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Slashdot Asks: Can Anything Replace 'QWERTY' Keyboards? (technologyreview.com)
MIT Technology Review recently discussed new attempts to replace the standard 'QWERY' keyboard layout, including Tap, "a one-handed gadget that fits over your fingers like rubbery brass knuckles and connects wirelessly to your smartphone."
It's supposed to free you from clunky physical keyboards and act as a go-anywhere typing interface. A promotional video shows smiling people wearing Tap and typing with one hand on a leg, on an arm, and even (perhaps jokingly) on some guy's forehead... But when I tried it, the reality of using Tap was neither fun nor funny. Unlike a conventional QWERTY keyboard, Tap required me to think a lot, because I had to tap my fingers in not-very-intuitive combinations to create letters: an A is your thumb, a B is your index finger and pinky, a C is all your fingers except the index.
The article also acknowledges the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout and other alternatives like the one-handed Twiddler keyboard, but argues that "neither managed to dent QWERTY's dominance." [W]hat if the future is no input interface at all? Neurable is a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's working on a way to type simply by thinking. It uses an electrode-dotted headband connected to a VR headset to track brain activity. Machine learning helps figure out what letter you're trying to select and anticipate which key you'll want next. After you select several keys, it can fill in the rest of the word, says cofounder and CEO Ramses Alcaide....
Then there's the device being built over at CTRL-Labs: an armband that detects the activity of muscle fibers in the arm. One use could be to replace gaming controllers. For another feature in the works, algorithms use the data to figure out what it is that your hands are trying to type, even if they're barely moving. CEO and cofounder Thomas Reardon, who previously created Microsoft's Internet Explorer, says this too is a neural interface, of a sort. Whether you're typing or dictating, you're using your brain to turn muscles on and off, he points out.
While a developer version will be shipped this year, Reardon "admits that it is still not good enough for him to toss his trusty mid-'80s IBM Model M keyboard, which he says still 'sounds like rolling thunder' when he types." But do any Slashdot readers have their own suggestions or experiences to share?
Can anything replace 'QWERTY' keyboards?
The article also acknowledges the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout and other alternatives like the one-handed Twiddler keyboard, but argues that "neither managed to dent QWERTY's dominance." [W]hat if the future is no input interface at all? Neurable is a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's working on a way to type simply by thinking. It uses an electrode-dotted headband connected to a VR headset to track brain activity. Machine learning helps figure out what letter you're trying to select and anticipate which key you'll want next. After you select several keys, it can fill in the rest of the word, says cofounder and CEO Ramses Alcaide....
Then there's the device being built over at CTRL-Labs: an armband that detects the activity of muscle fibers in the arm. One use could be to replace gaming controllers. For another feature in the works, algorithms use the data to figure out what it is that your hands are trying to type, even if they're barely moving. CEO and cofounder Thomas Reardon, who previously created Microsoft's Internet Explorer, says this too is a neural interface, of a sort. Whether you're typing or dictating, you're using your brain to turn muscles on and off, he points out.
While a developer version will be shipped this year, Reardon "admits that it is still not good enough for him to toss his trusty mid-'80s IBM Model M keyboard, which he says still 'sounds like rolling thunder' when he types." But do any Slashdot readers have their own suggestions or experiences to share?
Can anything replace 'QWERTY' keyboards?
Enough said
Yeah, DVORAK can replace QWERTY keyboards... but you'll be condemning yourself to a life of fighting your environment to work in DVORAK instead of QWERTY.
It's quite possible that more typing is already being done on the software touchscreen keyboards of mobile devices than on traditional hardware keyboards (albeit these are still in the QWERTY configuration, but many use input methods like swiping instead of more traditional typing).
Various Chordal keyboards have been developed over the years, and even the basic ASCII versions work rather well.
But there is a well established alternative, it's the ancient Morse Operator's "Iamic Squeeze Keyer".
Those who have never used it will fall about laughing of course, but many have used an Iamic Keyer (via USB adaptor) for keyboard input for years. It's fast and fun, and quickly becomes perfectly natural.
If you want to do any amount serious work such as,
- Write hundreds of e-mails
- Write 10k long reports
- Code 8 hours a day
You better be using a qwerty keyboard !
I owned touch screen phones, tablets and devices in between such as MS Surface. Non of them are great for any serious work.
Call me outdated, I still use a BlackBerry for writing/drafting e-mails on the go. And yes, I am a keyboard hoarder... every time I come across decent one, I just buy it. My current favourite being MS Ergo 4000.
