the U is. I think that would be sweet.
For dvorak users who need to log in using QWERTY, there's an easy solution: set your password to the QWERTY equivalent of your dvorak password/phrase. For example, if your password was "dogcow", set your computer to QWERTY, then type dogcow using dvorak keys, which comes out to something like "hsuis," Not only is this easy for you (you just type in dvorak), but evolves a password that is hard to guess as well.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
The program was less than successful because many of the women felt the merit resided in the beads rather than the counting, and moved them around to suit themselves.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The Johnson Keyboard Layout
I've been using Dvorak for a few months now, and I love it. I'm not sure I want to spend the time switching again, though.
Although I'm always eager to mock french ethnocentrism, this is silly:
METRIC
Everybody uses metric.
The only people still measuring things in feet, cubits, elephants or stones are USians, UKians, and some stone-age tribes spread throughout the globe.
And even the UKians show the intellectual ability to multiply and divide by 10 when they need to. Particularly when they send things to space.
LANGUAGE
At least they are aware there are other languages, beyond the names of food in your local "Taco Bell".
"MONTREALL": what are you talking about?
If you want something quirky to mock about the french, try their number/counting system. Just try writing numbers as they are dictated by a french person.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
The full story:
I bought a kinesis after I got low-grade carpal-tunnel syndrome from too much programming, and decided that since it was going to take me a while to get used to I might as well switch to Dvorak too. After about a week I realized Dvorak had some serious problems:
The first one was my biggest concern because my main goal was to be comfortable while typing. Under Dvorak your little fingers rest on the extremely common "a" and "s", the uncommon "u" is right under the index finger and is thus easier to type than it needs to be, etc. etc.
I found some letter usage charts online but didn't trust them so I made up my own with a simple perl script, the Linux HOWTO files and a bunch of and coding (in java and perl mostly) that I'd done. The raw results are here. I found my letter usage to be slightly but importantly different, so I spent a few hours designing the above mentioned keyboard layout with comfort as the goal. I targeted it towards programming java and perl in Emacs on a kinesis by putting the most common letters within easy reach of the strongest fingers, making common two letter combos easy to get to, and making common programming chars and emacs commands easy to type.
Let me know if you try it, I'd be interested to hear if it helps.
Hmm, interesting. I've been using Dvorak for a while now (and yes, I can still type fast on qwerty with the occasional pause). However, one thing I found about Dvorak was that spelling checkers become less useful on it - because of the closeness of common letters to each other, a Dvorak miskey tends to generate a correct spelling of the wrong word, rather than an incorrect spelling. This confounds automated spell checking. Has anyone tried to make a layout which minimises cases in which letters which can be substituted in words being next to each other is a Bad Thing?
I normally use the asterisk on the numeric keypad (between '/' and '-').
By the way, an interesting thing about Adobe Premiere: in version 4 you could use the '+' and '-' keys in the numpad to zoom in and out. Since version 5, these stopped working and you now have to use the '+' and '-' keys in the main keyboard. They call it progress...
RMN
~~~
I tend to post on /. articles that probably have lived past their prime, but I guess I feel satisified that I said what i wanted.
Anyway, my point is that after further reading, I don't feel like I *have* to switch to another layout. Relearning how to type would be a huge pain and due to the fact that I would still have to use several different layouts, it's probably easier to stap with the wrist numbing qwerty style.
Q-coast in da houz
Live web cams
This, I think, is nearly enough for a proof that dvorak owns.
/usr/dict/words | wc -l
/usr/dict/words | wc -l
$ egrep '^[aoeuhtnsid]*$'
950
$ egrep '^[asdfghjkl]*$'
58
I.e. 950 words (including such words as "a", "the", "this", "that", "those", "I", etc) can be typed on Dvorak without moving the fingers from the home row. And only 58 on QWERTY.
I am a genius; therefore, you suck.
Open Source systems have a lot of alternatives. Big ones, like KDE vs GNOME, and small ones, like various PHP scripts. All this Open Source soup is evolving. And same as the mother-nature, it does it slow without sex (without exchange of source code pieces), or rapidly with sex (with exchange of source code pieces). Got a point? We have to steal software source code from each other in order to accelerate our software evolution!
Less is more !
