How about this - The Workman Keyboard Layout
<a href="http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-different-philosophy-in-designing-keyboard-layouts/" rel="nofollow">http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/a-differe...</a><p>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:<p>- Truly ergonomic keyboard
<a href="http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.trulyergonomic.com/store/index.php</a><p>- Type matrix
<a href="http://typematrix.com" rel="nofollow">http://typematrix.com</a>
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.<p>So my idea was to collect data on all keystroke transitions. There are 1,089 of these on the part of the keyboard that you would optimize for. Typing 5 minutes a day at a relaxed pace would be enough time to cover each of those 8 times in a month, so collecting enough data to work with would be feasible pretty quickly. I was then going to take a big textual corpus of English, and the total of all transition times would serve as the fitness function.<p>I had the data collection program done, and was starting to collect data, when I decided I should redo it with triples (of which there are 35,937). Then the length of the data collection process I was looking at became really daunting, and I lost interest in the project.<p>What I'd quite like to do, though, would be to crowdsource the data collection using a web app. Then I could get good three-key data and not have it biased to my own personal quirks.
As some already have pointed out, internationalization can be somewhat tricky on alternative keyboard layouts.<p>As it is, I find that languages with extra letters often move some extra symbols (like {[]}) into combinations with peripheral keys, thus making coding a chore as compared to on US keyboards.<p>What I would like to see is if anybody has a good way of getting rid of both the "key" and "board" part of keyboards. Electronics and manufacturing is so cheap today that this could be feasible to produce on a large scale.<p>For those who have a sense of rhythm, I'm thinking a combination of twisting/pushing/tapping/whatever moves that in combination would indicate a given symbol. This would take some focused effort to learn, but after that...<p>The form factor could be a ball, a pair of gloves, a combination with pedals, a guitar-like thing, whatever. Keyboards would make a cheap fallback in settings where such a contraption would be inappropriate.<p>Has anyone else thought of something similar?
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?<p>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 least 5 times better and easy to learn (less than 1 day), just for people to "consider" it due to the migration costs.<p>Fun story- I come from France, where everybody uses the azerty layout for some copyright reasons initially IIRC (qwerty was copyrighted, but if you switched some letters around it suddenly was not copyright infringement) and now for historical reason.<p>In high school, after examining the situation, I quickly decided to go with qwerty for some simple reasons :<p>- easier to find on new hardware (say, laptop, smartphone with a physical keyboard, etc)<p>- large software support (in the bios, now uefi, - not a single thing to change)<p>- good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....)<p>- 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)<p>You know the saying - you can't change others. You can only change yourself.<p>So I figured out the best hack was to hack my tastes, not the keyboard ;-)<p>qwerty might be 1 to 5% less optimal than something else - let's even say 10%. But being suported on 100% of the hardware and software makes all the difference.<p>Now when I need some hardware on ebay I'm sure I'll find a good qwerty solution. My french friends bitch and moan about the lack of azerty support, and the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users.
I was kind of hoping this would be a petition for keyboard manufacturers...<p>I still don't get how shitty keyboards are still included in laptops and keyboard designs. I mean I remember using one keyboard with a backspace key the size of a number key and one where the restart button was near home.
If anyone's interested, I embarked on a similar project for one-finger typing for users with motor disabilities: <a href="http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228" rel="nofollow">http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110228</a>
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 <a href="http://typing.io" rel="nofollow">http://typing.io</a>, which allows you to type real code instead of prose.
I don't think QWERTY is as bad as it has been portrayed.<p>See <a href="http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html</a>