Anything that relies on autocorrect is pretty much automatically a no-go for developers, mathematicians and such, since we have to type a lot of things that can't be "autocorrected." Then there's the thing that autocorrect works pretty poorly even for English, but for languages like e.g. Finnish, it's a major crapshoot; our language is chock-full of conjugations, a single word can have twenty different conjugations with different meanings, not to mention all the dialects and stuff, which make the whole thing several times worse. I just cannot see any keyboard-replacement being viable as long as it relies on guessing its input.
Most people learned to type on a qwerty keyboard. Qwerty remains because nothing else, such as Dvorak, has been so much better that it's clearly worth completely re-learning how we type. Dvorak *is* better than qwerty, but it's not clearly so much better than "whatever you already know".
Smart phones don't use the muscle memory of typing on a keyboard. If you were accustomed to typing on a keyboard, you ALREADY have to learn a different skill, thumb-based text entry on a tiny screen. That would have been the time to ditch qwerty and switch to something else - at the transition when even if you're a fast typist on a standard keyboard, you have to re-learn anyway.
My eye sight is failing, stabilized now but there was a time I was looking in to braille keyboards. I am a self employed contract computer programmer. Not sure what the market is for a blind one? I am good now with in the reach of my arm ;) Which allows me to work. ;) that is kinda like switching a keyboard. emacs is different (alien) those who know, know.
;)
I have thought about keyboards/displays/input devices, I did switch to emacs way back, to do column blocks
Is there something new coming yes but I have not seen it yet.
Just my 2 cents
Basically, the overall resistance to replacing QWERTY is down to whether there is a tangible benefit to be had to compensate for the pain of transition. And transition to anything different *will* be painful because it necessarily requires everyone to retrain on the new layout. It's not clear that any previous alternative (including Dvorak) actually provides such a benefit. Even if there is a measurable improvement with a new layout or new input device, it would have to be such that it makes life noticeably easier for a large cross section of users. Nothing seems to have met that bar.
The original Dvorak study was flawed (no proper control and was not conducted by an impartial party) and further studies have suggested that additional training on QWERTY leads to (on average) similar gains to those shown in Dvorak's study (where the participants were trained on the Dvorak layout). Thus, it's not clear that there is any real benefit there so it's not surprising that it hasn't taken over the world.
Basically, since existing QWERTY keyboards generally do reasonably well for most people who do use some method of touch typing, it seems unlikely anything that isn't substantially better on multiple fronts will likey take over. Also, for the fair number of people who don't touch type, keyboard layout makes no real difference so that group of people won't benefit at all from a change.
I know that I, personally, find the QWERTY keyboard adequate for my needs. It's not clear to me that a different layout would necessarily be substantially better so I have no incentive to put the time into learning something else. Perhaps something will come along some day that is substantially better, but I'm skeptical.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
If a keyboard fails to correctly register one input out of 10,000 it's in danger of getting replaced.
If a touchscreen correctly registers 10 inputs in a row it's a fucking miracle.
I tried to use dvorak for about two months - solidly forced myself to use it, and got moderately good at it. Had to relearn all the muscle memory I had for the prior 20 or so years of typing on a qwerty keyboard. I didn't find it particularly advantageous over qwerty. And when I had to sit down at a server or somebody else's computer, I had to do a reset on my brain to type the old way. I just went back to qwerty.
I think the upshot here is: qwerty is "good enough" and nothing has come along that drastically improves upon it, so for the foreseeable future, it's staying put.
Morse code must be pretty optimal otherwise it would not have lasted so long, maybe something with one or two keys/touchpad areas could be made simple enough to work without needing phenomenal dexterity. I have heard that 50 words per minute is achievable, it only need to go as fast as I can think (which is not that fast)
Nullius in verba
For me QUERTY is good enough, but I hate flat keyboards. I gotta have split or my wrists ache from doing the butterfly thing.
:>| The later 'media' models were not as good IMO.
Right now I am still using a gen-1 MS Natural keyboard, but it is the last one I have.
Kinesys makes a split model that looks good.
I like the Ergodox too, but the modifier key thing scares me. I'd prefer it with just a plain querty layout.
Really though,,,, I am wondering when voice-recognition typing died?
Seems like 10-15 years ago there was a few companies trying to make it work as well as possible, but stories now are rare.
By now a keyboard should be kept next to the punch cards in the modern cabinet of curiosities...
