OT Configuring the Keyboard ?

[Taavi Burns]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:12:34 -0500, William O'Higgins
<william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 09:11:36AM -0500, Geoffrey Hunter wrote:
> 
> >Incidentally, in an ideal world the 26 letters of our alphabet would
> >be arranged in alphabetical order; the QWERTY order was designed to

No, they would not.  Putting them in alphabetical order makes no sense from
a useability perspective, since they keys you use most would be distributed
in strange places.  The ordering of the alphabet is (as far as I know) somewhat
arbitrary.  Now, what we should do is rearrange the alphabet in order
of statistical
frequency in common use...  ;)

> >How about this for a (partial) keyboard arrangement:
> >
> >     A B C D E F G H I
> >     1 2 3 J K L M N O   4 rows x 9 columns
> >     4 5 6 P Q R S T U    = 36 characters = 26 letters + 10 digits
> >     7 8 9 0 V W X Y Z
> >
> >3 of the vowels (I,O,U) are at the ends of the first 3 rows;
> >A is at the beginning of the first row,
> >E is symmetrically in the middle of the first row,
> >(which is good because E is the most frequently used vowel).

Yeah, but being in the top row, it's horrible to try to reach for.  I don't
care if I can reach it with either hand.

> If you are going to develop a new keyboard, why not do something
> radical/interesting?  How about a ten-key design like that used by
> stenographers, where you never lift a finger off it's key, and you type
> via chording, giving you 2^10-1 possibilities, which you would rank
> based on character set by frequency.  One keyboard for all (well, most)
> languages.

Or use something that's already been invented, like a Dvorak layout, which
is just as intuitive and useable as the QWERTY keyboard for beginners, but
performs better for experienced typists.  Using chording would be neat, but
when I look around work I see computer programmers, and I think that most
of them can touch type...but not all.  Asking these people to go to a Dvorak
layout would be somewhat ludicrious, but at least it can be made into a
software choice.

(the ten-key chording thing could be, if keyboards weren't wired the way they
are: generally unable to keep track of more than 2 "non-control" keypresses
at once)

-- 
taa
/*eof*/
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