- What's wrong with the way things are?
- We already know how to do so much better
- So why isn't better the norm?
- Why not go even deeper?
- A theory on realistic widespread change
QWERTY was designed to accommodate for the limitations of typewriters. Technology has completely evolved past those limitations, and yet we are still using QWERTY keyboards.
There are two dimensions to the problem: physical layout, and glyph mapping. By phsical layout, I mean the relative positions of the keyboard keys in space, and by glyph mapping, I mean the choice of which key is used to type which letter. This is usually referred to as "keyboard layout", but I want a term that can't be confused with physical layout.
QWERTY has three main rows of keys. Those rows are staggered- there is no vertical alignment. But fingers are not staggered. When we extend or retract our fingers, their natural path of motion for the fingertips is symmetrically straight, with a slight fanout.
Consider the T key in QWERTY. It is one of the most common used letters, and yet is placed in a position that requires stretching away from the natural resting position of the hands.
If you ignore the fact of letters being physically printed on keys, glyph mappings are usually handled at the software level. Each operating system has their own set of ways of doing it.
We can do so much better, and we already figured out how. The road has been paved in many different good directions.
Here are just a few:
- Kinesis Advantage
- Ergodox / Iris
- Ortholinear
Here are some of the top search results:
- https://github.com/binarybottle/engram
- http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
- https://github.com/michaeldickens/Typing
- https://github.com/wincent/yak-layout
- https://github.com/MadRabbit/keyboard-genetics
- https://workmanlayout.org/
- https://www.draketo.de/software/keyboard-layout-evolution.html
It kind of boggles my mind how there are so many smart solutions to problem, and yet, I had never heard of them.
Aside from the technology used, each of the above solutions differ in their design goals, or accomodation for various design goals, which include:
- Minimizing differences from QWERTY
- Minimizing consecutive same-finger or same-hand key presses.
- Favouring usage of certain fingers
- Minimizing finger travel distance
- Aligning comfortable/easy key-to-key transitions with frequent glyph transitions (bigrams).
QWERTY is taught at a young age, and all physical keyboards and operating systems default to QWERTY. Those two realities reinforce each other, creating QWERTY's death grip on the world. Most people don't question it or even think about it. We just accept it and use it to get things done.
-
Since there isn't a huge fuss about it, keyboard manufacturers and laptop manufacturers don't have an incentive to offer consumers other physical layouts. That pushes better physical layouts into the hobby domain, or only being needed if you have serious wrist-strain problems.
-
For an individual person, learning a glyph mapping is a big investment. In many ways, it's like learning to ride a bike or speak a language. When learning a new keyboard layout, you're up against all your previously built up muscle memory, and you have the choice to either forget QWERTY (and subsequently have a much harder (or impossible) time using any device that doesn't belong to you), or maintain fluency with multiple keyboard layouts (which is not easy, and generally not worth the effort).
There are alternative technologies with either great advantages over conventional physical keyboards, or are just really cool: Speech-to-text, stenography, touchscreen + tablets, "holographic" laser-projected keyboards, etc.
Speech-to-text is extremely convenient. It's fairly hands free with zero learning curve. But it can have a harder time recognizing a person's accent or domain-specific proper nouns, and requires a fairly clean audio signal. You might not be able to use it in a loud place without a mic, and you probably wouldn't want to use it to write an essay in a quiet library or office with other people trying to focus. I personally would avoid using it with strangers closeby just for the sake of not annoying them, or because I don't want to broadcast a conversation to them. It's much like using the phone.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/13/139803/why-we-cant-quit-the-qwerty-keyboard/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEsqY4MH40s&ab_channel=janMisali
Have you ever seen a Lichtenberg figure? With some help, electricity will navigate paths through a medium as resistant to conducting electricity as wood "choosing" (completing a circuit with) the path of least resistance. The less conductive the material, the more charge is necessary to complete the circuit (or something like that. I'm not an electrical engineer).
Change is hard. The bigger the change, the less likely it is to be adopted. That applies both for changing people who use keyboards and for changing people who make keyboards.
But we have already built up lots of charge: Historical reasons aside, technology has long advanced past the point where the continued widespread usage of staggered QWERTY keyboards would still be justifiable. The charge has already begun feeling its way about for paths to complete the circuit: people have designed more ergonomic physical layouts and glyph mappings. We just haven't made that magical connection yet. We haven't found the path(s?) of least resistance to realistically bringing about widespread change for the better.