You have no idea the weird looks people gave me as I brought out the freaking "Keyboard From Hell" into my lectures. At least it was quieter than that typewriter kid!
I wonder how an ergonomic keyboard would fare. I mean those that are split in the middle. Probably won't have an impact as one would still use the 10 finger system if its known and the distance would still be the same, i think.
@@matthiasbecker5064 it actually makes a Huge difference to the shoulders and wrists (and thus most of the pain and injury in the arm). The fully split ones connected by a cable so you can actually position them properly for your body rather than some ficticious average anyway. rearanging the keys to be ortholinier (that is, the rows are lined up rather than staggered) also makes a huge difference to finger and wrist strain even without changing what position any individual key occupies. (it also takes between single digit hours and single digit days to get used to the difference, with the biggest one being x and c being displaced enough that one ends up hitting the wrong one a lot.)
Dworak did not only optimize the finger travel-time and a frequency, he also optimized the layout such that the fingers would alternate on the most frequent two-letter combinations. Like ensuring that E and R or T and H would be on opposite sides of the keyboard
Agreed. Dvorak also optimized for anatomy in that your hand rolls better one way than the other, so things like SN, ST, SH, and TH are easier to type. But this favors primarily English. Still, glad to see that even with James' more limited analysis, my decision in college to switch to Dvorak has been at least 26% a good idea.
As someone who switched from QWERTY to DVORAK around 4 months ago, I can attest that switching a keyboard layout and getting used to it again takes a really long time. I was at around 80 WPM with QWERTY and it took roughly 2 and a half months (maybe closer to 3 months) to get back to that speed with DVORAK. One thing that is beneficial with DVORAK is less pain in my wrists when writing for a long time.
Same, but I did it back in 2015 (holy crap it's been 8 years). I remember my first few days on Dvorak I typed at a miserable 22 KPM (KPM!! Not WPM) and looked like a complete idiot. But it's totally worth it when I look back - I could only do ~40 WPM on QWERTY and now can do 100 WPM on Dvorak rather comfortably. Edit: just to clarify, I'm not claiming Dvorak is intrinsically faster. Reduced finger movement is a very real benefit, but it contributes rather little to actually being fast. Being familiar with the words you are typing matters much much more. That being said, I do think Dvorak has one major advantage, in that it encourages the use of all fingers by design. It would be very difficult to learn Dvorak "wrong" (as in typing with 4/5/6 fingers instead of all 8), whereas it's all too common with QWERTY.
I was about 50wpm with qwerty, but I couldn't touch type. I figured if I was going to learn to touch type, I would do it on a better keyboard than qwerty. Now I'm a comfortable 90wpm on Dvorak. No ragrets
huh, my experience is that it took me maybe a month at most to get fully used to the new layout, and that was mostly just catching up the last percent of performance. Granted, i use colemak specifically because it leaves some keys alone, so i can switch between colemak and qwerty without quite as much grinding of gears.
Switching to more ergonomic keyboard layouts, as well as the physical key arrangement itself, has done wonders for me. Started with Colemak, then to Colemak DH, and ended up using Canary, later switching to Canary Matrix with a column-staggered board. I'm now switching to Aptmak which is optimised for 30-key (23332+2) boards, using the Berylline keyboard next month, and I'm very excited! I might start exploring embedded stenography at a later date, too.
A few years back I tried experimenting with alternative layouts, like Dvorak and Colemak. The biggest issue I had, apart from getting familiar with the new layout, is that the optimizations are language dependant. Typing may improve for one language, but gets worse for another. As someone who is multilingual it was no overall improvement for me. It still seems that qwerty is the least worse layout for me.
starting at 11:35, only moving a few keys around that benefit your language and vocabulary can already provide a big improvement. No need for a full layout swap. You can use a few tools to edit your keyboard layout and then just pop the keycaps to move them around or use a sharpie and some tape.
@@TheSliderW It can provide a big improvement in terms of one language but at the same time make hinder input in other languages. Say, you move J to the top row (like Colemak does) because it is not as frequent in English, and you put N there instead. However when i am typing Chinese in Wubi, J key stands for 是 which means ‘is’, a very frequent character, and now i need to go to the top row to type it, and in the home row i have 民 which is a less useful character. But multilingual people use different languages all the time, and we’d rather not have a separate layout for each language because not only constantly switching layouts is inconvenient, but also adaptation to every single layout to reach good typing speed takes longer than a month, while overall gains are only marginal.
@@damian_madmansnest Interesting. I havent though much about asian Languages and that does make it trickier indeed. But then maybe it could be possible to keep that word/kanji/syllab on the previous position if it makes sense while still swapping the keys for your other language ? I don't know. I'm in a similar situation but maybe weirder as I'm used to 3 keyboard layouts AZERTY, QWERTY and QWERTZ for legacy reasons as I travel a lot in Europe. Not to mention one of the laptops is an Aussie macbook with it's own weird key combinations for European accents and such which funnily enough is still intuitive compared to dedicated accentuated vowels as found on AZERTY and QWERTZ. I also set up my smartphone to swap layouts and dictionnaires when typing in the corresponding language so I can confirm, you get used to it. It's like when you talk to natives from other countries, you start naturally thinking in their language as you speak. No clue which one is best though. X )
@@damian_madmansnest yeah on paper we should have one layout per language as well as one layout per keyboard form factor. but it can be a lot to learn so in practice we have to make compromises and balance. That doesn't mean qwerty is good by any mean, just that the dvorak-style keyboards use algorithms with a single language. Colemak is particularly bad at that. It got a lot of critics. Even its qwerty compromise is often negated by modern software allowing to change the shortcuts. As a native french speaker, I had this issue writing English and German with the bépo layout (which is almost complete for occasionally typing every Latin script languages) until I used a symmetrical keyboard and programmed Z and W (the [ and ] us-qwerty keys) to be on the left side. I just keep a qwerty label for the badly written programs hardwired to this legacy layout so in the end I won't touch anything else than those two.
I'd caution against attributing the health hazards of typing to the QWERTY layout. Only a fraction of people actually touch type with proper form and a very large portion of injuries results from bending the wrist back too far, often as a result of having the keyboard too close to the edge of the desk.
The QWERTY layout, as mentioned, was designed for typewriters to prevent jamming, not necessarily for optimizing typing speed or minimizing hand strain. While it has become the standard, some argue that it may not be the most efficient layout for modern computer keyboards. Challenges with QWERTY: High Finger Movement: QWERTY often requires long reaches and high finger movement, potentially leading to fatigue and strain, especially during extended typing sessions. Imbalanced Load: Some fingers are used more frequently than others in the QWERTY layout, which could contribute to muscle imbalances and discomfort. Not Optimized for Modern Devices: QWERTY was not designed with modern computer keyboards in mind. Alternative layouts like Dvorak or Colemak aim to reduce finger movement and potentially lower the risk of strain. Considerations: Adaptation Period: Transitioning to a new layout can be challenging and may initially impact typing speed and comfort. However, some individuals find the long-term benefits worth the initial learning curve. Individual Variation: Hand anatomy, typing habits, and personal preferences vary among individuals. What works well for one person may not work as effectively for another. Ergonomic Practices: Regardless of the layout, adopting ergonomic practices is crucial. This includes maintaining a neutral wrist position, taking breaks, and using ergonomic keyboards that suit your needs. Personal Exploration: Try Alternative Layouts: If you're open to experimentation, consider trying alternative layouts like Dvorak or Colemak. Keep in mind that the benefits may vary from person to person. Ergonomic Accessories: Explore ergonomic keyboards, key switches, and other accessories that promote a more comfortable typing experience. Listen to Your Body: Pay attention to any signs of discomfort or strain. If you experience persistent issues, it's essential to consult with a healthcare professional. General hand injuries caused by keyboard use, including the QWERTY layout, are often associated with repetitive strain, poor ergonomics, and excessive or prolonged typing. Some common types of hand injuries related to keyboard use include: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Carpal tunnel syndrome is a condition that results from pressure on the median nerve in the wrist. Prolonged and repetitive keyboard use with improper hand positioning can contribute to this syndrome. Tendonitis: Tendonitis involves inflammation of the tendons, which can occur in the hands and wrists due to repetitive movements during typing. Trigger Finger: Trigger finger is a condition where one of the fingers gets stuck in a bent position, often caused by repetitive gripping and typing. De Quervain's Tenosynovitis: This condition affects the tendons on the thumb side of the wrist and can be aggravated by repetitive hand and wrist movements, such as those involved in typing. Hand and Wrist Strain: General hand and wrist strain, characterized by discomfort, pain, or stiffness, can result from prolonged and repetitive keyboard use without proper ergonomic considerations. Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI): RSIs are conditions that result from repetitive and forceful movements. They can affect various parts of the hand, fingers, and wrist. Preventing these injuries involves adopting good ergonomic practices: Proper Hand Positioning: Maintain a neutral wrist position while typing, avoiding excessive bending or extension of the wrists. Ergonomic Keyboard and Mouse: Use ergonomic keyboards and mice designed to reduce strain and promote natural hand positions. Regular Breaks: Take regular breaks to stretch and relax the hands and wrists during extended typing sessions. Correct Desk Setup: Ensure a proper desk and chair setup to maintain a comfortable and ergonomic typing posture. Stretching Exercises: Incorporate hand and wrist stretching exercises into your routine to promote flexibility. and Even with perfect hand positioning, individuals may still be susceptible to some hand-related issues. These issues can include: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Despite proper hand positioning, factors such as prolonged typing sessions or pre-existing conditions can contribute to the development of carpal tunnel syndrome. Tendonitis: Repetitive typing, even with optimal hand positioning, can lead to inflammation of the tendons, resulting in tendonitis. Trigger Finger: The repetitive nature of typing, even with good hand positioning, can contribute to trigger finger, a condition where a finger gets stuck in a bent position. De Quervain's Tenosynovitis: This condition, affecting the tendons on the thumb side of the wrist, can still occur with repetitive hand movements, despite maintaining proper hand positioning. Hand and Wrist Strain: Extended typing sessions, even with optimal hand positioning, can still lead to general hand and wrist strain. Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI): The cumulative effect of repetitive movements, even with perfect hand positioning, may result in RSIs affecting various parts of the hand, fingers, and wrist. It's important to note that the risk and severity of these issues can be significantly reduced with proper hand positioning and overall ergonomic practices. key word "reduced" not completely mitigated. but "I'd caution against attributing the health hazards of typing to the QWERTY layout" I would say your wrong by that statement.