Also of interest is the cleanliness of the keys in the new configuration. (My keyboard has accumulated some sort of gunk, and the keys are discolored based on how frequently they are used.) In the new configuration, the entire home row is clean with the exception of the underscore/hyphen. In addition, all keys in the center of the keyboard are clean. As you move away from the center towards the periphery, the keys gradually become darker, with more dirt on the left half. So I have some empirical evidence to support the efficiency of the Dvorak keyboard.
Check out Chad's News
So I just gave in and stick to QWERTY. It works well enough. And with the amount of typing I do, I'd have to wear these wrist braces regardless of which layout I use, I think.
I can easily believe the reports I've heard that Dvorak is easier to learn, though; if I forgot where a key was, I could remember just by thinking of where it would likely be. It's a very logical layout. The only reason I know the QWERTY layout so well is from so many years of use.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
A few years ago, some friends and I switched over to Dvorak. We switched because three programmer friends of ours swore by Dvorak, and we were interesting in bettering ourselves.
:)
;)
My typing speed was already fair; I was around 60-100+ when I started (accuracy vs. speed-chat wpm).
Although the speed was interesting, there wasn't really much point. I could only hit 100+ wpm when transcribing or in momentary bursts while chatting.
The going wasn't easy. It was frustrating at times, we'd be making typos like beginning typists --well we _were_ in a way. And, we watched out qwerty speed dimish at first.
We went about it different ways: One of us engrossed himself in Dvorak and suffered the greatest initial Qwerty spped loss. And, while I minimized my Qwerty wpm regressions by switching key layouts in mid sentence during my learning period, I also slowed down my Dvorak gains.
I took maybe a quarter to half of a year of casual effort. Mainly using Dvorak and switching to Qwerty when I needed consistent high RPMs, which I would stop relying on partway through the year.
I noticed, at least subjectively, a reduction in the number of inadvertent-key-press typos. It didn't make things much faster than before, but it was definitely much easier; I like typing most words without moving my hands much at all. My left wrist rarely aches after extended Dvorak keyboarding, but it'll be sore after an hour of piano or Qwerty, especially if the temperature is cold. [1] We also have the benefit of friends not wanting to hijack our computer systems for a "quickie" game session or web browsing.
Two of us are back near or above old Qwerty speeds. Opted to return to his hybrid qwerty-hunt-and-peck. All in all, I'm happy I learned Dvorak; it's not the same magnitude of improvement as going from hunt-and-peck to Qwerty, but it's more like going from the Qwerty number system to learning "Ten Key" numbers.
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[1]Its kind of funny because I was always Mr. Careful, and I knew about and constantly was on the lookout for info on household and workplace health risks, including RSI --I even had a book and couple cut out articles about it I would repeat to friends.
I guess this is related to the "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you" I ignored the signs, and constantly downplayed them, and now I get aches from playing piano, computer games, or keyboards with high keypress-resistance.
All three of us have some RSI in our wrists. I got it from too much Quake2 and piano, one got it from too much Diablo, and another got it from too much Action Quake2.[1] I don't mash keys now and actually take typing breaks/stretches *laugh*.
The other Dvoraker came close to getting the uberkeyboard/glove ($1k?) from
"http://www.fentek-ind.com/datahand.htm" but instead opted for the Dvorak Kinesis board ($250-$300.) I spent my money on audio equipment and made do with el-cheapo keyboards
Bombed as I may be, I feel it important to point out that one of the primary requirements that led to the development of dvorak: rolls. Consecutive adjacent keys proceeding toward the center of the keyboard allow you to simply roll your hand instead of moving to each key.
Sorry, but as a dvoraker whose typing speed has gone from a max of 90wpm in his qwerty days to over 100, I felt I had something to contribute.
Besides, this article places the 'e' key under the weakest and least-dextrous finger right handers have: their left pinkie. Dvorak has the e and t under your middle fingers.
The idea that Dvorak is some much better than QWERTY is an absolute myth. Many people on similar Slashdot articles pointed out properly run experiments that point out that very little, if any, improvement is gained from QWERTY when you account for retraining a control group on QWERTY along with training Dvorak.
Plus, much of the studies showing Dvorak to be better were commissioned by Dvorak himself in order to try to sell his layout. It was a fucking scam.
I guess it would suck for shell coding though!
Would it be possible to work with a keyboard that changed as you typed? Constantly evaluting what you press to move keys around to better suit you? If it did this predictably, you could learn to keep up with the movement without looking. Coding? Nice when those {} and switch places.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/