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New Standard Keyboard
Posted by
samzenpus
on Mon Jan 24, 2005 11:06 PM
from the learn-to-type-again dept.
from the learn-to-type-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."
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Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Informative)
Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody really denies that Qwerty is an inefficient layout. At least nobody who has done their homework. There are many studies comparing wpm speeds of people proficient in both Qwerty and Dvorak that show the clear advantage of the latter. I'll leave finding them as an exercise to the reader (read: I'm too lazy to look them up right now).
So let's use a
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Informative)
The study by Liebowitz and Margolis depend heavily on two assumptions:
1) Dvorak's studies were self-serving and therefore suspicious.
2) Strong's studies were well controlled.
The first is kind of hard to argue, as the studies were self-serving. However, Strong's studies were NOT well controlled.
Don't believe me? Try getting the original material of Strong's research to verify his claims. You can't. Know why? Strong destroyed the material. If Strong's studies were well controlled, why did he shred his research when people started asking about it?
So in "researching the entire Dvorak saga", the two economists failed to even mention that Strong's research, which they use as the fundamental support of their argument, may be seriously flawed. At the very least we cannot take it at face value since we cannot analyze the data ourselves. In fact, Strong was not objective at all, from the very beginning he intended to show that any speed up with Dvorak is sufficiently small that retraining the Navy's typists would be impractical. So why did these economists overlook this fact? Well, they were themselves trying to argue that the market always picks the best solution.
Keep this in mind when you think about window's dominance in the market, or any other product that rose to the top through whatever questionable means. The paper in which these two economists wrote about Dvorak not being better than Qwerty was actually a paper in which they were saying "The market always chooses the best option." The keyboards were just the whipping boy they chose to use.
So which serious objective tests between the two keyboards have there been?
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Dvorak and me and studies and keyboards... (Score:4, Interesting)
I switched because less finger travel made my hands less tired at the same typing speed. I still use both layouts, but if I am typing a lot, I will use dvorak.
When I first thought about switching, I created an Excel macro to count finger reaches in QWERTY phrases and one for Dvorak. I also started making a list of common words that can be typed on the home row in each. In both of these endeavors, Dvorak won. roughly 25-30% less finger travel, more in some phrases. Many more common words on the home row.
Here http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ [kinesis-ergo.com] is a company that makes ergo keyboards with vertical rows, QWERTY, Dvorak, or both.
History says:
The slant of the columns on the keyboard is an artifact left over from mechanical typewriters.
For those not acquainted with the story of the keyboards, here's a short version:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/ [mit.edu]
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wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of which, y'all should check out my new IOCATB keyboard layout. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, it feels faster than anything else.
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Re:wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Fundamentally, how you arrange the letters -- assuming you use some logical
arrangement that makes a bit of sense -- is not the only thing that matters.
QWERTY (in order to keep typewriters from jamming) arranges them so that it's
statistically less likely for adjascent letters to occur on the same finger
and more likely for them to occur on opposite hands. This does speed up
typing somewhat over, say, an alphabetical layout (once you are comfortably
familiar with the layout you are using, of course). Dvorak instead goes out
of its way to put the letters that are most frequently used in English on
the keys that are easiest to hit. This too speeds up typing somewhat over
an alphabetical layout.
But they both have serious flaws, and it's not in how they lay out the letters.
It's in how they handle the other keys, which they do virtually the same way.
The numbers across the top are okay, and the spacebar is okay -- well, the
spacebar would be okay if it didn't waste one whole thumb. The thumb is
unique among the hand's fingers in that it can easily operate independently
from the other fingers. This makes it ideal for the spacebar, because space
is statistically more likely than any other character to be typed right
before or right after any other character. However, the thumb is *also*
ideal for a bucky key, the most important being shift, for a similar reason:
you can hold a key down with the thumb, and all your other fingers can still
hit any key they could hit before. Try that with the shift key where it is
now: it doesn't work, which is the main reason we have two shift keys,
which is wasteful and makes the layout larger than it needs to be. A second
thumb bar for shift would be much more efficient, in terms of typing speed,
and as an added bonus it reduces by one the number of keys needed. *Plus*,
it substantially reduces the frequency with which you hyperextend your pinky.