@@DanielFolsom the only part that disagrees with the video is typewriter part which whether you want to agree with it or not it's true, they made it so bad so people would not type as fast.
@@FBI_42069Again, you're not disputing his points ... you're justing saying "WELL IT'S TRUE." Also, if you try Googling this, you can find a ton of high-quality sources (including, for example, Smithsonian Magazine) noting that it's, in fact, not true-it's a widely spread myth.
10:00 This layout demonstrates the need to choose your performance metric carefully. No penalty for same finger movement meant that for many common bigrams the right index finger has to hit two different keys in quick succession. E.g. for AN (2% of bigrams), and also (in order of decreasing frequency) EN, ND, ED, AL, LE, DE, NE, and EA (0.69% of bigrams). For the word AND the same finger has to hit 3 keys!
this is why i like colemak, it's especially optimized with movements in mind, and god damn it tends to feel extremely smooth to type. Sentences are just a series of rolling movements and one finger basically never has to jump around awkwardly
@@swedneck Nice! Which version do you like best? I'm personally using Colemak-DH. I find that with qwerty, my fingers tend to hover above the keyboard, while in colemak they can rest flat on the home row keys. Love the inward rolls.
@@cymno i think what i use is colemak-DH wide mod altered to be more in line with the standard swedish layout (it has åäö and the normal for us placement of symbols) And yeah it's rather funny how my typing style instantly changes when i move back to a qwerty keyboard, with colemak i rest on the home keys and all fingers move equally little, but with qwerty i end up mostly typing with the pointer and middle fingers and the right hand flies around its half of the keyboard to hunt for the right key..
@@swedneck I do type 10 finger on qwerty, but the high frequency of keys not on the home row makes me hover my hands above the keyboard instead of resting the fingers on the keys
Dear James, After watching a video by someone on this topic from a year ago and getting excited about the topic but not content with how far they took it, I thought about modifying their code myself to take it far enough. I never finished the project and it just kind of sat there at the end of the day, but I went UA-cam searching again today and saw this awesome video. I'm so happy you put in the work regarding the code and made it available for others (I'm not really a coder lol), so I can modify it to use my own dataset and generate my own unique keyboard. You did the heavy lifting for others, and did a bang up job with this extremely good video. Infinite thanks for your great help, -Carmen
I really appreciate that you went to the Northern Presidetial range and Mount Washington in the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire to explain hill climbing. Of course the Chrystal Cascade waterfall was a nice touch too! Great work on the whole project! Keep climbing.
Glad to see you are still enjoying Boston and tossing in some White Mountains! In addition to enjoying your content, I also enjoy trying to figure out where you are standing.
I switched to Dvorak probably 20 years ago and still love it. When I saw the title of this video, I knew I had to watch it for at least some mention of Dvorak. You didn't disappoint!
7:02 - I'm confused about the image of Dvorak. The image is of Antonin Dvořák, the composer. At first I thought it was the joke but the image is also labelled August Dvorak which in all seems like a mistake in the graphic.
Well if someone can't even find the picture of August Dvorak and uses the picture of Antonin Dvořák instead, how trustworthy are they in the first place? I doubt everything they say, not only because I haven't had any pains related to typing, and I grew up with a QWERTY keyboard and have been using one for the past 26 years.
@@livedandletdie Well, be happy about it and shut the fuck up. I've had to go on sick leave multiple times, for multiple weeks before because of my RSI. Switching to Dvorak took like a month, but I've had a lot less wrist pain since then, and no phases where I've had to go on sick leave because I physically couldn't type anymore
@@livedandletdie, everything else I know about Dvorak and Qwerty is pretty in line with the video so I don’t really have issues with that. As for whether you have any paints that’s just anecdotal evidence but I can guarantee you that Dvorak is more comfortable layout.
An MIT student did something similar about 10 years ago. I took their "most efficient layout" and modified it to keep my most common hotkeys in place (zxcv). I also gave the semi-colon a strong position as I use it in programming a lot. That's been my layout for 8+ years. I'm the only person in the world who uses this.
I’ve used Dvorak for 16 years and love it. Along the way I also learned Maltron which was super wacky with the letter E on the thumb. Maltron was supposedly developed to make learning it easier. I was touch typing within a day! It was uncanny! I gave it up because it used a nonstandard keyboard and I couldn’t use the layout on a laptop … so Dvorak it is.
@@v0id_d3m0n Yes, and that’s how I use Dvorak. Maltron uses 2 separate thumb keys that don’t exist on a laptop… so if you mapped it, it would defeat the point of having the letter ‘e’ on your thumb.
@@shApYT Tom made an update video saying that this is the last year he is doing consistent uploads. So, he isn't going away permanently, but there will be a rather large hole in tom's content style to fill.
Kinda felt sad seeing the thumbnail and then watching 2 seconds of the video. Knew instantly it's at the very least inspired by Tom Scott, and well we all know Tom's plans for his channel.
one thing to note is that finger distance is not the only thing you want to think about when you're looking for a new keyboard. for example, dvorak was designed to increase the amount of 'drumming' (meaning you alternate between your left and right hands when typing) and colemak was designed to increase the amount of 'rolling' (using consecutive fingers like, like pinky-ring-middle-index or the other way around). personally, I have trouble with lots of drumming, so switching to colemak was a huge benefit for me. also, another thing to think about is using layers. for example, on normal keyboards we use two layers, one with lowercase and one with uppercase. there isn't really any reason to only limit this to two layers; and I for example use three for lowercase, uppercase, and numbers/punctuation. additionally, you briefly mentioned the orthographic keyboard, but that's not the only improvement you can make to the layout; for example if you then proceed to split the keyboard down the middle you can have your wrists at a much more natural angle instead of twisting them so much. personally, my favorite style of keyboard is the dactyl manuform, as it also shifts the columns to account for the different lengths of your fingers, curves the surface inwards so that your fingers always point directly at the keys, and lets your normally useless thumbs actually do things by having modifier keys next to the thumbs instead of having to move your whole hand whenever you want to use a key combination.
no wonder DVORAK sucks; drumming is not a good quality to have. For instance, I can type 'star wars' with the left hand entirely. QWERTY is the superior layout, because it finds the perfect balance between drumming and non-drumming; Colemak sucks because prioritizing 'rolling' is also stupid; Again, QWERTY is superior, as it doesn't prioritize a single thing, but it BALANCES THEM in the perfect way. People seem to get stuck on one concept and then try to min/max it like oafs, not realizing that BALANCE IS THE KEY
This guy keyboards Tbh before this video I thought qwerty is worse than t actually is but now that I can just roll my fingers to type qwerty I can see why it's so good
@@pyropulseIXXI As someone who switched from QWERTY to Colemak, I disagree. Drumming/rolling aside, QWERTY has a lot of commonly used keys placed in very awkward positions. The primary benefit of Colemak for me is bringing the most commonly used keys to the home row or close to it. I used to have genuine finger pain typing on QWERTY sometimes, which I fortunately don't experience anymore.
Yeah, drumming leads me occasionally into a typo where every vowel in a word is 1 letter later than it should be. I've only found inward rolling useful (pinky to index), trying to do it outwards sucks in comparison. Qwerty puts all the useful letters in the middle of the top row and that just doesn't make sense for homerow typing, when I did use qwerty it was with hands on sert yuil most of the time
That's so cool! Love your approach in design. I also started from some of your same hypothesis and designed a quite unorthodox keyboard but for mobile devices. Letter layout is totally customizable, you could use it adapting the layout of your world worst keyboard if you feel your fingers haven't had enough yet.
I had my own little version of this recently and the "could feel my neurons rewiring" is the BEST way of putting it! I had to start using a left handed trackball because of a bad injury, and I had headaches from just that! You mustve had some serious brainache with a whole keyboard.
stumbled on this channel today, I really appreciate the odd outdoor shots with the background noise. It makes the video much more interesting in some way, gives it a bit more contrast
I feel the urge to say that the shown photograph is of composer Antonin Dvorak, not the typewriter guy. Besides that, I loved the video, you have great style and delivery. Keep them coming!
Super Duper great and well made video!!! I can't express how important this video. It's like a guide on how to know exactly which shoe to wear, or how to brush your teeth faster and more easily for a healthier mouth. People will type using their weak fingers more if they do even a bit of the research you did, using their brains for a bit, outside the comfort zone, taking an effort to learn. People will enjoy typing more after diving into it even if just for two hours. Typing will become healthier for the tendons and ligaments and joints. I'm glad I am alive around people who do these things just for the sake of it. You are an exemplar of a person in my view. I think you'll be the first content creator I'll support, for that. You're pursuing an interest and a good time, producing eventually a good piece of content. I wish you good rest and that you will be lead by your passion.
You must take the space, enter and caps key into the mix, they are also part of a keyboard and can have better or worse positions or sizes, and sizing each key should be part of making a new keyboard :)
Years ago I switched to colemak. While not faster from my experience, typing has become much more enjoyable and comfortable. I figured if I'm going to be typing for decades, spending six months to learn a new layout wasn't that bad.
I wanted to learn how to touch type properly using proper posture and positioning, decided to try one of the other popular typing layouts at the same time since I already was learning something completely new, I went with Colemak mod-dh and haven't looked back, and I can touch type now too!
I've wanted to learn colemak for years now, but I can't justifty forcing myself to daily use both qwerty and colemak, and I'm not able to bring my own keyboard to work. :(
I started getting the first twinges of RSI in the late 90s, so I switched to Dvorak... kinda. I kept Dvorak as an alternate layout for over a decade, using it most of the time (unless I needed to type fast, like chatting). I never learned it well. Finally in the early 2010s I took QWERTY off my keyboard layouts in Windows, and I've been Dvorak ever since. I have a hardware keyboard now that maps to the Dvorak layout natively, so I don't have to deal with weird language-translation issues on Windows (games that ignore it, remote desktop tools that mess it up, etc). If I had it to do again, I'd choose Colemak, because it's the same benefits as Dvorak, with a much lower learning curve. Switching never made me faster, but my RSI definitely benefitted; despite playing PC games at night and being a programmer by day, I have no issues with RSI (and I'm now pushing 50). Using a layout that's easier on my tendons has had a materially long-term benefit on my wrist health, so I do recommend it to anyone willing to retrain their touch-typing reflexes.