Iâ(TM)ve been using Dvorak for about 20 years now and thereâ(TM)s nothing better. If Iâ(TM)m stuck on a hotel pc or something that only has QWERTY I can still type ok, but for everyday use Dvorak is the best. But I would like to eventually move to something more direct. I would like to type without using mechanical input. I think some of the research on detecting forearm muscle movement is interesting. And Iâ(TM)ve looked into schooling keynoards too but havenâ(TM)t made the jump. Really though what would be best is to not have to spell out words at all. If I could just transcribe the words directly, sans letters, I would be happy. When we think we think in words but when we type we have to type each letter one after another even if we donâ(TM)t think of each letter. Typing is almost autonomic. So the leap to transcribing words direct,y without letters is not so great. In the meantime Iâ(TM)ll keep going on Dvorak.
thought interface where I can be in my recliner with my eyes closed just working away.
;)
Just my 2 cents
[W]hat if the future is no input interface at all? Neurable is a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's working on a way to type simply by thinking. It uses an electrode-dotted headband connected to a VR headset to track brain activity. Machine learning helps figure out what letter you're trying to select and anticipate which key you'll want next. After you select several keys, it can fill in the rest of the word, says cofounder and CEO Ramses Alcaide
Let's just assume that no amount of machine learning, artificial intelligence or anticipatory pattern matching can handle my typical thought processes (need sex, any espresso left? what time is it? gotta check slashdot, shit my feet hurt, wow need to trim fingernails, was that a mouse?) nor I'm guessing what goes on in the minds of many other developers.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Some years ago Reason magazine did a story on the history of Dvorak.
What they found was that most of the early studies showing Dvorak keyboards to be superior, were done by Dvorak himself,,, who was trying to sell his patented keyboard to the US Navy.
If it works better for you that's great--but the Navy was not impressed and didn't buy it.
https://reason.com/archives/19...
I would agree that on technical grounds, Dvorak sounds like a big improvement over querty... but the few modern studies I've read of showed no clear benefit.
I'm sure Millennials are due to kill QWERTY keyboards any day now.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
If this device is detecting hand positions... why not just use the letter signs from ASL (American Sign Language)? Lots of people already know it.
In other countries they’d use the local equivalents, of course.
#DeleteChrome
There have been a few attempts at 'projection keyboards' that project an image of a virtual keyboard onto a surface, with a camera that tries to detect which keys you're pressing. Unfortunately the camera POV is usually parallel to the projector, so it has a difficult time telling when you're touching the surface; also, you can't rest your fingers on the virtual keys, leading to finger fatigue as you hold them in midair.
I predict the proliferation of Augmented Reality keyboards, which use an AR display to show a virtual keyboard anywhere, not just on real surfaces. Your hands will be wearing haptic gloves which resist movement of your fingers, giving tactile feedback and avoiding fatigue. Want it to feel like you're typing on a Model M? Easily configured to do that. If you want a split/ergonomic keyboard, or customized function keys, you can configure that too. You can even have keypress sounds piped into your ears, so only you can hear your noisy 'keyboard'.
Or, keyboards will be replaced with subvocalized dictation/voice control for non-programming tasks.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I have two Model M keyboards. I'm typing on one now. I've had several different keyboards over the years including Dell and recently a couple of Mac keyboards for my work and home laptops.
I'm at times extremely frustrated at my tablet or phone virtual keyboards. My fingers aren't that small and I'm constantly hitting space for 'n' or even interspersing spaces to break up words due to my floating thumb. I had an Android phone for a couple of years and it was the most annoying keyboard, frustrating enough to be flung across the room more than once. I had a Blackberry back in the day and the physical keyboard, while small, still took a little pressure to generate a key. Even too close to a virtual keyboard will throw in an extra letter or space. Right now I rest my thumb briefly on the keyboard while I type.
I recall some virtual keyboard, laser light letters on your desk to simulate a keyboard. Anything like that, even a full sized tablet virtual keyboard wouldn't work for me for coding. I even bought the second Model M to replace the Dell keyboard I had at work (at IBM at that!) because scripting was such a pain in the ass.
I did try out the Dvorak keyboard a bunch of years back. Swapping key-caps on my IBM was pretty simple to make that change. But as an IT person a the time, using a Dvorak keyboard on my keyboard and then going to the users who all had QUERTY was insane. I'm not doing that any more, at least to that extent, but there are the occasional times where I need to use someone else's keyboard and switching back and forth would be annoying.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
workstation is when you go anywhere else it is like. "Darn! This sucks"
;)
Just my 2 cents
I have switched over to the Summers layout. It relieves the boredom of typing, and my office mates are always commenting on the impact of my work on the company environment. Try it yourself: http://www.rathergood.com/buff...