If your pinkies hurt after a long bout of typing, this is the answer.
There are other mistakes both layouts make. Ctrl is similarly poorly
positioned and should definitely be put where it's easier to hit. On the
other hand, the window key is in a bad place. It's effect is much more
drastic than ctrl, in that it takes keyboard focus completely away from the
application or window that had it and thoroughly disrupts whatever was being
done, so it should be out of the way more. Where the traditional layouts
have put it, it gets hit mostly by mistake and becomes an annoyance -- quite
needlessly, because there are plenty of out of the way places where it could
be put such that it would not be hit by mistake while the user is typing.
Right next to Print Screen, for example, would be a great place for it.
I could go on and on, but basically it comes down to this: QWERTY and Dvorak
both took great care when arranging the letters, and it shows: they're both
pretty decent arrangements for that (for different reasons). But they appear
to have put no thought whatsoever into the arrangment of the other keys
(except the spacebar), and that shows too: the arrangement of the other
keys *sucks* on these layouts. That is where the next round of improvements
needs to be made.
I'd start by putting shift and ctrl below the spacebar, where they can be
hit or held with the left and right thumb, respectively, with no impact on
where the other fingers can be. (This makes *one* combination hard --
Shift-Ctrl-Space -- but that's a rather unusual combination, and it makes
every other shift and ctrl combination much faster and easier. Care would
have to be taken so that normal hitting of the spacebar with either thumb
would not hit these keys by mistake, but that's easily possible if a gap
the size of a single key is left between them and the spacebar.) Then I'd
proceed by putting as much thought into the placement of every other key
as was put into the placement of the letters.
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Re:wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
(BTW, it's called a "Mac.")
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Re:wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
After using this layout for several months, the only programs that didn't accept it were Microsoft applications, which seemed to randomly decide if they would follow the Qwerty or Dvorak layout for command keys. If you are on Mac OS X there really isn't a lot of disadvantages to trying Dvorak out if you are free from MS applications (I haven't tried Mac Office 2004 to see if this problem persists).
The only bad thing about learning Dvorak is that when you go back to a regular keyboard you are basically back to hunt and peck. I found it really difficult to be able to switch between the two and maintain typing speed; I can type at over 100 wpm on either layout after sufficient time is given for me to adjust. That said I would way rather use Dvorak it just feels nicer on your hands, you can type faster, and I found I made less typos.
Parent
Re:wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Or I pretty much grew up on WordStar. To do the equivalent of the CTRL-C CTRL-V you mention, you'd have to use block commands, which were prefixed with CTRL-K. But an even more fun command group were those starting with CTRL-O. Don't even try doing that with the left hand only, it's not comfortable. Again, it worked well enough and people were typing whole books in WordStar. (And I stuck to Borland IDEs for programming until 2001 or so, because they let me use the WordStar key mappings.)
Or here's an bit of fun about German keyboards. The CUA Undo is CTRL-Z, and German keyboards are QWERTZ. I.e., CTRL-Z is where CTRL-Y would be on the USA keyboards. People use it with no problem, though. More fun for programming is that the square brackets have been moved on RIGHT_ALT-8 and RIGHT_ALT-9, instead of being a single keystroke, to make way for the national characters. And "@" (as used in emails) is RIGHT_ALT+Q. Again, seems to work OK, if that's what you got used to.
Basically as was said, _any_ keyboard arrangement works just as well, if that's what you're used to. Including, I'd add, any arrangement of the shortcuts on the keyboard.
However, the reverse is also true. Switching to a new arrangement just brings a long learning curve before you get back to speed. So buying Dvorak keyboards for the whole company to "improve their productivity" might have the opposite effect, as well as needlessly annoying everyone.
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Re:wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Some friends and I were actually going to make a footboard once, not that long ago, to move all the modifier keys to the floor. We figure that, if a church organist can play scales with her feet, we could speed up our typing significantly by never having to use two finger simultaneously by way of our feet doing that part of the job.
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Re:wrong (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/foot.htm [kinesis-ergo.com]
Remove the foot.htm bit for the whole site, it uses frames.
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Re:wrong (Score:5, Informative)
I would tend to be suspicious of studies comparing qwerty to dvorak, since most people who learn dvorak learned qwerty first, whereas most qwerty users know only qwerty. Because of qwerty's ubiquity, it's very difficult to make an objective comparison.