I had a client once who could not figure out what was wrong with their computer. $9000 US for a Thinkpad in 1996 was a lot, so we were very invested in tracking down the issue. They had inadvertently switched the keyboard driver to use the Dvorak rather than QWERTY layout. Since none of us had ever actually used a Dvorak keyboard it took checking a lot of hardware before realizing the actual issue.
@@slicerabbit6166computers were like VR HMDs back then, just more Americans were more richer than the rest of the world. The best VR headset costs $10k today
I've had issues replicating passwords on systems that anticipate a US keyboard when i'm using a UK keyboard, or visa versa. Germany swaps Y and Z, making their keyboards "QWERTZ" which is.. fun. There's always that moment of realisation where you're like "oh, I can't believe my lying eyes, that's right."
@@slicerabbit6166 No, we got it switched back to properly match the hardware. Yeah, those machines were like first to marked DVD drives, military grade hardware encryption (the hard drive could ONLY work in the matched machine), top Active Matrix screens. They were not for the average consumer.
well, well made. Normally I'd move on with my life but you presented the information so well and at such a pleasing tempo that I found myself watching anyway. Reminds me of that old British show "connections".
I like the idea of new keyboard layouts, but what always gets me is that I want the new layouts on all keyboards. If we could get everyone in the world to swap E and J around, I'd be onboard, but I'd probably get frustrated fast if only ~50% of the keyboards I interact with made such a change.
As someone that speaks another language, I say that you get used to it. It's mildly annoying when I get in my hands a computer with a english instead of a portuguese pattern (we use qwerty too, but with extra buttons for diacritics), but as long as the changes are small, such as it would be the case for the J and E swap, you can get used to it in minutes.
How often do you use other people’s computers? Yes, having different layouts on different computers is an issue, but for many people it shouldn’t really be an issue as they spend most of the time on computers they can configure to their preferences. I basically forgot Qwerty but it doesn’t affect me much since I need to use it only once in a blue moon.
@@matth3us I have enough trouble with US vs UK keyboards. I learned a decade ago, and my right pinkie still automatically heads for the @ key on a certain UK keyboards (;/: on a US board) whenever I need to use one.
I'm in France now and going between qwerty (my computers) and azerty (on other computers) is incredibly frustrating. If qwerty is arbitrary and sub-optimal, azerty is doubly so because at least most of the world uses qwerty. Even China uses qwerty for crying out loud!
Indeed! In French I use AZERTY, but got used to QWERTY as well over the years, and it’s handy for typing out Japanese on top of English. The punctuation is not the same, but it’s be a whole other ordeal if ALL the letters were completely switched around!
@@alfred5454I would suggest we share many of the keyboards we interact with thus must learn the common orientation. Also, I'm too lazy to reorganize the letters to my preferred layout.
The 8 key change one looks the most interesting for someone that codes and still needs to use commas, dots and semicolons a lot, really nicely made video btw, makes me kind of wish I finished my ml phd this stuff is so much fun to play with.
A long time ago I wrote (in Shockwave-anybody remember that?) an Auto-Optimizing Keyboard. It kept the last bunch of letters you typed and moved them to the optimal locations in the home row … as you typed.
Holy shit I haven't thought about Shockwave in YEARS! That was a trippy brain blast, suddenly memories of playing bad games as a teenager came flooding back
I've been touch typing for over 30 years. I used Dvorak for a while, when working from home in the 90's, but that made it a nightmare to use a keyboard anywhere else. When I worked on other people's computers around the turn of the century (I made a lot of money from y2k fears) I reverted to QWERTY. I would love it if we could agree on an optimized layout and get everyone on board - particularly moving vowels to the home keys - but that's the real challenge; IF WE COULD AGREE. We need the optimized keyboard to be ambidextrous so we don't totally alienate lefties. We need it to be optimized for all languages that use the Latin alphabet - or it won't be widely adopted. Meet those requirements and I'll be glad to try it out and support efforts to make it a standard. I'm not interested in a keyboard that is optimized for English because I mostly type in French.
first video I've seen from this channel, and the information is so detailed, placed in an interesting way and with such a nice edit. Subscribed and watching more immediately.
I was always a fast typist on QWERTY but at some point I started to hit a speed limit and also noticed that going on full speed caused "typewriter's cramps" (tenovaginitis) more and more often the older I got. So I switched to Dvorak. Once I was able to reach the same speed as before on Dvorak, I noticed that it was way easier on my hands. However, Dvorak allowed me to break my former speed limit and become even faster than before; so fast, that I could write as fast as people normally talk with ease (I could transcribe what people say in real time and without using shorthand). The problem is that a few years later my cramps came back because I think I was going too fast now. It got so bad that at some point I was just looking for a keyboard layout that would not cause me any pain, which is more important than speed, and so I ended up with Colemak. I cannot achieve my former speeds with Colemak but thanks to the fact that Colemak is optimized for even smaller finger movement and more pleasant rolling motions, whereas Dvorak is more optimized on hand alteration, I can now type at pretty good speed and with almost no pain, if I don't overdo it and use the right keyboard. As for the right keyboard, a split ergonomic keyboard works best for me and a low height one (like a notebook keyboard) works better than a half height or full height one and also way better than a mechanical ones, as I need way less force to push down the keys (almost no force at all) and the keys also travel a way shorter distances, so there's way less finger movement with only a minimal amount of force applied and that let's me type for hours and hours, every day of the week with no bigger issues, as that's part of my job.
@@kennethng9653They don't need to be far apart, they just need to match the natural position of my hands. It's not necessary for my forearms to be parallel to each other, like the two sides of the letter H. It's fine if I move my hands closer together so that my forearms form the shape of the two sides of the letter A, as long as my hands follow my forearms in a straight line. Bending the hands to either side creates an unnatural bend in the wrist; most people do this on a standard keyboard, they angle the left hand to the left and the right hand to the right. This is a position that you can do for a short time without any problems, but you should not do this for hours a day and several days a week. The reason is that this flexion compresses your carpal tunnels and the nerves that run through them, causing the infamous carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Bending your forearms together is not a problem as long as your elbows stay close to your body (anything else puts strain on your shoulders) and your forearms are supported from below. So I would always use a chair with an armrest, and the armrest should be at the same height as the table or maybe even slightly above it (bending the wrists slightly downwards is more natural than bending them slightly upwards). So I place both halves at such an angle that my hands form a straight line with my forearms, which is important. The mouse is to the right of my right half, and since my keyboards don't have a numpad, I only have to move my right hand slightly to get to the mouse, and when I reach the mouse, my forearm is roughly perpendicular to my body and not leaning to the right like most people who use a full-size keyboard with a numpad, because that's bad for the shoulders and often the cause of tension and pain in the shoulder blade area for office workers. However, I don't use a mouse either, only for gaming. For normal desktop work, I use an external touchpad because I like to use gestures to navigate and scrolling with two fingers is much less tiring than with a scroll wheel (and I have to scroll a lot). Also, this way I prefer to move my fingers rather than my hand most of the time, because during mouse pointer operations my hand rests on a cushion below the touchpad and only has to move a little when I go left/right, but not at all when I go up/down or scroll up/down. My last trick is not to use the arrow keys, which you need quite often. Instead, I've turned the capslock key into an additional modifier, and when I press it, the JKLI keys become arrow keys (JKLI according to QWERTY layout, not Colemak layout). Also H moves a word to the left and ; moves a word to the right with this modifier. So I don't have to move my right hand away from home row position when navigating with the arrow keys.
Just curious, do you type on a membrane or mechanical keyboard? I decided to switch to a mechanical 2 years ago due to pain and it was the best thing ever. My fingers don't hurt anymore because I'm using much less effort to press the sluggish and sticky keys and my typing speed also is faster as well. I am interested in trying other layouts though
@@kupo150 I have collected all kinds of keyboards, probably 40 to 50 of them over the years, in order to find the optimal keyboard for me. But all the mechanical keyboards I've tested so far are not suitable for me because the key travel path is too long. On my current membrane keyboard, a short travel keyboard (like a notebook keyboard), the key travel path is tiny and I need almost no force at all to press the keys because when I lift my finger and drop it on the key, the force is almost enough to press it. Usually people have problems with membrane keyboards because they literally hammer their keys (you can actually "hear" how hard they hit it), when in fact a gentle touch would suffice. With a mechanical keyboard, there is less strain on the fingers when hammering as the key is gradually slowed down before coming to a complete stop, whereas with a membrane keyboard there is no slowdown, the key stops abruptly and all the surplus force acts back on the bones, muscles and joints. But once you learned to type with almost no force, meaning there is no surplus force anymore, mechanical keyboards don't work for you anymore, as when I type on a mechanical keyboard the same way as I'm typing right now, I'm in fact not typing at all, as no keystroke is ever registered, because with that amount of force I cannot push the key down to the point where it would register a keystroke. I need to push harder and farther to type with a mechanical keyboard and this is more tiring for my fingers. Also when I get used to this kind of typing again, I cannot type on notebook keyboards anymore, as then I will have the issue of using too much force again and the result will be a very painful experience after only an hour of typing on a notebook keyboard which is not able to absorb that extra amount force and this is nothing I can change like just flipping a switch. It took me several months of training to learn typing fast and accurately while almost exhibiting no force on the keys; when I type it look as if I'm petting my keyboard, as you barely ever see me lifting my finger or visually pressing anything down. A lot of people type like this: ua-cam.com/users/shortsIdH1TF6pUH8?feature=share and this will kill you when you type on a membrane keyboard. With such a keyboard, you need to type at least as gentle as in this video: ua-cam.com/video/MKT6Uhk5-Iw/v-deo.html Yet when using a layout like Colemak, there's is way less movement as you rarely ever leave the home row and even if you do, you don't move the entire hand around, you just move a single finger up/down, while the rest stays on the home row. ua-cam.com/video/7TVKvZkbndc/v-deo.html Also compare this: ua-cam.com/video/8PCMgDk315Y/v-deo.html See how much more gentle the movements are to the right vs to the left (forget the middle one, Logitech keyboards aren't good).