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Honestly, I'm close to using voice for typing more than the keyboard now. So, in a sense, voice will replace qwerty. Editing is the issue that keeps my keyboard here for now. There is no way I can describe edits out loud as fast as I do them with a keyboard.
Chorded keyboards have been around since the 1800s - including some that use tapping as opposed to pressing keys.
I used one in the mid-90s for a while that I can't find at the moment. It was an ergonomic grip designed to be a one-handed keyboard replacement operated at your side. There was more than one contact per finger to give 10 keys with 1024 possible combinations and software to allow words and phrases to be assigned combinations. The multiple contacts were hit with different parts of your fingers which at first doesn't seem possible to learn but was and allowed 10 contacts without the need to move your fingertip from one contact to another. It took about a month to reach a speed in the ballpark of my QWERTY keyboard skills. Mine broke after a few months and the device didn't catch on.
The Twiddler 3 offers similar functionality to what I remember, but is not as ergonomic and requires the fingertips to be moved around.
So, the answer is that these devices have tried to replace QWERTY and failed though they have had enough success to create a stable niche. The Twiddler devices have been around since '92.
"Marketing says we need something new to spur on sales. The replacement market isn't sustaining enough growth for the investors."
"Our design team has come up with this new layout. The old layout was made by a team that retired years ago. The new bucks want something with their name on it."
That happens when your 't' key craps out and you can't afford a new keyboard.
Wondering why vocal command isn't included in this list? I know people who dictate text messages and other memos in their phones (and have for several years)..this could easily get to the point where we vocalize a lot of what we want to input. (Although this could cause vocal strain after extended use, so not ideal either..)
A glove that recognizes signing letters and numbers, etc... something like this?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But they're harder to learn. While typing English, stenotypers (like court reporters) can type over 200 words per minute with high accuracy, but it takes four years of training to achieve that level of proficiency. On the other hand some one-handed chorded keyboards seem slightly easier to learn for novices than QWERTY, but the fastest users are only equivalent to a mediocre typist. Since you pretty much have to learn QWERTY, these don't add much marginal value.
QWERTY may not be optimal, yet it works well enough and is sufficiently easy enough to learn for most people. Add to that being ubiquitous, standard, and mandatory to learn and I don't think we'll see any viable alternative to QWERTY emerging on hardware keyboards anytime soon.
Touchscreen keyboards are a different story. QWERTY on-screen keyboards don't work well enough for many tasks. Back in the PDA days there was a lot of research being done on this, but predictive text gave the QWERTY on-screen keyboard enough of a leg up to be practical for things like texting. At the time that was that, but these days peoples' data is increasingly in the cloud and accessed through some kind of mobile terminal. Maybe it's time to revisit this.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Pry my QWERTY from my cold, dead hands.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
I imagine a future wherein computers would be able to read your mind, similar in concept to speech recognition except for mere thoughts instead of spoken words. As you think of what you would want to otherwise type or say, the computer would respond exactly as if that had been typed at a keyboard.
An AI could adapt itself to the way that you think so that if your mind has a propensity to wander, the system could learn to recognize with certain things, that is not necessarily what you meant to actually tell the computer to do, and would eventually be able to filter out extraneous information, much as we can, for example, in a crowded room with many people talking all around us, still focus on a single conversation that we are a part of.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
However it's not necessarily the case that future workloads will involve the direct entry of large amounts of text. Right now everything we do is fundamentally supported by a raft of text entry - sourcecode, documents, etc. It is conceivable that future workloads might involve the manipulation of some other way of abstracting the same concepts. As a totally artificial example, if tomorrow's programming language is designed such that the "sourcecode" is an array of 3D blocks, then it's easy to conceive that the IDE for such a language could be a VR or AR interface where you pick up and place those blocks with your fingres.
One might argue that the dominance of the QWERTY keyboard as "the input method" is already challenged by touchscreens - which don't even have keyboards on them all the time. But of course the real question is not "will something else replace QWERTY as the dominant input method" but really "will something else replace QWERTY as the dominant input FOR SIMILAR QUANTITIES OF TEXT" - which is a very different question. Touchscreens obviously are terrible for this. Let the flames begin.