I use qwerty and dvorak interchangeably, and am probably slower in both than if I had stuck with qwerty alone, but I find dvorak much more comfortable (and that's something that's much harder to quantify).
According to a quick google search, Barbara Blackburn [syr.edu] is the fastest typist in the world and she uses dvorak. That carries more weight than questionable studies in my book, though I would prefer a better reference than a random web link.
Does anyone have data comparing the fastest known dvorak typists to the fastest known qwerty typists?
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Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, did not have time to read through all three linked articles, but did read the Reason one (due to the fact that I do trust the sourse) and one of its main punches was the UN-SCIENTIFIC ways those studies were conducted. And, unfortunately, in your comment you do show the same attitude of referencing "numerous studies" without considering what could go wrong with them.
Think about it in programmer's terms: ok, there is
this language called, say, "BigBigSea" which noone spends proper time to learn, but most everyone knows a bit and can handle (some can get really good at it). And then there is this new language called "Tea", and you did learn it, one of the early adopters... Would not you swear that since you've learned it your productivity increased 10-fold? Even when people would try to put a bit of a study together, you would sub-consciously give your old skill a disadvantage to provide advantage to your new skill, which can move you up in the food chain?
Paul B.
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Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that it is simply unclear how they projected it. It was the nineteenth century after all, and some weird ideas were followed: eg, you can type typewriter with just keys on the top row (I read this was intended, for what reasons I'm not sure). Probably it was some trial and error, and they came with an half-baked design.
Oh, the exercise to the reader, yes: here is a Guinness record [syr.edu].
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Actually, it's very clear (Score:4, Informative)
But there were real mechanical considerations there too.
Typewriters used to be purely mechanical things. Hitting a key physically pressed a lever, which swung a small hammer at the paper. Actually, at the ink ribbon. And on the hammer a letter or digit was embossed. (Actually, two. SHIFT would physically raise the carriage, so the second letter on the hammer hit.)
Because it was purely mechanical and involved densely packed thin levers, it was jam-prone. If you hit two keys at the same time, two hammers would try to occupy the same space at the same time. If they were coming from opposite ends, not much would happen: 99% of the time one would just hit on top of the other. But if they were adjacent (or almost adjacent) levers, the machine would jam.
That was the problem they tried to solve: keeping the machine from jamming. Which involved moving the hammers for most common letter combinations further apart from each other. Which, since it was a purely mechanical contraption, involved moving the keys too. (It wasn't as simple as defining a new mapping table, like on computers.)
And whatever effect it had on typists and typing speed, was side-effect rather than considered in the design. Whether it sped them up or slowed them down, it still ended up faster if it didn't require unjamming twice a minute.
However, here's another fun fact: the typewriter for which that layout was designed was very different even from typewriters manufactured after 1900. After 1900 the hammers were arranged in an arc in front of the paper. Before that, they were arranged in a circle or bucket shape.
That bucket shape is what the QWERTY layout was designed for. Which meant that moving the hammers had some weirder effects on where the keys moved. E.g., near the middle of rows, two adjacent keys would swing hammers from opposite sides of the bucket. Hence the "TY" in "TYPEWRITER" would not jam that machine, which is why they're still near each other.
It would, however jam a post-1900 typewriter.
So basically the short story is: QWERTY was never supposed to be ergonomic, it was supposed to just prevent jams. And even that was a quick mechanical hack, which missed a lot of fairly commong combinations. _And_ even for the purpose of preventing jams it wasn't that useful any more, for any post-1900 typewriter.
Yet, more than 100 years even after the new typewriter design, and half a century after keyboards being used in computers (which don't jam) we're still stuck with the QWERTY idiocy.
Its saving grace, though, is that basically on a computer keyboard _any_ layout works just as well. Neither jams nor alternating hands (which made sense back when you had to hit the keys HARD on a typewriter) are relevant any more. You just type faster on whatever layout you're the most used to. For most people that means QWERTY.
Which means there's little real incentive to switch to a new layout.