@@xcoder1122 very interesting stuff. I think I used to slam type a bit with membrane but I do feel like my pressure with a mechanical has decreased a lot. I slam sometimes still. I always used crap logitec membranes I guess. The issue I had was that my shift key got worn down to a point where it was getting stuck and it caused a lot of extra effort that my pinky finger started getting a lot of pain from the strain. Once I switched to my Huntsman keyboard all my strain pain went away. Of course a new membrane would have worked in the short term but I also don't like the squish feeling of membranes either. I also don't care for laptop style keys either that are really thin, I like more things to feel
I didn't find a significant improvement when switching to Dvorak, but one thing I did find is that, when my hands started cramping up, switching between them provided a vast improvement.
In addition to shifting the weighting, there's also the text it's trying to write. I suspect each language could end up with a keyboard that isn't just english + letters, but optimized differently because they type differently. I like the idea of throwing wikipedia at it as training material, open source, and nicely random.
Different languages have different optimal layouts. Like, Colemak-DH works great for English but isn't great for other languages. Dvorak works well for basically all western languages though, and makes a great default since it's so universal and quite a bit better than qwerty.
The issue of letter frequency charts over pure text data is that frequency charts only account for single letter presses, and doesn't tell you anything about how letters are ordered in real-usage, so it overlooks important things like the relationship of popular letter combos like an, th, sh, ght, ugh, ch. If you leave out important information like that, you're going to create a keyboard that may be more painful to use than it has to be. Imagine a keyboard that puts "T" on your index finger, but g and h on the keys just below and above it because of their middling to low typical usage. Such a keyboard would be really cumbersome when typing words like "thought" "through" and "thigh" due to the overly heavy usage of a single finger for those words. @@kitefan1
I switched over to a Dvorak in 2000 or so and used it until about 2016 or so. There was a learning curve but I did ok with it. The biggest problems I had with it was changing keys when I bought a new keyboard, laptops were a pain and bringing in my keyboard to new work and then getting IT to allow permissions to load a new keyboard was painful. The absolute worst was entering in my network or computer logon password. Until the system booted up and loaded the Dvorak driver the computer assumed you had Qwerty, 100% a pain. I switched back, learned touch typing a little more and that is where I am. Great vid though!!
No mention of Linotype layout - which is one of the optimized layouts that resulted in the historic jams that led to QWERTY and other jam-free formats. QWERTY wasn't to slow people down - it was to split the common letters to non adjacent armatures, which also extended the life of ribbons (and reduced jams)
Good to know that Dvorak is pretty close to the Utopia keyboard. I’ll be sticking with it since it’s natively supported by all common OS’es and relatively ubiquitous among alternative layouts.
I switched to colemak in the beginning of this year and I can totally attest that learning a new keyboard layout totally sucks. I took it more as a personal challange than as a "I want to type more comfortable" and I'm quite happy to have done that. And it comes with the disatvantage of being completely unable to touch type on a QUERTY keyboard anymore, although that interestingly wasn't really a problem at any point.
I too have noticed they not typing on qwerty has basically not been a problem, but I still type qwerty on my phone because I can't be bothered to learn an optimised phone keyboard system and there's just no point typing colemak on it. Still I get by on other people's keyboards when I must and it's honestly fine. If I absolutely need to do some substantial typing work my split ortho keyboard uses hardcoded colemak-dh (with a qwerty compatibility layer) so I could bring that anywhere I went if I needed to. In reality I always have my laptop which I have meticulously rearranged the keycaps on so it looks the part too!!
@@minerscale I learned to touch type Colemak, but never changed my keycaps, so when typing with less than 10 fingers, I still type QWERTY. I also still type QWERTY on my phone. At home and at work I use QMK keyboards for which I have a Colemak and a QWERTY layer. When playing games for example I just switch to QWERTY, I just can't be bothered to rearrange the controls for every game. When I have to type text in it I just have to switch back to Colemak shortly.
I switched to a split ortolinear/columnar keyboard when doing the change. It means that my fingers feel the difference and type Colemak-dh. When typing on a laptop or other normal keyboard the switch to qwerty is automatic as it feels so different.
@@GarrettW I was afraid that my overall speed for both layouts would suffer so I didn't try to do that. It also seemed to be too much work for the party trick of being able to switch between the two.
Having learned dvorak around 10 years ago, I can testify the huge improvement it gives you. The main point is actually making less mistakes, which makes you so much faster in the end. Never had any finger or wrist pain after, even with huge amounts of writing. Would always recommend! As another commenter said: It's not the best. But it is far better than qwerty. One other point though: Only switching very few letters does not make it easier. It makes it harder, especially if you happen to switch between both layouts later on. I do that frequently (one computer running on qwerty, one on dvorak) and whenever words start with ma or am (same position for both), it gets me confused. You want it to be quite different so your brain does a complete rewiring instead of using old circuits.
The REAL homerow is W A D SHIFT SPACE. They tried to get me to use the standard home row in school but im a gamer and use gamer homerow. Which means the majority of my typing is my index and middle fingers. My right Pinky is only ever used for shift and CTRL and my left pinky is only used for ENTER. No its not nearly as fast or efficient as standard homerow but it is something to consider for keyboard design. I can still type at an acceptable 50 WPM though. Just an observation.
@@markomacek920 Ugh. The only reason for HJKL is because it was dragged forward from the control characters on a dumb terminal that VI's original programmer was using in the mid 70s. I use IJKL for arrow keys and that makes a whole lot more sense IMO.
There's another dimension to this, and that is the fact that QWERTY isn't just used for English. Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Baltics, also use it. Belgium and France use AZERTY, Germany, central Europe and the balkans use QWERTZ. In Belgium, there's a really common issue on Windows where people accidentally switch keyboard layouts from AZERTY (Belgium and France standard) to QWERTY. All it takes usually is to accidentally press alt+shift to switch between keyboard settings as for some reason most WIndows installations come with both presets configured. AZERTY and QWERTY only have minor differences in letters (AQ, WZ, and Mcomma) but almost all of the special characters are completely different. AZERTY is ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS if you are a computer programmer because many of the symbols are only accessible using the ALT key. Whenever you boot up a video game for the first time in Belgium, the first thing you ALWAYS check is the keyboard settings to see if the developers did correct localisation, and if not, go through the entire thing to make sure your WSAD becomes ZSQD. I usually don't change the M for map anymore, I am so used to pressing the comma button for opening a map that it doesn't bother me. What is annoying however is all the number keys. In AZERTY, numbers are on the same keys, but they are accessed through SHIFT+number key. The default names for the keys are all symbols. "1234567890" becomes "&é"'(§è!çà". This is good for French people so they have access to their accent aigu's etcetera, but very annoying to have a video game tell you to press "à" for rocket launcher and "§" for shotgun.
In 2004 i started learning Dvorak. For a while, i continued also typing QWERTY. It was tough, very tough. But if I'd go from one to the other, I'd make a few mistakes, and then my brain would click and i'd be okay - with one exception, my typing speed went way down. So with that experiment done, I ditched QWERTY altogether and went exclusively with Dvorak. Coworkers can't use my machine, because other than the A and M keys, none of the other letters match. It was a painful re-wiring of my brain, but I'm glad I did it. In 2008 i had to ditch the mouse - too much hand pain. Now I use a giant track ball. LOVE IT.
As a software developer, it would be interesting to see how different keyboard layouts perform with languages like Javascript, C, Python, etc. Each language has their own quirks and regularly used character, or is it not enough to make a difference?
Well, I think, as a programmer, you're supposed to spend about 30% of your time just trying to figure out exactly what that function was supposed to do, 30% of the time waiting for your program to compile, and 20% of your time looking for answers on Stack Overflow, so I mean it really doesn't matter for that final 20% of the day
Python would obviously place the curly braces and semi column on less important positions whilst in many other programming language they would be on super prominent positions as they're frequently used. If you were to let it position tab as well then that would be in a prominent position for python (assuming you're not some weirdo that hits spacebar an awful lot and just have the IDE set to insert spaces when hitting tab) whilst for other programming languages it might depend on your coding style (although likely still a very prominent position if you stick to the most common conventions)
I'm a long-term programmer, and it doesn't slow me down at all. As I touch type, I know where what is, without looking. And now with AI auto-complete, it's even better.
@@howmuchmorecanItake If you're doing unity built C, you'll definitely not wait that long for compilation. 100k LOC should be less than 10 seconds for a full rebuild on a skylake machine with MSVC and all the compiler flags removing the unnecessary things. And as my experience increases, SO has basically become one of the biggest sources of disinformation, rather than a support - so I spend a decreasing amount of time there, and much more time (relatively) with documentation, trial-and-error prototyping or asking experts.
I switched to Dvorak myself a couple years ago, as I was developing a RSI from my job. My wrists thank me today. It was truly one of the best decisions I've made. Glad to see the science backs it up! Even if it's not the absolute most optimal thing possible, it's a massive improvement over QWERTY nonetheless. And besides, "most optimal" is a moving target, as you showed with your experiment when using different sets of training data. Everyone's most-typed words are a bit different, plus Language use is also changing over time. I'm happy with the compromise. Dvorak's layout is wonderful, and much healthier to type with.
I would actually like one that optimised for writing code. I wouldn't even mind having a separate keyboard for normal words. Also, the keyboard layouts are designed for touch typing right? Like you're supposed to have your hands on the home row and follow the finger rules. I never learned to do that and I'm now quite fast at typing while moving my hands around the place. I've built some pretty interesting muscle memory patterns with my hands.
@@_PatrickO Trying to go back to QWERTY after learning Dvorak is like typing with one hand tied behind my back. Maybe Dvorak wanted to make money, but I'm glad he did. See how many words you can spell with the QWERTY home row (e.g., glasses, alfalfa), and how many you can spell with the Dvorak home row: the, these, those, antenna, attenuation. There's just no going back.
@@cdorcey1735 I get that you are used to it. But there is no proof dvorak is faster. Look at the current world records for typing. All the top scores are with Qwerty, not Dvorak. The guiness "record" for barbara blackburn is completely fake and was proven to be fake by karl jobsts in a really in depth video about this.
You mentioned Dvorak, but I'm moderately surprised there was no mention of the Colemak layout, which is supposed to be even better. Obvious question: if you were previously around 60wpm with the QWERTY layout, after the exercise did you wind up seeing any improvements on such? Figured I'd ask just out of sheer curiosity ^_^
I agree. Colemak is designed to be relatively easy to learn relative to the benefits it provides. I switched to Colemak DH several years ago and am not looking back!