The mechanical arrangement is part of the art which needs to be learnt and the developed muscle memory (based on tactile feedback) is a key aspect when performing.
I have some fond memories of The President's Analyst but unfortunately I no longer remember it well enough to know if it was good enough to watch again.
Wow, it just occurred to me that TPC also has three letters (when I saw the movie, "three letter agency" was not in my lexicon).
Ooops, have to switch glasses now to check the lawn...
The problem with challenging these things is that they're trying to fix something that isn't broken.
Sure, there are fringe problems with the layout. But those fringe issues don't matter to the majority. If you have a personal fringe problem, then fix it yourself.
there are lots of other options for you to use.
But the majority won't change because it doesn't matter.
Long story short, stop trying to project fringe issues on the majority. That is "your" problem. That isn't an insult. Own it. Then actually fix it. You can do it if you actually care.
If you don't care enough to do anything about it, then it didn't matter to you either.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Spatial memory is about remembering where things are.
A skilled typist doesn't type "the" by thinking about where the T is, then where the H is, then where the E is. There"fingers just do it", they'd tell you. Psychometric experts would explain that it has moved from the cerebellum to the basal ganglia - motor connections.
Here's an experiment to see the difference:
Asked a skilled typist where the J is. They'll likely answer by fist putting their fingers out as if typing it, then move their finger to remind themselves, then describe the location. They tell their finger to type J and it hits J, which then reminds the spatial part of the brain where it is.
I once had an ATM pin number I had used for many years, but when asked I couldn't remember it for the life of me - until Input my fingers on a pin pad. Muscle memory. That's how skilled typists type, not by remembering the location of each letter.
The QWERTY has the advantage that it exists. I learned to type on it 60 yearsago. DVORACK and all the other keyboard styles MIGHT be better, but we'd to have a cohort of children who learned a new keyboard style nearly from birth.
In some countries they use AZERTY. Works pretty well.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I should have ended that with:
They remember the finger movement (muscle) for the letter, not the geographical location of the key.
"The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "QWERTY" layout for the letter keys." Patent application was 1867. Sometimes there is a reason why some sub optimnal stuff stays so long : there may be more optimal layout (in fact for other languages , there are , german QWERTZ and french AZERTY) but they take much longer to learn compared to QWERTY not being that bad. Find a way to make a much MUCH better keyboard, and it will be adopted. But as people tried and tried and most solution got no traction at all, it is pretty clear this is not as easy as many thinks.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Unlike a conventional QWERTY keyboard, Tap required me to think a lot, because I had to tap my fingers in not-very-intuitive combinations
I'm sure the first time you typed on a QWERTY keyboard it was anything but intuitive! Try Tap for a year then tell us about it.
J
Pretty much any input method can replace the QWERTY keyboard. The only question is will *you* learn to use it?
The biggest contender for a long time was the T9 input method on mobile phones there were people who could type up a storm on those. However as the smartphone clearly showed, given the option people quickly revert to what they are familiar with.
How good is your Morse code? I could quite happily type this without a QWERTY keyboard. ... But I don't.
Anything could replace QWERTY, eventually. I'll probably use it for the rest of my life, but anything you get familiar with would do.
However, let me make a practical suggestion - the manual alphabet from sign language. Gear used for VR can already detect hand positions, or rig up some sort of sensor glove for input. Okay, even for those already trained it isn't as fast as the fastest touch-typist - but then again I'm not as fast on a real keyboard as a touch typist either so perhaps that is meaningless. And the manual alphabet is a useful skill regardless.
At first. Qwerty is a historically green mess, just one we've all gotten used to. An alphabetical keyboard would be objectively better.
Given enough time, you can get used to cord keyboards and other devices and learn to type super fast on them. Often times even faster than with regular keyboards. It just takes time and breaks the norm we all agreed on. That's why it's very difficult to replace Qwerty.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If they're going to switch anything, it should be the phone layout to the number pad. Nearly every phone has recent calls and phone books. Mobiles have the bonus of voice dialing. In fact, many people I know don't even have a phone plugged into their landline.
Our desk phones can be dialed from our CRM software - we trialled SIP clients only (all the phones have wireless headsets), but we found people were missing calls as the headset notification was too discrete (as was the windows notification). It was also impossible to reject a call, though I filed a bug report with the vendor.
for (int i = 0; i j ; look at the rump on that ) { oh no the boss is coming over he's a total cunt
}
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Unlikely, we are used to QWERTY.
