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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?
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.
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.
QWERTY will not be completely replaced, but I know many people who use voice for 90% of their input needs. But that doesn't work for coding.
Strap-on neural sensors have big limitations, but a brain implant with a direct connection to neurons could give you not only text input, but also thought control over light, appliances, etc. You could also use it as an alarm clock that you can't lose, a reminder and appointment calendar, as well as a place to keep always-accessible notes.
They will need to figure out how to disable it during exams.
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.
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.
It'll also give the NSA a direct line into your brain meat. But that's a feature, not a bug in today's tech sector.
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.
Unless what you transition to is something you already know, like handwriting. But that's a lot slower than touch typing.
I still liked Graffiti 1, the original input method on Palm PDAs. Most of all because you could do it without watching - taking notes under the table was not difficult at all. It wasn't all that speedy, but it was reliable and easy to learn for anyone who could write block letters. Graffiti 2, after the lawsuit by Xerox, not so much. You no longer had all the letters as single-stroke, and couldn't move the stylus out of the designated area without it causing problem, which made writing without looking much harder.
That is science fiction at this point
Brain implants are science, not science fiction. Commercialization is still a ways off, but thought control is working in the lab. The first commercial applications will likely be in medial devices for amputees and paraplegics. The mass market will follow.
[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 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!
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.
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.
I did switch to emacs way back, to do column blocks ;) that is kinda like switching a keyboard. emacs is different (alien) those who know, know.
No worries! Rescue is on the way!!
Emacs has a superb vi/m mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emac... or you could go really evil: https://www.emacswiki.org/emac...
Emacs is still a decent operation system, and with the vim and evil mods it now does no longer lack a decent editor!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, a) because of precisely what you just said - ASL isn't worldwide, whereas qwerty is (all standard keyboard layouts worldwide are very closely related to qwerty; azerty, qwertz, etc, including Asian and Cyrillic keyboards that have the Roman alphabet plus modifiers and additional IMs like guobi that give you characters from Roman typing), and b) because ASL wasn't designed to be used as an alphabet, it's a _language_ for which the letter signs are a fallback when there's no specific sign for the thing you need to say - so the letter signs aren't necessarily the easiest to remember, or "best" shapes from a muscle memory standpoint.
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.
Firstly, if you are going to learn to use a keyboard, you might as well learn the one you are going to find everywhere, and not some weirdness that is mildly more efficient (VHS v Betamax).
Secondly, if accuracy matters, you need control over every key stroke. You need a programming language and to enter every character personally. If it doesn't, then get drunk and go talk slang with your mates in the bar - its more fun, but won't get the bugs out.
Voice input won't work - hell, I can't understand the dialogue in half the American content on the TV, and I have yet to meet an IVR system that understands what I say at all. I speak standard BBC English, and I cant get the damn things to understand "yes" and "no".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"QWERTY will not be completely replaced,"
Sure it will. Already all the Germans use a QUERTZ one while all the French people use AZERTY and ....
I remember this same discussion about 50 years ago.
Firstly, if you are going to learn to use a keyboard, you might as well learn the one you are going to find everywhere, and not some weirdness that is mildly more efficient (VHS v Betamax).
I would agree, except that I recently moved to Europe and the standard keyboard here is the "QWERTZ" keyboard. Z and Y are swapped. (Colloquially called among expat friends a "kezboard".) Also, all the punctuation is in a different spot. I tried learning it, but then would go home and sit at my QWERTY laptop. I finally gave up and remapped the keys. I'd say just use what you're used to and don't worry about what you're going to find everywhere.
E pluribus unum
Morse "E" is as quick as hitting the "E" on a keyboard. Everything else is slower.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And still almost nobody uses them. That should tell you something.
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."
It's the standard in Germany and presumably Austria. Unless they've been up to their old tricks again.
This is the case even between US English and the proper kind like what The Queen talks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
QWERTY isn't unique to US English. E.g. British keyboards are QWERTY too but have a different layout to US ones.
To be fair, it's mainly the programmers that spot the differences.
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.
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.
I think physical layout is much more important than the key mapping. I have a bit of RSI on the outer side of the hands (Emacs pinkie) and would like to reduce the stress on the pinkie. As a programmer I am probably biased but I don't find the layout of the letters to be problematic. I spend a lot more time thinking than typing so typing speed isn't a huge issue. I also spend more time navigating, editing or typing weird symbols like braces and brackets than I do typing plain English text and those actions are some of the least ergonomic. Most key maps like Dvorak or Colemak optimise key placement based on the typing of english text but do nothing for symbols or placement of modifier keys (shift, control, alt). Neo is the only one I know that remaps symbols and movement by creating more modifiers/layers but all the modifiers are still along the edge of the keyboard and pressed with the pinky (and it is in German).
I have tried some ergonomic keyboards but none have caught on either because they were not radical enough (just a qwerty split in half) or because they were too big, expensive or not laptop friendly. Actually, none are laptop friendly if you do type on your lap. Some of the single hand chorded keyboards could be laptop friendly enough but they would have to support all the various brackets and braces for general use.
To scratch my own itch, I have been experimenting with my own chorded shortcuts software which distinguishes between ordinary typing and when you're Holding one key and Press-Releasing another. It basically treats the key events "Press A - Press/Release B - Release A" as a shortcut which can be mapped to anything. It helps with my particular case of RSI since I can remap all modifiers to the strong fingers (hold V or M for Ctrl, F and J for Shift, hold Space for movement and deletions etc). It works rather well but I do occasionally get some false positives so it isn't perfect yet. The code is here ( https://github.com/hopr/hopr ) if anyone is interested but it is a prototype without any polish since I am the only user. It works for me though.
I would very much like a redesigned keyboard with all movement, editing and modifier keys moved to the bottom (thumb) or center (index finger) but I want it on both laptops and desktops. Laptops won't change anytime soon so I think we are stuck with QWERTY. A more radical remapping of the qwerty keyboard would be interesting (like use all inner keys FGHJ etc as layers/modifiers like Neo) but only for some special groups like programmers or people with RSI. Neurological implants would of course be cool but so would magic wands.