After 40+ years of using qwerty, i have switched to Colemak DH too, using a 36 key layout on a split ortholinear keyboard. The difference in comfort is amazing and typing feels effortless.
@@Tezla0 after about a week of practice i switched over. Took about a month to feel really comfortable, now a few months later i would never switch back. Used a layout called miryoku_zmk then customised it for my preferences.
Better for what? Dvorak is handy for programmers with common characters like home row -_ for snake_case and kebab-case variables to be easy to input. ',. for characters, lists, and accessing records are also in better positions. I use these symbols more than some Latin characters demoted to the bottom row. I tried a few other layout options, but none of them helped me at my job as much. (And yes, languages that use semicolons, ;, are inferior to options that do)
I already know kbd layout history, and this is just you showing what you learned when applying machine learning, which is cool but working solutions are cooler. I just wanna say, because I must, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU for not making a 3 hour video, one for the typewriter, one for the keyboards, and one for qwerty stuff and your stuff.
Something that should be considered with keyboard designs aimed at injury prevention: The right index finger is already under heavy stress due to all the left clicking, so it should not do any heavy lifting on the keyboard to balance out the strain.
it would also be interesting if you found better keyboard shapes and layers in the same way. you briefly show a xy-optimization at 11:22 but there are plenty of other ways to make the keyboard align more with your hand shape. my favorite video about a keyboard is still 'why is this weird keyboard so good?' by 'pinguefy' which goes over a dactyl manuform, showing how much improvement you can get by daring to break into the third dimension, and the 'Ben Vallack' channel shows how awesome layers and chording can be.
I've personally been using the German QWERTZ layout for the better part of six years now. It's quite usable for me, and it makes a lot of sense for a lot of the positions. It's vastly different from the American QWERTY standard, which is annoying when you're an American. But I've memorised where all the keys are, so there's that. But I really like having shift+ period/comma be colon and semicolon, just makes life so much easier. The only disadvantage is that I don't have the Sheffer stroke and carrots key, since on the actual German layout those are a single key, replacing half the right shift. I do plan on getting a German layout keyboard eventually, so i'll be able to type them finally lol. Oh and the y and z are switched. It's SUPER annoying to type on a normal American keyboard for me now. I love bringing the topic of other layouts up because it's interesting to see what's out there.
I switched over to Dvorak years ago, so I can't necessarily say how much it improved me vs. QWERTY. What it did do was break me of my bad habit of looking at the keys, so now I can confidently touch-type.
Same here, with the weird twist that if I do look at the keys, I'm back typing QWERTY again. Did it make me faster? I don't think so. Is it at least 3x more comfortable? Oh yeah. Is touch typing a way bigger advantage than I thought it was back when I couldn't do it? Also yeah. Thanks, Dvorak!
I have been on Dvorak for about 20 years. Main advantage is that it is supported under Windows, so there is no problem switching to it. With an extra utility I could implement some special characters and do a couple of layout modifications suitable for other languages. English, German Swedish, French, Greek, Esperanto.
you frame your words a lot like tom scott, 4:12 bit was a lot like him/other mini-documentary type people, the tone and use of environment + camera movement makes me love that scene
Switching to Dvorak was one of the best choices in life I've ever made. It took me about a month to not feel like clunky gloves, and 3 months to be about 80% proficient. I chose Dvorak over Colemak or similar because it was best supported by default over most operating systems. Nowadays I use a ZSA Moonlander with a lightly modified Dvorak and it's amazing. If you do any amount of typing, I 100% recommend learning an optimized layout. Your joints will thank you. As a fun side note, I'm actually using Qwerty right now because I just wiped my laptop and haven't bothered to switch to it and my mechie is in the other room. I only lost about 20% on my qwerty performance over time and my brain automatically switches by the feel of the keyboard, it's so weird (useful whenever using someone else's keyb). Actually I should just fix that. ... Ahh there we go. Woah that feels so weird. My muscle memory still thinks this keyboard is qwerty since it has been that way the past two weeks and it is taking me a sentence or two to shift back.
Dvorak puts vowels to left hand, hands alternate. Algorithm optimizes for assumption which could be wrong. It would be interesting to build model from timing data of different layout users.
I think a good model to use for a generally optimized keyboard for the english language would be to use simulated annealing of 1) the 3000 most commonly used words in the English language (which supposedly accounts for ~80% of daily linguistic communication) weighted by frequency of use, 2) Weight by travel distance from the home keys in a multiplicative manner to word frequency, 3) don't weight by awkwardness of using each finger to type unless you have a large enough sample size of people to get an accurate measurement, which I presume would be several thousand people minimum. 4) For typing on mobile define travel distance by how far each thumb would have to travel from halfway along the keyboard vertically and either one-third or one-quarter in the keyboard from each side. This process could be applied in a multilingual context by using words in every language that uses a Latin script that ammount to 80% of daily communication in each also weighted by frequency of use and travel distance form the home keys, and maybe weight each language by frequency of use.
TIL (today I learned) - I always, incorrectly, thought that Qwerty was related to mechanical keyboard arms - thanks for this video and insight! I guess once you've been typing with a certain layout for many years (in my case, 43 years), it's nearly impossible to change. I can touch type - I'm doing it now - I've spent so much time on a querty keyboard, since my ZX81 back in 1982 (I was a year late), any other layout is now an impediment. Even switching two letters would throw me out. I literally glance at the keyboard once every session. A session is when I take my hands off the keyboard entirely. Touch typing is entirely based on muscle memory... which does make buying a new keyboard interesting. It must have exactly the same spacing and size of keys.
I tought myself the Workman layout (with select changes), which was an interesting comparison to Dvorak. Dvorak does a better job of prioritizing alternation (something you didn't consider in this video) and minimizing consecutive same finger usage (something you also didn't consider). Workman does a much better job of considering the natural range of motion of each finger (much easier for index finger to move downward than the ring finger, for instance) It does take about a month to get even remotely productive with an alternative layout, and probably 2-3 months to hit your old speed, but honestly? It's worth it. Give it a try!
Workman was the first layout after QWERTY that I tried when getting into touch typing. It's been so long I don't really remember what I exactly I didn't like about it but it kind of felt wrong and "slow". Ended up switching to Dvorak (with some modifications for Ergodox) that I use ever since.
To find the "optimal" keyboard one should also find the most common letter pairs and arrange the keyboard so that one of these letter is on one hand and the other on the other hand so that typing consecutive letters seldom falls on one hand.
Fun video. I would add that one of the big advantages of Dvorak is missing when you setup your objective function: with it (in English) you mostly type one key with your left hand, then one with your right hand, ..., in a very nice alternating flow. Would be fun to see how adding that that changes the results.
Would have been useful to see performance improvements of a keyboard layout trained on one dataset in the other datasets, would convey whether you overfit or if the benefit would translate more generally
A 40% keyboard is already the worst keyboard on the planet to me, never mind the switching around of keys on top of that :P I've never seen a proper history on the keyboard layout, I also just assumed it was the typewriter jamming thing I'd always heard, so that was informative!
As someone with both serious RSI injuries in both wrists many years back and someone that has been using 'ergonomic' keyboards for over 20 years now, just looking at one of those minimised things actually makes me wince in pain. I have no idea how people can stand the damn things, yet they do seem hugely popular.
@@DrBunnyMedicinal The smaller keyboards and a split actually helped my wrist pain. Less reaching thanks to layers, and split helps get my arms and wrists into better alignment.
I need all my keys Definitely a numpad So much easier typing longer numbers with numpad and my blender 3d uses it for viewport navigation which is much better than having to use buttons in the UI
@@error.418 Huh. I really found that an ergonomic KB helped me out, both when I was injured and when I was constantly typing up a storm in a call center
Nice video, I have learned a lot of things, I didn't even knew that might interest me. And one funny thing: on portrait seen in 7:01 is actually composer Antonín Dvořák not August. But after brief googling it seems to be a pretty common mistake on the internet (and some sources even says that they might be distant cousins). 🙂
I made the switch to Dvorak years ago (acknowledges hearty applause). While it didn't take super long to learn where all the keys were, it did take a long time to get back to where I was typing *words* rather than letters. When you type "the", you don't mentally type 't', 'h', 'e'. You type "the" which is several strokes that you don't have to think about. Like you don't have to think about all the motions involved in opening a door, you just open it.
the buckley layout shown at 3:48 has a special place in my heart. it's a complete loss that we don't still use it today. i think in it's time it had mechanical issues with the typewriter carriage getting stuck and was abandoned due to miscarriage problems.
I've been using the Neo2 layout for over 5 years, which is optimized for letter frequency very similarly to what you did. Never looked back to QWERTY. It takes quite some time to get used to, but it's worth it, even just for the flabbergasted reactions of people seeing my keyboard for the first time 😃
The most striking conclusion from this research is that unpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, caffeine-addicted PhD students make inexplicably painful choices on how to spend their free time 😂 Seriously, it’s a fantastic vid, very well produced, and you totally demolished the subject matter. I’ve clicked the bell, something I never do, and the highest praise I can give a channel.
For those that are (too) used to A/QWERTY/Z to learn something new, or need to maintain a low-entry-barrier (meaning being able to go with whatever keyboard is at hand): You may try to shift your hands-position one character to the right, so that the left F-nub is under the left middle-finger and the right index-finger is on the K. In this position you can make use of your knowledge of the keyboard-layout while also being much more centered and have a better spread/shorter reach, kind of equalizing the asymmetrical orientation. This is especially helpful on laptops and compact industrial, as well as the usual office keyboards. While i learned 10-finger typing on german keyboards, the switch to US-International-with dead-keys Layout reduced the strain further overall, independent of the languages i write in and is extremely helpful when writing code, often switching operating systems and editors over the day (or night). Would love to try a Dactyl Manuform if only there were key-switches with a much shorter travel, comparable to HP Laptops/Notebooks and Apple MacBooks/Magic Keyboards - simply because with Poly-Arthritis it's a PITA to hunk mechanical switches over the threshold for longer than an hour .. Love your style btw. keep the middle-fingers coming!
I have been using colemak for about 8 months now and i can say that i find it significantly more comfortable to type with. Retraining my muscle memory was challenging and very frustrating at times but I think it was worth it for the party trick alone. Now I'm using a column staggered 34 key keyboard called the ferris sweep using colemak as the keymap and I can say that it is the most comfortable and effortless typing experience I have ever had, to the point that going back to a normal row stagger keyboard using qwerty feels fatiguing after about 10 minutes. Learning a new layout is not worth it unless you find the challenge fun though.
