If you speak to long-time users of alternative layouts, most of them will not list typing speed as the reason they stuck with it. When others ask me if they should consider alternative layouts, typing speed is the most common topic: Will switching make me faster? The answer is, it might, but probably not by much. efficient processes feel better than inefficient ones, even when the end result is the same-they improve our emotional well-being and quality of life.Should we try to fix it? What would be some possible advantages? Here is a partial list: So here we are, on a layout that-no matter how you look at it-was not designed for the modern computer typist. If you think keeping this historical artifact on modern keyboards is silly, you're not alone. Looking at historical images of typewriters, it appears that this was necessary to make room for the lever arms of the number row, which lay between the arms of the home row and the row below it. For example, the row above home row is offset from it by 0.25 units, but the row below home row is offset by 0.5 units. One that has always interested me is the decision to vary the horizontal stagger distance between the rows. Many other vestigial aspects of the typewriter also carried over into computer design. It was subsequently adopted by computer manufacturers and continues to this day. What we can agree on is this: By the end of the 19th century, QWERTY was an established standard on commercially available typewriters. For example, the bigram-separation theory would not explain why E and R (a very common English bigram) are very close together on the Sholes & Glidden typebar basket. They argue that the letter placement would never have evolved into modern QWERTY if the goal was to reduce jamming by separating common bigrams. Putting these characters close together made it easier for the transcriptionist to quickly change their mind about what to enter. The researchers propose that American Morse Code's inherent ambiguity made it easy to confuse certain letter combinations during rapid transmission (for example, Z and SE). In 2011, Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka-a pair of researchers at Kyoto University-published new research suggesting that the QWERTY layout was actually a response to feedback from Sholes' earliest customers, who wanted to use the device to transcribe American Morse Code. In addition, there is a tendency for advocates of alternative layouts to layer moral judgement on top of the little information we have, suggesting that QWERTY was specifically designed to make typing difficult, or that it was designed to be proprietary, so that typists would be forced to buy Remington products and take Remington typing courses. The problem with the classical legend of keyboard evolution is that it is not very well documented. The eventual result of this was the modern QWERTY layout:

They also migrated toward a more compact layout with 4 rows. They experimented with moving common bigrams (2-letter sequences) apart and increasing hand alternation. Over the course of the next decade, typewriter manufacturers (Sholes & Glidden, Remington) made improvements to prevent this from happening.

The classical legend holds that this layout was problematic because early typewriters were prone to jamming when letters with neighboring typebars were pressed in rapid succession. (initially, 1 and 0 were not given dedicated keys, because it was felt that I and O could be substituted). A horizontal stagger between the rows made room for the lever arms attached to each key: The usual legend of typewriter evolution holds that American Christopher Latham Sholes debuted the typewriter in 1868 with a 2-row layout that was (nearly) alphabetical. Due to time constraints and my own limited knowledge, I will focus on layouts optimized for the English language (ANSI variants, with an occasional nod to ISO).įirst off, it's important to understand how much debate there is about how we got here: I will not even attempt to settle the issue of who invented the 'first' typewriter layout, because the modern device had many predecessors going back centuries. It is intended to discuss the topic in broad terms, but I will share my personal preferences towards the end. This is a post to satisfy your curiosity about alternative keyboard layouts, why some people use them, and whether they're for you. An introduction to alternative keyboard layouts

Alternatives to qwerty keyboard layout