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Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Insightful)
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favorite keyboard (Score:5, Interesting)
Product won't fly, details scarce (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a close-up picture [newstandardkeyboards.com].
spacebar (Score:5, Funny)
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The QWERTY Rumor (Score:5, Informative)
A long-lived rumor is that typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to slow down the typist.
If this were true, he would have located popular letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.
What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh", "ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.
This design change actually had the bonus effect of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.
A 1953 U.S. General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the two keyboards. Fingers travel less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".
Re: The QWERTY Rumor (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes it does.
That would be its primary problem.
There is nothing like trying to get people out of a local opitma, even if it is sending them towards disaster. It's like trying to quit smoking; you know it will lead to a better life, but the current cost of a cigarette is so minimal, and the current pleasure of it so high.
QWERTY won't kill your hand in ten minutes or ten days. More like ten years. For some people, maybe even never. But for others, much sooner. I for one would prefer to never get RSI, and I decided after I experienced what turned out to be a false alarm that I never wanted to experience the real thing. Unfortunately, no science has been done in this domain to my knowledge so we are on our own with anecdotes. I note, however, that while I have heard many "I switched from QWERTY to DVORAK and my pain got better" stories, I have never heard an "I switched to DVORAK and my pain got worse until I went back to QWERTY". (People with that story are invited to comment and tell it, please!)
DVORAK probably isn't an answer to all the problems, but it helps a lot. You really do move your hands a lot less. As a secondary result, you will also find yourself actually touchtyping; all my life my hands were always wandering with QWERTY, now they don't, because they don't have to; wandering hands always "wander" into sub-optimal positions, which if you think about it ought to be a characteristic of a properly designed keyboard layout.
It's also about the only ergonomic thing you can do to a laptop.
For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.
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Origins of the new keyboard (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately this did not stop the keys getting sticky.
Difficulty of change (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd have to institute it with people starting to use computers, because it'd be organizational suicide to replace QWERTY w/ DVORAK/alphabetical due to the steep learning curve and the resistance to change.
Personally, I'm great with a QWERTY keyboard, even knowing that it is designed to be an inefficient system and would never change to an alphanumerical keyboard, despite the ultimate benefits. Shortsighted perhaps, but I don't see the benefit to the steep learning curve. I'm willing to bet that many organizations won't be willing to make that step either.
Re:Difficulty of change (Score:5, Interesting)
Just another keyboard layout, however, won't cut it. I learned Dvorak in college, and actually got as good typing Dvorak as I had been typing Qwerty. However, no matter where I went I was constantly running into Qwerty keyboards, and while I was learning Dvorak my Qwerty speeds went down significantly. Even if I could master Dvorak, it would bring my overall average typing speed down because everyone has a Qwerty. I switched back, and my typing speeds went back up.
Offer a truly revolutionary interface paradigm, or give up your illusions about changing the world.
Parent
where's the space bar? (Score:4, Funny)
And where's the space bar?!
From the article (Score:3, Funny)
keyboard "standards" (Score:3, Interesting)
And until there is something that is easy enough to learn without any practice, I doubt that anything will replace QWERTY.
What is this, PR-Newswire-Blog? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does the "Tech-Blog" have no author and read exactly like a corporate press release, trying to cram down my throat why I NEED this keyboard?
It's probably some of the most blatant advertising copy I've read in quite a while. At least have some subtlety to get your product "reviewed" by one of the tech magazines or something...
No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Alphabetizing the keys and giving it a garish Fisher-Price color scheme does not make a keyboard grown up. One of the benefits of a QWERTY keyboard is that a good deal of typing is done with keystrokes alternating between the hands, speeding things up quite a bit. Alphabetical keys may make it easier for "hunt and peck typists as well as senior citizens who have never had a computer because they are challenged by the difficult basic keyboard," but it is far from becoming a standard, since the layout is very inefficient for a touch typist.
This article really reads like a marketing press release.
Re:No thanks (Score:3, Informative)
Keyboard layout not slowing me down. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even number entry is very quick and easy. I just can't see how a new keyboard layout would change typing speed dramatically.
Shitdrummer.
Horrible, just horrible (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the biggest problems with the current AT-keyboard layout is the ordering
of digits on the numeric keypad.
I mean, damn near every other keypad in existance begins with 1 at the top left and works its way down to 9 at the bottom right (think telephone, ATM, eftpos terminal, security keypad).