I cannot believe he made all of those different keyboards for each different input type. So much effort for such amazing detail. And honestly some great conversation pieces to hang on your wall.
This video is very interesting! I would be interested seeing a keyboard optimized for programming, it uses a very different set of characters and frequencies to writing normal prose
another youtuber used a dictionary to measure the DISTANCE_on_keyboard_layouts between letters within words, to optimize just for that. This almost only optimizes for single-finger-typing. he also made the "longest distances keyboard"
A way to make this something you can use yourself to generate the perfect keyboard for yourself would be amazing, tracking your own inputs for a while and then submitting the generated keyboard layout to be ordered to your door.
I also played around with keyboard optimisation a few years ago. Also used simulated annealing. One new idea I had towards the end was that it may be better to use a home gap rather than a home row. In other words, the better home position is *between* two rows (after optimising the keys in those rows), which allows you to keep more keys closer. The overall penalty for eg moving half a row for most keys is less than a zero penalty for the home row plus the unit penalty for more keys.
Interesting stuff. After a 20 year career as a typographer in the pre-desktop days, I got 3 different RSI problems in my arms, but mainly bilateral epicondylitis and radial nerve syndrome. I got ill in 1992, and my case was an early one that helped Workers Comp decide to allow chiropractic as the primary treatment for workplace injuries, if the injured person prefers. Just to say, I've tried everything. I left typography and entered tech writing, but I do still type many hours a day. I use the TypeMatrix keyboard, which is a small footprint regular grid. Hugely better, totally fixed me up. Will run either qwerty or Dvorak. I have no affiliation, just wanted to share.
You have no idea the weird looks people gave me as I brought out the freaking "Keyboard From Hell" into my lectures. At least it was quieter than that typewriter kid!
That’s true lol
I wonder how an ergonomic keyboard would fare. I mean those that are split in the middle. Probably won't have an impact as one would still use the 10 finger system if its known and the distance would still be the same, i think.
@@matthiasbecker5064 it actually makes a Huge difference to the shoulders and wrists (and thus most of the pain and injury in the arm). The fully split ones connected by a cable so you can actually position them properly for your body rather than some ficticious average anyway.
rearanging the keys to be ortholinier (that is, the rows are lined up rather than staggered) also makes a huge difference to finger and wrist strain even without changing what position any individual key occupies. (it also takes between single digit hours and single digit days to get used to the difference, with the biggest one being x and c being displaced enough that one ends up hitting the wrong one a lot.)
Try Vitrimak next
t k v u m i a j b r
w x / f p d g q , s
h . ' c o l n z y e
Send it to chyrosran22 for an official verdict
Loss keyboard at 3:50 is a true feat of modern engineering.
Pattern-seeking brain go brrrrrr
are you FUCKING kidding me
I can't believe I missed that.
Odd place to find you, Silly!
I came here to make this comment 👆🏻
As a PhD student myself, I think most of "unpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, caffeine-addicted PhD student" is redundant
he probably could've just said "PhD student" ;)
So, what you're saying is that being a PhD student gets you ready for the real world - where capitalism makes having a job feel exactly like that!
'un(der)paid, overworked, sleep-deprived, and caffeine-addicted' describes life in general
Such a terrible joke lmao. "So if I'm unpaid, that also means I am a drug addict; got it."
@@3nertiasounds like you need a better job 😉
Dworak did not only optimize the finger travel-time and a frequency, he also optimized the layout such that the fingers would alternate on the most frequent two-letter combinations. Like ensuring that E and R or T and H would be on opposite sides of the keyboard
Came here to say this. I think it's the core problem with his algorithm; it optimizes for only one variable.
Agreed. Dvorak also optimized for anatomy in that your hand rolls better one way than the other, so things like SN, ST, SH, and TH are easier to type. But this favors primarily English. Still, glad to see that even with James' more limited analysis, my decision in college to switch to Dvorak has been at least 26% a good idea.
Dvorak has never been shown to be helpful.
Dvorak absolutely _has_ been shown to be helpful. The main effect is comfort, with a small improvement in accuracy and speed.
@@pdgiddie only in people that learned how to type wrong
This feels like a Tom Scott video. Well done, I like it 👏🏻
Yea, I thought the same thing... Tom Scott v2
This feels like a pleasant intersection of Tom Scott, Technology connections, and Veritasium, while still being its own. Big fan of Atomic Frontier
I just came down to make this comment....but here you are, already having made it.
do you just mean...british?
Tom Scott but more British and more autistic
Love that this was both a history lesson on keyboards, and lesson on machine learning
Thanks! Honestly that was a really big part of the video pitch and I was tossing up splitting it in two. But yup, glad I kept it together :D
not to mention my favourite genre of youtube video, the creator deciding to make themself suffer for the purpose of science.
As someone who switched from QWERTY to DVORAK around 4 months ago, I can attest that switching a keyboard layout and getting used to it again takes a really long time. I was at around 80 WPM with QWERTY and it took roughly 2 and a half months (maybe closer to 3 months) to get back to that speed with DVORAK. One thing that is beneficial with DVORAK is less pain in my wrists when writing for a long time.
Nice! Yes, writing on the "optimal" keyboards made me rearlise how much nice things can really be.
Same, but I did it back in 2015 (holy crap it's been 8 years). I remember my first few days on Dvorak I typed at a miserable 22 KPM (KPM!! Not WPM) and looked like a complete idiot. But it's totally worth it when I look back - I could only do ~40 WPM on QWERTY and now can do 100 WPM on Dvorak rather comfortably.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not claiming Dvorak is intrinsically faster. Reduced finger movement is a very real benefit, but it contributes rather little to actually being fast. Being familiar with the words you are typing matters much much more.
That being said, I do think Dvorak has one major advantage, in that it encourages the use of all fingers by design. It would be very difficult to learn Dvorak "wrong" (as in typing with 4/5/6 fingers instead of all 8), whereas it's all too common with QWERTY.
I was about 50wpm with qwerty, but I couldn't touch type. I figured if I was going to learn to touch type, I would do it on a better keyboard than qwerty. Now I'm a comfortable 90wpm on Dvorak. No ragrets
huh, my experience is that it took me maybe a month at most to get fully used to the new layout, and that was mostly just catching up the last percent of performance.
Granted, i use colemak specifically because it leaves some keys alone, so i can switch between colemak and qwerty without quite as much grinding of gears.
Switching to more ergonomic keyboard layouts, as well as the physical key arrangement itself, has done wonders for me. Started with Colemak, then to Colemak DH, and ended up using Canary, later switching to Canary Matrix with a column-staggered board.
I'm now switching to Aptmak which is optimised for 30-key (23332+2) boards, using the Berylline keyboard next month, and I'm very excited! I might start exploring embedded stenography at a later date, too.
A few years back I tried experimenting with alternative layouts, like Dvorak and Colemak. The biggest issue I had, apart from getting familiar with the new layout, is that the optimizations are language dependant. Typing may improve for one language, but gets worse for another. As someone who is multilingual it was no overall improvement for me. It still seems that qwerty is the least worse layout for me.
this
starting at 11:35, only moving a few keys around that benefit your language and vocabulary can already provide a big improvement. No need for a full layout swap. You can use a few tools to edit your keyboard layout and then just pop the keycaps to move them around or use a sharpie and some tape.
@@TheSliderW It can provide a big improvement in terms of one language but at the same time make hinder input in other languages.
Say, you move J to the top row (like Colemak does) because it is not as frequent in English, and you put N there instead.
However when i am typing Chinese in Wubi, J key stands for 是 which means ‘is’, a very frequent character, and now i need to go to the top row to type it, and in the home row i have 民 which is a less useful character.
But multilingual people use different languages all the time, and we’d rather not have a separate layout for each language because not only constantly switching layouts is inconvenient, but also adaptation to every single layout to reach good typing speed takes longer than a month, while overall gains are only marginal.
@@damian_madmansnest Interesting. I havent though much about asian Languages and that does make it trickier indeed. But then maybe it could be possible to keep that word/kanji/syllab on the previous position if it makes sense while still swapping the keys for your other language ? I don't know.
I'm in a similar situation but maybe weirder as I'm used to 3 keyboard layouts AZERTY, QWERTY and QWERTZ for legacy reasons as I travel a lot in Europe. Not to mention one of the laptops is an Aussie macbook with it's own weird key combinations for European accents and such which funnily enough is still intuitive compared to dedicated accentuated vowels as found on AZERTY and QWERTZ.
I also set up my smartphone to swap layouts and dictionnaires when typing in the corresponding language so I can confirm, you get used to it. It's like when you talk to natives from other countries, you start naturally thinking in their language as you speak.
No clue which one is best though. X )
@@damian_madmansnest yeah on paper we should have one layout per language as well as one layout per keyboard form factor. but it can be a lot to learn so in practice we have to make compromises and balance. That doesn't mean qwerty is good by any mean, just that the dvorak-style keyboards use algorithms with a single language.
Colemak is particularly bad at that. It got a lot of critics. Even its qwerty compromise is often negated by modern software allowing to change the shortcuts.
As a native french speaker, I had this issue writing English and German with the bépo layout (which is almost complete for occasionally typing every Latin script languages) until I used a symmetrical keyboard and programmed Z and W (the [ and ] us-qwerty keys) to be on the left side. I just keep a qwerty label for the badly written programs hardwired to this legacy layout so in the end I won't touch anything else than those two.
I'd caution against attributing the health hazards of typing to the QWERTY layout. Only a fraction of people actually touch type with proper form and a very large portion of injuries results from bending the wrist back too far, often as a result of having the keyboard too close to the edge of the desk.
And also most of claimed RSI relief from Dvorak, etc. might actually come from people finally learning to touch type properly when they learn Dvorak.
The QWERTY layout, as mentioned, was designed for typewriters to prevent jamming, not necessarily for optimizing typing speed or minimizing hand strain. While it has become the standard, some argue that it may not be the most efficient layout for modern computer keyboards.
Challenges with QWERTY:
High Finger Movement: QWERTY often requires long reaches and high finger movement, potentially leading to fatigue and strain, especially during extended typing sessions.
Imbalanced Load: Some fingers are used more frequently than others in the QWERTY layout, which could contribute to muscle imbalances and discomfort.