As for the QWERTY layout per se - since its so established and hard-to-change why don't we just re-define "alphabetic order" from A,B,C,D... to Q,W,E,R,T,Y.... - then the QWERTY layout would make perfect sense.
OK, so re-defining alphabetic order is going to be a little bit tricky and have a few unintended consequences but, frankly, the QWERTY layout has been technically obsolete since at least the 1960s (golfball typewriters didn't have type bars to collide) and has resisted all attempts to improve/replace it - even the numeric phone keypad (that had its day when SMS texting went viral) suffered death-by-iPhone - so alphabetical order is pretty much the soft target here. Most kids these days will see a QWERTY keyboard before they get taught to read, so that shouldn't be a problem, and if you ever forget what the new order is - just look down! With lots of semi-skilled workers about to be made redundant by AI, just think how many valuable jobs would be created re-sorting the books in the great libraries of the world...
Chord keyboards and other "clever" solutions have the problem that you have to learn to use them - and they failed to take off even back in the days when people expected to need training before they could type. The chord-based stenograph has been around as long as the typewriter, but has never broken out of specialised niches in courts etc.
The great thing about the QWERTY keyboard is that the instructions for basic use are printed on the bloody keys. Only a minority of keyboard users today have actually been taught to touch-type - so the failure of all alternatives can't be about the level of training on QWERTY, its that you don't need training to use QWERTY. Maybe, just maybe, QWERTY is still around because it gets the job done?
These days, we've got pretty good speech and handwriting recognition, too - but the inconvenient truth is that many people prefer typing to writing, and feel like a twit talking to their computer or phone (and we're talking here about people who don't feel a twit meandering along with their head hunched over their phone). The other problem with speech/handwriting is that they grind to a halt as soon as you want to go back and edit your work, undo a typo or fix an autocorrupt error.
As for "thought control" - we (sex!) know (manager walking past - hide slashdot) how (sex!!) that will (what a wanker!) work out (talking of wanking...) in practical (need a piss) day-to-day (sex!!!) office (coffee!!!) use (my ass itches).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
QWERTY are two things: A physical layout of keys in rows and a logical mapping of symbols to those keys. Dvorak is only the latter.
There is a movement for changing the physical layout, from rows to a column for each finger, which can improve typing speed and accuracy, as well as being touted as more ergonomic. These are also often separated into a part for each hand.
This idea is not new, but almost as old as typewriters themselves. Schools for QWERTY divided the keyboard into columns for use with different fingers. The Blickensderfer typewriter with its "Scientific layout" from the late 1800's and Lilian Malt's Maltron from the 1970's (onwards) changed both physical layout to a columnar and logical mapping to a more logical, and I suspect that it was the unusual logical mappings that prevented adoption of those more than anything.
The Kinesis company has made its "contoured" ergonomic keyboards for decades -- with QWERTY or Dvorak, but they are not common.
Columnar ergonomic computer keyboards used to be common in Japan in the 1980s, mainly for the NEC PC-8800 computers, but IBM squashed that platform, partly through political pressure.
In the recent decade there has also been a resurgence in keyboards with mechanical switches, partly as a reaction to what I think has been a regression in keyboard design towards having flatter, cheaper keyboards.
As animals, we touch and feel. We think spatially. Things are more intuitive when they are things and not abstract concepts.
Mechanical keyboards feel more substantial, and often provide better ergonomic shapes and better tactile feedback than the common muck that is usually bundled with a new computer. Mechanical keyboards also have keys and switches as discrete components, which has made development of mech keyboards more accessible to hobbyists.
There are now dozens of different homebrew, custom and kits out there for mechanical keyboards -- with columnar layouts. Split, contoured, "orthonormal" grids, shifted columns, etc. Many of them are Open Hardware. ... ) you don't see many "ergonomic" keyboards in the mainstream any more, which is a shame.
The most famous is the ErgoDox, which is manufactured by multiple companies. It has also got several successors, with different tweaks to the physical layout.
While mainstream hardware manufacturers are now making keyboards with mechanical switches (for "gamers"
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
use hand/finger position sensors and learn sign language
...of how organizations are resistant to change. They say that despite it's increased efficiency, organizations are inherently resistant to change, and use the DVORAK keyboard as an example when training management consultants.
> You do realize your argument is they don't remember the location of keys, just relative location to where their fingers are and that's not spatial location?
