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The keyboard layout project

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Re: The keyboard layout project

#21

Post by JBiserkov »

guylhem wrote: post #8

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at leas…

>the trouble to manage different keyboard layouts in their head

There are two main ways to type in Bulgarian on a PC: BDS - the National standard and Phonetic - a transliteration of Bulgarian (Cyrillic) letters into English ones.

I've always hated the Phonetic as its even worse than QWERTY. In high-school I forced myself to touch-type BDS so I can use it even on keyboards that don't have it. So when I heard about Dvorak in the university, I immediately decided to learn it since I already had two layouts in my muscle memory, a third one wouldn't be a problem. Initially I was using a Dwerty layout - a Dvorak when typing, a QWERTY when issuing commands (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V), but since it was incompatible with Windows 8 I've abandoned it and am currently running on pure Dvorak.

I think an affinity towards foreign languages helps a lot, but have no research to back it up [besides Bulgarian I learned French (age 5 - 14), German in high school (age 14-19) and English (age 10-19) and recently (26) some Swedish].

Re: The keyboard layout project

#22

Post by Cilvic »

mistercow wrote: post #4

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the p…

I'm building KeyRocket bascially to help people get better with software from their behavior. I love the idea of making everybody transition to a better layout letter by letter and we could help with the data collection if it respects/protects people's privacy. What do you mean that there are 1,089 transitions?

Re: The keyboard layout project

#23

Post by dsego »

mistercow wrote: post #5
dsego wrote: post #2

How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe... But the layout is just one of the problems. The key staggering is also not very ergonomic. There are two cool keyboards featuring symmetric key positioning: - Truly ergonomic keyboard http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php - Type matrix http://typematrix.com

Out of curiosity, do you have any references to support non-staggered keys are superior? I ask because (100 - ε)% of claims about ergonomics are completely unsupported by scientific research.

Not really. But you can take a look at Maltron keyboards, which are non-staggered and also curved. From what I can find on the web it seems that they have done some research.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#24

Post by zokier »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #19
moonboots wrote: post #7

I question whether these keyboard layouts are ideal for programmers. On Qwerty, Colemak, Dvorak, and Workman, the symbol keys are pushed to the periphery of the keyboard. To improve practical typing efficiency, I created and use http://typing.io , which allows you to type real code instead of prose.

Agreed. I'd like to try the colemak layout, but the various brackets and braces need to be handy for programming. Say what you will about qwerty, but at least on the US version the punctuation is decent and reasonably logical on the right.

For programming you should consider that programming languages most likely have evolved to use the particular symbols that are easily available on US keyboard layout, without as much consideration if those symbols are the logical ones to represent whatever function.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#25

Post by guylhem »

flixic wrote: post #9
guylhem wrote: post #8

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at leas…

Hardware is not a problem. Here I am, typing these words with Colemak layout on qwerty keyboard. Software, on the other hand, is a slight annoyance. Colemak (and any other keyboard layout) can easily be available in pretty much any OS except iOS. Also, many games implement their own keyboard input handling, and disregards custom layouts.

Hardware is the problem is you want the figures on your keys to match what they do. (I love such "tiny" details).

In the past I did try various kind of stickers, since it was hard to find my preferred qwerty layout (canadien normalise), but they were just a nuisance.

So I changed to a apple canadian qwerty layout (not many differences), it's just perfect - hardware support and software support out of the box.

And whenever I get a us qwerty I can still be efficient.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#26

Post by guylhem »

JBiserkov wrote: post #21
guylhem wrote: post #8

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at leas…

>the trouble to manage different keyboard layouts in their head There are two main ways to type in Bulgarian on a PC: BDS - the National standard and Phonetic - a transliteration of Bulgarian (Cyrillic) letters into English ones. I've always hated the Phonetic as its even worse than QWERTY. In high-school I forced myself to touch-type BDS so I can use it even on keyboards that don't have it. So when I heard about Dvo…

It's funny we have quite similar experiences but you picked up dvorak instead of qwerty - Whatever floats your boat they say :-)

I did briefly consider Dvorak but I wanted a full support and it wasn't there (ex: bios, bootloader ; for generic laptops) when I made my choice.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#27

Post by MTGandP »

mistercow wrote: post #4

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the p…

Hi, writer of The Keyboard Layout Project here. I'm well aware of the limitations of scoring a layout based on crude heuristics, and I'm trying to collect some good data. Right now I have some data from a few layouts that I've collected using [Amphetype](http://code.google.com/p/amphetype/), which records speed and accuracy for characters, trigraphs, and words. I'm curious, what program did you use to collect typing data?

If you or anyone else has typing data or is willing to collect some, please post a comment on my blog (preferably [here](http://mtgap.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/wanted-typing-data/)) and I will email you.

Ideally, we would have typing data not just from QWERTY and carefully-designed layouts, but randomized layouts. All the layouts people use (except QWERTY) share design patterns—putting the most common keys on the home row, etc. We can get more accurate data if we know how people type on random layouts.

I plan on using a little grant money from my school to pay some people to learn randomized keyboard layouts and then record typing data. If anyone's willing to do this for free, I'd love to have your help; again, you can contact me by leaving a comment on my [blog](https://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/).

Data collection with a web app is also a good idea. I don't plan on writing such a thing any time soon, but if anyone does plan to, I think it would be very useful.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#28

Post by MTGandP »

techiferous wrote: post #11
mistercow wrote: post #4

For years, I've toyed with a similar idea to this. I feel like a lot of work on this has relied on some pretty crude heuristics like "rolls" and "alternation". I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize about these, and I think it's also short-sighted because there are probably more specific patterns that affect typing speed. So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the p…

Being a dvorak user, I must say, the "rolls" are extremely comfortable and fun. I love typing the words church, tenth, school, etc.

That's why my keyboard layouts try to optimize for rolls more than any other layout I've seen. The most recent version has a number of very nice rolls, TH, IN, ST, and some other less-frequent digraphs.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#29

Post by zokier »

guylhem wrote: post #8

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at leas…

> good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....)

> quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive)

This is actually very good point. The problem with qwerty is that there is no single qwerty. Almost every country has some weird variation of it (and some countries have several!). This causes problems on two fronts: 1) you need different hardware for every country, which means that niche/high-end keyboards (or laptops etc) become harder to get/use. 2) Software (and programming languages) designed to be used on US layout are pita on national layouts as punctuation etc symbols are shuffled around.

Re: The keyboard layout project

#30

Post by MTGandP »

guylhem wrote: post #8

Just what we need - yet another standard! Maybe it will be marginally better (like all the others attemps before - gogole around to see the approaches and results) - but still not enough to fully replace good old qwerty. Dvorak, with a larger support failed. How do you think it can succeed? The advantage of being first in the market, and now having a large use based, let me think you'd need to have a solution at leas…

I'm not trying to design yet another standard. I recommend that people use [Colemak](http://colemak.com/)—even though it's not as popular as Dvorak right now, it's easier to learn, so I think it has a better chance of overtaking QWERTY in the long run.

I design keyboard layouts because it's fun. I want to discover what it means for a layout to be the best. It's more of a scientific curiosity than a desire to make things better—although I do think QWERTY is in need of replacement.

> qwerty might be 1 to 5% less optimal than something else - let's even say 10%.

It's definitely a lot worse than that. If you're just talking about finger travel distance, for example, most modern keyboards (Colemak, [Arensito](http://www.pvv.org/~hakonhal/main.cgi/keyboard), my keyboard) do about three times better.

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