Not Optimized for Modern Devices: QWERTY was not designed with modern computer keyboards in mind. Alternative layouts like Dvorak or Colemak aim to reduce finger movement and potentially lower the risk of strain.
Considerations:
Adaptation Period: Transitioning to a new layout can be challenging and may initially impact typing speed and comfort. However, some individuals find the long-term benefits worth the initial learning curve.
Individual Variation: Hand anatomy, typing habits, and personal preferences vary among individuals. What works well for one person may not work as effectively for another.
Ergonomic Practices: Regardless of the layout, adopting ergonomic practices is crucial. This includes maintaining a neutral wrist position, taking breaks, and using ergonomic keyboards that suit your needs.
Personal Exploration:
Try Alternative Layouts: If you're open to experimentation, consider trying alternative layouts like Dvorak or Colemak. Keep in mind that the benefits may vary from person to person.
Ergonomic Accessories: Explore ergonomic keyboards, key switches, and other accessories that promote a more comfortable typing experience.
Listen to Your Body: Pay attention to any signs of discomfort or strain. If you experience persistent issues, it's essential to consult with a healthcare professional.
General hand injuries caused by keyboard use, including the QWERTY layout, are often associated with repetitive strain, poor ergonomics, and excessive or prolonged typing. Some common types of hand injuries related to keyboard use include:
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Carpal tunnel syndrome is a condition that results from pressure on the median nerve in the wrist. Prolonged and repetitive keyboard use with improper hand positioning can contribute to this syndrome.
Tendonitis: Tendonitis involves inflammation of the tendons, which can occur in the hands and wrists due to repetitive movements during typing.
Trigger Finger: Trigger finger is a condition where one of the fingers gets stuck in a bent position, often caused by repetitive gripping and typing.
De Quervain's Tenosynovitis: This condition affects the tendons on the thumb side of the wrist and can be aggravated by repetitive hand and wrist movements, such as those involved in typing.
Hand and Wrist Strain: General hand and wrist strain, characterized by discomfort, pain, or stiffness, can result from prolonged and repetitive keyboard use without proper ergonomic considerations.
Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI): RSIs are conditions that result from repetitive and forceful movements. They can affect various parts of the hand, fingers, and wrist.
Preventing these injuries involves adopting good ergonomic practices:
Proper Hand Positioning: Maintain a neutral wrist position while typing, avoiding excessive bending or extension of the wrists.
Ergonomic Keyboard and Mouse: Use ergonomic keyboards and mice designed to reduce strain and promote natural hand positions.
Regular Breaks: Take regular breaks to stretch and relax the hands and wrists during extended typing sessions.
Correct Desk Setup: Ensure a proper desk and chair setup to maintain a comfortable and ergonomic typing posture.
Stretching Exercises: Incorporate hand and wrist stretching exercises into your routine to promote flexibility.
and Even with perfect hand positioning, individuals may still be susceptible to some hand-related issues. These issues can include:
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome: Despite proper hand positioning, factors such as prolonged typing sessions or pre-existing conditions can contribute to the development of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Tendonitis: Repetitive typing, even with optimal hand positioning, can lead to inflammation of the tendons, resulting in tendonitis.
Trigger Finger: The repetitive nature of typing, even with good hand positioning, can contribute to trigger finger, a condition where a finger gets stuck in a bent position.
De Quervain's Tenosynovitis: This condition, affecting the tendons on the thumb side of the wrist, can still occur with repetitive hand movements, despite maintaining proper hand positioning.
Hand and Wrist Strain: Extended typing sessions, even with optimal hand positioning, can still lead to general hand and wrist strain.
Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI): The cumulative effect of repetitive movements, even with perfect hand positioning, may result in RSIs affecting various parts of the hand, fingers, and wrist.
It's important to note that the risk and severity of these issues can be significantly reduced with proper hand positioning and overall ergonomic practices. key word "reduced" not completely mitigated. but "I'd caution against attributing the health hazards of typing to the QWERTY layout" I would say your wrong by that statement.
@@FBI_42069... your first sentence disagrees with the content of the video without at all bothering to rebut the video's points.
@@DanielFolsom the only part that disagrees with the video is typewriter part which whether you want to agree with it or not it's true, they made it so bad so people would not type as fast.
@@FBI_42069Again, you're not disputing his points ... you're justing saying "WELL IT'S TRUE." Also, if you try Googling this, you can find a ton of high-quality sources (including, for example, Smithsonian Magazine) noting that it's, in fact, not true-it's a widely spread myth.
10:00 This layout demonstrates the need to choose your performance metric carefully. No penalty for same finger movement meant that for many common bigrams the right index finger has to hit two different keys in quick succession. E.g. for AN (2% of bigrams), and also (in order of decreasing frequency) EN, ND, ED, AL, LE, DE, NE, and EA (0.69% of bigrams). For the word AND the same finger has to hit 3 keys!
this is why i like colemak, it's especially optimized with movements in mind, and god damn it tends to feel extremely smooth to type. Sentences are just a series of rolling movements and one finger basically never has to jump around awkwardly
@@swedneck Nice! Which version do you like best? I'm personally using Colemak-DH.
I find that with qwerty, my fingers tend to hover above the keyboard, while in colemak they can rest flat on the home row keys. Love the inward rolls.
@@cymno i think what i use is colemak-DH wide mod altered to be more in line with the standard swedish layout (it has åäö and the normal for us placement of symbols)
And yeah it's rather funny how my typing style instantly changes when i move back to a qwerty keyboard, with colemak i rest on the home keys and all fingers move equally little, but with qwerty i end up mostly typing with the pointer and middle fingers and the right hand flies around its half of the keyboard to hunt for the right key..
@@swedneck I do type 10 finger on qwerty, but the high frequency of keys not on the home row makes me hover my hands above the keyboard instead of resting the fingers on the keys
@@swedneck That's why I like the Workman layout 👍
Dear James,
After watching a video by someone on this topic from a year ago and getting excited about the topic but not content with how far they took it, I thought about modifying their code myself to take it far enough. I never finished the project and it just kind of sat there at the end of the day, but I went UA-cam searching again today and saw this awesome video. I'm so happy you put in the work regarding the code and made it available for others (I'm not really a coder lol), so I can modify it to use my own dataset and generate my own unique keyboard. You did the heavy lifting for others, and did a bang up job with this extremely good video.
Infinite thanks for your great help,
-Carmen
I really appreciate that you went to the Northern Presidetial range and Mount Washington in the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire to explain hill climbing. Of course the Chrystal Cascade waterfall was a nice touch too! Great work on the whole project! Keep climbing.
I feel the badness of the worst keyboard can be improved by mapping a letter like Q to the Spacebar
League players rejoice
@@nickpatella1525 for league players it's probably best to remap a macro that types the 100 most nasty insults to spacebar
@@insu_na i have a coworker who plays smite on console but has a button bound to chat "your mama raised a bitch"
If you include modifiers, put the most-used letters as shifted keys like the symbols are usually.
@@gblargg that sounds like a great way to hate your hands
I really enjoy all the strange places and interesting locations you choose for just talking portion. It feels somewhat wonderful 😄
Thanks! Did I need to go climb Mt Washington? No. Was it more fun than showing a picture of a mountain? Yes.
@@AtomicFrontier If it helps you stay sane and keep on kicking out quality content - keep at it mate. I fully support ya!
ikr? really adds to the video
Yes, it's like watching an episode of Planet Earth. This guy is the David Attenborough of UA-cam with his filming locations!😅😅😅
Glad to see you are still enjoying Boston and tossing in some White Mountains! In addition to enjoying your content, I also enjoy trying to figure out where you are standing.
i really like your writing/storytelling/ journalism style. Very interesting how you leveraged the pauses in your speech.
I switched to Dvorak probably 20 years ago and still love it. When I saw the title of this video, I knew I had to watch it for at least some mention of Dvorak. You didn't disappoint!
dvorak is very bad, worse than qwerty, switch to colemak or other modern layout (i'm serious)
@@drdilyor why is dvorak bad? I'm learning it right now and am finding it really easy to type with.
7:02 - I'm confused about the image of Dvorak. The image is of Antonin Dvořák, the composer. At first I thought it was the joke but the image is also labelled August Dvorak which in all seems like a mistake in the graphic.
Lol what if the image was taken in August, so literally August Dvořák.
@@chad_bro_chillOctober Dvorak is much more jolly. He likes Spring.
Well if someone can't even find the picture of August Dvorak and uses the picture of Antonin Dvořák instead, how trustworthy are they in the first place? I doubt everything they say, not only because I haven't had any pains related to typing, and I grew up with a QWERTY keyboard and have been using one for the past 26 years.
@@livedandletdie Well, be happy about it and shut the fuck up.
I've had to go on sick leave multiple times, for multiple weeks before because of my RSI. Switching to Dvorak took like a month, but I've had a lot less wrist pain since then, and no phases where I've had to go on sick leave because I physically couldn't type anymore
@@livedandletdie, everything else I know about Dvorak and Qwerty is pretty in line with the video so I don’t really have issues with that. As for whether you have any paints that’s just anecdotal evidence but I can guarantee you that Dvorak is more comfortable layout.
An MIT student did something similar about 10 years ago. I took their "most efficient layout" and modified it to keep my most common hotkeys in place (zxcv). I also gave the semi-colon a strong position as I use it in programming a lot. That's been my layout for 8+ years. I'm the only person in the world who uses this.
I would honestly like to see your full layout. I have an interesting variation myself, but want something better.
@@HisZd11same
Actually, I use the same exact layout.
@@resmartedYep, I started using this layout around 20 years ago
i 100% use this layout too
I’ve used Dvorak for 16 years and love it. Along the way I also learned Maltron which was super wacky with the letter E on the thumb. Maltron was supposedly developed to make learning it easier. I was touch typing within a day! It was uncanny! I gave it up because it used a nonstandard keyboard and I couldn’t use the layout on a laptop … so Dvorak it is.
You can actually install a lot of keyboard layouts onto your OS!
@@v0id_d3m0n Yes, and that’s how I use Dvorak. Maltron uses 2 separate thumb keys that don’t exist on a laptop… so if you mapped it, it would defeat the point of having the letter ‘e’ on your thumb.
@@pixeljuggler01 oh :(
Finally, the channel that will continue on Tom Scott's legacy. Extremely well put together video my dude! Feel proud!