It's not "my argument", it's well-established science. Motions that we learn thoroughly, such as writing, are a completely different area of the brain than picturing a map. A skilled typist learns first "make an A", then "type THE" and types it without thinking about location, without picturing a map of the keys. It becomes directly "triggering this muscle creates this letter". An *unskilled* typist has to think about *where* the keys are. A skilled typist has learned how a skill called "tab" which involves the muscles that control their little finger. It becomes a hand skill rather than a map. It's like picking up a cup, an adult know how much muscle movement your fingers need without thinking about how much pressure your putting on the cup. A toddler drops the cup often because they still have the intermediate, cerebral step of controlling the pressure on the cup.
So no, a skilled person does not work based on "relative location", picturing the location and then moving their fingers to the location they have in mind. Typing each letter becomes a skill, just as a full-time professional guitarist doesn't think about the location of each string, their fingers know how to play a given chord (actually their basal ganglia do).
The only people who think replacing keyboards for general text input is a good idea are people who never bothered to learn how to type.
Mobile devices might be an exception due to size... I'm a Graffiti person myself (originally Palm, now Android). It's how I'm able to make long postings like this one with my phone. Predictive keyboards slow me down, because I'm kind of OCD about not making spelling errors & only Graffiti is accurate enough to let me get away with NOT proofreading everything word-by-word. My only gripe with Android Graffiti has to do with capacitative behavior & governor-induced lag... it pisses me off that a fsck'ing sub-20Mhz 680x0 could handle nearly error-free input, but an Android phone with a faster CPU & more cores occasionally can't tell the difference between 'o' and 'u' because... er... Android decided something BESIDES high-res stroke-capture is a higher priority at that moment (using a governor like 'performance' or 'responsive' on a rooted phone definitely helps).
That said, there's room for improvement with Qwerty. The patents on the Matias Halfkeyboard expired years ago... it should now be a default feature on any new keyboard (and Matias himself should sell a USB adapter to sit inline and turn ANY USB keyboard into one), not to mention a standard feature in Linux and Windows. It's handy for "left hand on keyboard, right hand on mouse" use cases.
English is the common denominator language in a whole lot of applications. It won't be replaced with Spanish or Mandarin regardless of population count. And new languages like e-prime or esperanto aren't going to do it either.
Speaking would have been been a better example for me to use. Try saying "three three three". You speak without by making sounds. As a side-effect of your brain telling your body to make the sound, your tongue ended up at a certain position for the "th" sound and another position for the "r' sound - and you may not know what those positions are! You know *how* to make the sounds. You may well not know *where* each part of your tongue is for "r" that's different from "s", and you don't need a map distinguishing the positions of "r" vs "s". You only need the know how, the "make an S skill", no location maps needed.
Just as your mouth can learn "make an R sound" and "make an S sound", so can your hands learn "make an R" and "make an S".
Let me add an analogy : music writing by hand vs. software
When you are dealing with very special customized type of music, it is really complicated to translate it from your mind to a graphical program. You can do it well with a pencil on paper, but later you must try to realize what to do to move your ideas to the software capacities (that always will be limited compared with your own expressive writing).
So, in my case, the best solution has been to use Lilypond and to write by hand on Lilypond language, not trying to use those extremely limited graphical toys. And, this carry me to a keyboard, that I can use very efficiently because I began with formal typing studies on a mechanical typewriter a lot of years ago, and complemented with my piano studies in University.
I can use my "finger memory" that it is separated from my thinking, something that permits me to do both at the same time. And I don't need to look at the keyboard to find the letters. And QWERTY it is just perfect, no matter if I am using a Spanish or an English keyboard.
Also, I have two daughters, 8 and 9 years old. They are learning to use the keyboard with some software, and they are very good right now with just some weeks of practice. This means, that QWERTY it is not artificial even for little children, it is fast, it is reliable. Then, what it is the urgency to replace it.?
A different story is with your mobile or tablet. Well, maybe you can't carry a physical keyboard, so you must paint one in the screen ... it is a practical solution, but on a limited device. But if you can attach a physical keyboard things improve several times .. .always.
No game controller has succcessfully replaced a good keyboard (& mouse) so why would it in any other area ;-)
Is anyone else with me that when using a "set top box", or whatever with an on screen keyboard and it pops up in a-z format just considers binning the thing as it is going to take 10 times as long to input anything into it?
+----------------- | What is the question!