But for some unfathomable reason the AT keyboard standard has transposed the top and bottom rows, so you get 1 at the bottom left and 9 at the top right, making it much more difficult to master data entry.
Which of these looks more familiar:
1 2 3 7 8 9
4 5 6 4 5 6
7 8 9 1 2 3
0 . 0
I'm betting most will pick the former, since the pattern in the latter is much less recognizable if it's not shown in the context of a computer keyboard.
Re:Horrible, just horrible (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Horrible, just horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfathomable? Take one look at a calculator and it instantly becomes obvious. I can't say for certain since it predates my time, but I'll bet tape calculators used by accountants existed for some time before the numeric keypad was standard on keyboards.
Once that happened, it was far more logical to model the keypad after the calculator pad, since you're more likely to be punching in numbers in a spreadsheet, than punching in phone numbers into the computer.
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Re:Horrible, just horrible (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, damn near every other keypad in existance begins with 1 at the top left and works its way down to 9 at the bottom right (think telephone, ATM, eftpos terminal, security keypad).
What it comes down to is that there are two original progenitors of keypad layouts. The ones you list all go back to Bell Labs design for the Touch-Tone(tm) phone keypad. They even spent a fairly good chunk of change testing for which was more efficient. The results were that for dialing phone numbers, the "123" pad was faster, even for people who were experienced 10-key ("789" keypad) users. The reason is actually quite simple. 10-key is generally used for financial data entry, so the most commonly entered digits (0 and 1) are placed close together where they are easier to hit without looking (some proprioception issue there-- the exact explaination why eludes me). As the 0 is under the thumb, that means the 1 has to be in the bottom row to be close to it. Thus the bottom-up layout.
Dialing telephone numbers, however, isn't something that's done repeatedly. Almost nobody dials a phone by touch*; rather, they look at the dial pad to guide their fingers. The "123" layout is better suited to visual navigation because we're already trained to read from left to right, top to bottom.
Computer keyboards still use the 10-key style layout because the primary use for the keypad is still the same as its ancestors, the calculator and adding machine. Changing it to the telephone-style layout makes no sense as there's already an even easier to use "visual navigation" set of number keys above the letters.
* after 10 years of programming names and numbers into phone systems via the keypad, I actually no longer look at the phone keypad as I use it; but I've only ever noticed that skill in phone techs who install systems.
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More info (Score:5, Informative)
Original press release [yahoo.com]
Engadget reivew [engadget.com]
From the CES show [cesweb.org]
My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.
Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.
And there's.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And there's.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Fewer keys a step back in useability for many (Score:3, Interesting)
Crap! (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The QWERTY keyboard is established tech
2) I see no empirical evidence that alphabetic is easier to learn or use
3) Alphabetic keyboards overwork one area of the keyboard
4) It would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange keys to allow alternating of hands, which speeds typing.
Can anyone list any real reason that this is better? Other than the reduced number of keys, of course.
Who needs 53 keys? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who needs 53 keys? (Score:4, Funny)
Your humor isn't lost on me, but a seasoned vi user will use at least 41 keys, 45 for the inexperienced. The other 8 must be for Emacs.
You must be one those perl monkeys. Otherwise you would need space and return keys.
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Down with keyboards! (Score:4, Informative)
What we really need are alternatives to traditional typing -- ways to communicate with the computer in a more efficent manner.
I'm personally waiting for the wireless implant in my head so I can just "think" the words onto the screen
In the meantime, I've tried out the Twiddler2 chorded keyboard [handykey.com], which is a combination key entry and mouse device. Although a bit slower, it is FAR more comfortable surfing and chording with it than using the traditional keyboard and mouse (though you can forget programming). And it plays nice with OS X and Windows.
If you're interested, there are many other chorded "keyboards" [google.com] as well as many more ergonomic variations to the standard keyboard [google.com]. A useful resource is the exhaustive Alternative Keyboard FAQ [tifaq.com] and this alternative keyboard gallery [griffins.ca].
Pirate keyboard (Score:5, Funny)
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:this will not fly (Score:4, Funny)
And this is called "Standard Keyboard"?'
'And above'.
So it'll work on Linux or OSX but not DOS, right?
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