I basically quit using qwertys 17 years ago. See http://chordite.com/ I still think that's far and away the best approach. Nothing else comes close. It's really a pity I'm too lazy to promote it :-)
More like, Google analyzing your response to every article, image, and ad, and developing a personal brain map the'd then use to super-market to you.
Let's just assume that no amount of machine learning, artificial intelligence or anticipatory pattern matching can handle my typical thought processes (need sex, any espresso left? what time is it? gotta check slashdot, shit my feet hurt, wow need to trim fingernails, was that a mouse?) nor I'm guessing what goes on in the minds of many other developers.
In the same way that not every thought that crosses your mind comes out through your typing fingers (or your mouth, for that matter), there would have to be some way for the system to pick up on which thoughts you intended to output to your outgoing-text-stream, vs which thoughts were part of your internal monologue only.
Is that possible? Well, it's no less impossible than any other kind of thought-reading, at the moment.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Although it is still a QWERTY, I found that the original "split" Microsoft natural/ergonomic keyboards would increase my speed of typing and my comfort after getting used to them. An old girlfriend gave me an MS Natural Keyboard Elite as a present 20 years ago. I didn't find it that "natural" to use, but as it was the gf's present I kept using it and after around 6 months I decided I am never going back as it had increased my typing speed and there was less strain as well.
Now, while I am never going back, Microsoft sure is, since they have abandoned the split keyboard style with their new "curved" ones, which are not nearly the same thing and are actually not that good keyboards. So it is quite hard to find keyboards like the Elite or the Natural Keyboard Pro that came after it... I have one from Perixx, but then I bought recently their current updated version, and they dropped the build quality, so now I don't really know a good source for such a keyboard...
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The fascination with typing speed comes from the days when you had dedicated typists and secretaries. Computers, printers and photocopiers pretty much obliterated the need to re-type things and by far most professionals now type themselves, for the rest OCR and speech-to-text will give you a draft. A coder does not code at 200 WPM. An author does not write books at 200 WPM, if they did George R.R. Martin would finish a GoT book in a day and a half. Unless you have some really unique needs the limitation is the thought behind the text not the typing of the text.
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while it's further away I'd imagine mental input might replace it. Speach recognition has a huge flaw to it... namely lack of ability to be used discretely in public. There's a reason why text messages rapidly surpassed phone calls even back when the standard input method was "tap 1 3 times for C". That advantage being the ability to talk to someone in a crowded theatre, or office meeting etc... without excessively distracting those around you, as well as the ability to communicate in very loud places without your messages being sidetracked.
Except Dvorak isn't just "mildly more efficient", it's much more efficient and doesn't preclude being able to type on a QWERTY keyboard. Dvorak to Colemak is "mildly more efficient", to the point where the creator of Colemak advises Dvorak users not to bother.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Could you please elaborate?
I've always wanted to try something like that but haven't (yet). How does it work for editing (cursor movement, backspace), keyboard shortcuts (mark text, cut text etc) and entry of symbols (brackets etc)? How many symbols are available? Do you have to release all keys before typing the next character or is it "smart" in some way?
It's smart this way: some guys at IBM back in the '70s figured out the best way to poll the keys is to always report idle except when a release directly follows a press and then report the chord that existed between those 2 events. That's what your brain wants. With 8 keys there are of course 255 useful chords plus the idle chord. 127 with 7 the keys I usually implement. It's pretty much all explained in the downloadable source and instructions.
You toggle back and forth between mouse mode and keyboard mode. The mouse mode isn't agile enough for easy cut and paste but it's fine for clicking wigits. It has 2 speeds and 8 directions. Better to use your touch screen
I think there is room for improvement without totally ditching the QWERTY keyboard.
For instance, if I'm only typing English text, such as this comment, then I find QWERTY to be quite comfortable.
But if I'm entering a lot of source code that uses a lot of symbols and brackets, like this "wire [N-1:0] gated_one_hot = {N{gate}} & (2**i);", I find that my hands and wrists fatigue rather quickly.
So I would like to see some task-specific keyboard layouts where the QWERTY part is unchanged, but the symbols important to the task are more-optimally placed.
Honestly, we have arrived at the best time in history for users of alternative typing devices to bring them forward.
Every keyboard uses the standard USB port. As long as your custom device works with the Windows generic USB keyboard driver, then it's just plug and play.
If typing speed were a key performance metric of my ability to do the job, I'd ask the employer for a sample document to demonstrate my speed and then bang it out.
Thanks! I will look into it when I get the time.