I just stumbled onto this channel in my recommended videos and that is the exact thought that I had as well. What a stellar production!
Ironically (but in a good way), I discovered this channel via Tom Scott, when James did a guest episode. Subbed immediately.
He's not dying yet.
@@shApYT Tom made an update video saying that this is the last year he is doing consistent uploads. So, he isn't going away permanently, but there will be a rather large hole in tom's content style to fill.
Kinda felt sad seeing the thumbnail and then watching 2 seconds of the video. Knew instantly it's at the very least inspired by Tom Scott, and well we all know Tom's plans for his channel.
one thing to note is that finger distance is not the only thing you want to think about when you're looking for a new keyboard. for example, dvorak was designed to increase the amount of 'drumming' (meaning you alternate between your left and right hands when typing) and colemak was designed to increase the amount of 'rolling' (using consecutive fingers like, like pinky-ring-middle-index or the other way around). personally, I have trouble with lots of drumming, so switching to colemak was a huge benefit for me. also, another thing to think about is using layers. for example, on normal keyboards we use two layers, one with lowercase and one with uppercase. there isn't really any reason to only limit this to two layers; and I for example use three for lowercase, uppercase, and numbers/punctuation. additionally, you briefly mentioned the orthographic keyboard, but that's not the only improvement you can make to the layout; for example if you then proceed to split the keyboard down the middle you can have your wrists at a much more natural angle instead of twisting them so much. personally, my favorite style of keyboard is the dactyl manuform, as it also shifts the columns to account for the different lengths of your fingers, curves the surface inwards so that your fingers always point directly at the keys, and lets your normally useless thumbs actually do things by having modifier keys next to the thumbs instead of having to move your whole hand whenever you want to use a key combination.
no wonder DVORAK sucks; drumming is not a good quality to have. For instance, I can type 'star wars' with the left hand entirely.
QWERTY is the superior layout, because it finds the perfect balance between drumming and non-drumming; Colemak sucks because prioritizing 'rolling' is also stupid; Again, QWERTY is superior, as it doesn't prioritize a single thing, but it BALANCES THEM in the perfect way.
People seem to get stuck on one concept and then try to min/max it like oafs, not realizing that BALANCE IS THE KEY
Most of the typos I make are from one hand getting ahead of the other. Two fingers on the same hand hitting keys in the wrong order never happens.
This guy keyboards
Tbh before this video I thought qwerty is worse than t actually is but now that I can just roll my fingers to type qwerty I can see why it's so good
@@pyropulseIXXI As someone who switched from QWERTY to Colemak, I disagree. Drumming/rolling aside, QWERTY has a lot of commonly used keys placed in very awkward positions. The primary benefit of Colemak for me is bringing the most commonly used keys to the home row or close to it. I used to have genuine finger pain typing on QWERTY sometimes, which I fortunately don't experience anymore.
Yeah, drumming leads me occasionally into a typo where every vowel in a word is 1 letter later than it should be.
I've only found inward rolling useful (pinky to index), trying to do it outwards sucks in comparison.
Qwerty puts all the useful letters in the middle of the top row and that just doesn't make sense for homerow typing, when I did use qwerty it was with hands on sert yuil most of the time
That's so cool! Love your approach in design. I also started from some of your same hypothesis and designed a quite unorthodox keyboard but for mobile devices. Letter layout is totally customizable, you could use it adapting the layout of your world worst keyboard if you feel your fingers haven't had enough yet.
Awesome video - educational, engaging & well laid out! Love the editing & presentation style - keep up the good work!
5:02 Ah I see what you did there.
I had my own little version of this recently and the "could feel my neurons rewiring" is the BEST way of putting it! I had to start using a left handed trackball because of a bad injury, and I had headaches from just that! You mustve had some serious brainache with a whole keyboard.
Sorry to hear that, but yes oh my god! I get headaches reletivly often, but it was practically every day for the first week of the new layout!
@@JveFQ For real though. Especially if you stop caffeine cold turkey for awhile - the migraines were unreal!
I love how you managed to sneak in ocwntly flipping us off into this well played sir
stumbled on this channel today, I really appreciate the odd outdoor shots with the background noise. It makes the video much more interesting in some way, gives it a bit more contrast
the production & editing level is just absolutely off the charts, I love your channel and work, man
I feel the urge to say that the shown photograph is of composer Antonin Dvorak, not the typewriter guy. Besides that, I loved the video, you have great style and delivery. Keep them coming!
I was looking if somebody had pointed this out already.
Super Duper great and well made video!!!
I can't express how important this video.
It's like a guide on how to know exactly which shoe to wear, or how to brush your teeth faster and more easily for a healthier mouth.
People will type using their weak fingers more if they do even a bit of the research you did,
using their brains for a bit, outside the comfort zone, taking an effort to learn.
People will enjoy typing more after diving into it even if just for two hours.
Typing will become healthier for the tendons and ligaments and joints.
I'm glad I am alive around people who do these things just for the sake of it.
You are an exemplar of a person in my view.
I think you'll be the first content creator I'll support, for that.
You're pursuing an interest and a good time, producing eventually a good piece of content.
I wish you good rest and that you will be lead by your passion.
You must take the space, enter and caps key into the mix, they are also part of a keyboard and can have better or worse positions or sizes, and sizing each key should be part of making a new keyboard :)
Years ago I switched to colemak. While not faster from my experience, typing has become much more enjoyable and comfortable. I figured if I'm going to be typing for decades, spending six months to learn a new layout wasn't that bad.
I wanted to learn how to touch type properly using proper posture and positioning, decided to try one of the other popular typing layouts at the same time since I already was learning something completely new, I went with Colemak mod-dh and haven't looked back, and I can touch type now too!
Same here. Been doing Colemak since about 2008, and never turning back unless something better comes along.
Dvorak here
I've wanted to learn colemak for years now, but I can't justifty forcing myself to daily use both qwerty and colemak, and I'm not able to bring my own keyboard to work. :(
I started getting the first twinges of RSI in the late 90s, so I switched to Dvorak... kinda. I kept Dvorak as an alternate layout for over a decade, using it most of the time (unless I needed to type fast, like chatting). I never learned it well. Finally in the early 2010s I took QWERTY off my keyboard layouts in Windows, and I've been Dvorak ever since. I have a hardware keyboard now that maps to the Dvorak layout natively, so I don't have to deal with weird language-translation issues on Windows (games that ignore it, remote desktop tools that mess it up, etc).
If I had it to do again, I'd choose Colemak, because it's the same benefits as Dvorak, with a much lower learning curve.
Switching never made me faster, but my RSI definitely benefitted; despite playing PC games at night and being a programmer by day, I have no issues with RSI (and I'm now pushing 50). Using a layout that's easier on my tendons has had a materially long-term benefit on my wrist health, so I do recommend it to anyone willing to retrain their touch-typing reflexes.
I had a client once who could not figure out what was wrong with their computer. $9000 US for a Thinkpad in 1996 was a lot, so we were very invested in tracking down the issue.
They had inadvertently switched the keyboard driver to use the Dvorak rather than QWERTY layout. Since none of us had ever actually used a Dvorak keyboard it took checking a lot of hardware before realizing the actual issue.
$9000 for a thinkpad is insane even today. Hell, ESPECIALLY today. Did they end up sticking with dvorak, though?
@@slicerabbit6166computers were like VR HMDs back then, just more Americans were more richer than the rest of the world. The best VR headset costs $10k today
I've had issues replicating passwords on systems that anticipate a US keyboard when i'm using a UK keyboard, or visa versa. Germany swaps Y and Z, making their keyboards "QWERTZ" which is.. fun.
There's always that moment of realisation where you're like "oh, I can't believe my lying eyes, that's right."
Canadian Multilingual!
@@slicerabbit6166 No, we got it switched back to properly match the hardware.
Yeah, those machines were like first to marked DVD drives, military grade hardware encryption (the hard drive could ONLY work in the matched machine), top Active Matrix screens. They were not for the average consumer.
well, well made. Normally I'd move on with my life but you presented the information so well and at such a pleasing tempo that I found myself watching anyway.
Reminds me of that old British show "connections".
What a huge amount of production this must have been for a kind of niche topic. I hope your channel takes off!
I like the idea of new keyboard layouts, but what always gets me is that I want the new layouts on all keyboards. If we could get everyone in the world to swap E and J around, I'd be onboard, but I'd probably get frustrated fast if only ~50% of the keyboards I interact with made such a change.
As someone that speaks another language, I say that you get used to it. It's mildly annoying when I get in my hands a computer with a english instead of a portuguese pattern (we use qwerty too, but with extra buttons for diacritics), but as long as the changes are small, such as it would be the case for the J and E swap, you can get used to it in minutes.
How often do you use other people’s computers? Yes, having different layouts on different computers is an issue, but for many people it shouldn’t really be an issue as they spend most of the time on computers they can configure to their preferences. I basically forgot Qwerty but it doesn’t affect me much since I need to use it only once in a blue moon.
It used to be more of a problem in the desktop era. Have to ever tried to log in to check emails on a German hotel computer kezboard, for example.
@@matth3us I have enough trouble with US vs UK keyboards. I learned a decade ago, and my right pinkie still automatically heads for the @ key on a certain UK keyboards (;/: on a US board) whenever I need to use one.
I'm in France now and going between qwerty (my computers) and azerty (on other computers) is incredibly frustrating. If qwerty is arbitrary and sub-optimal, azerty is doubly so because at least most of the world uses qwerty. Even China uses qwerty for crying out loud!
I would say that the biggest problem with designing perfect keyboard is the fact that every person and every language would need a different layout.
Indeed! In French I use AZERTY, but got used to QWERTY as well over the years, and it’s handy for typing out Japanese on top of English. The punctuation is not the same, but it’s be a whole other ordeal if ALL the letters were completely switched around!
Does make you wonder how much the standardization of QWERTY has impacted our word choice & general diction; since it isn't the other way around.
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And the problem with every person needing a different layout is what exactly? Machine learning does the hard work.
@@alfred5454I would suggest we share many of the keyboards we interact with thus must learn the common orientation. Also, I'm too lazy to reorganize the letters to my preferred layout.
This video encouraged me to subscribe. Your humor is so subtle and sharp that I often wonder if I imagined it 😁 Thank you for this.
The 8 key change one looks the most interesting for someone that codes and still needs to use commas, dots and semicolons a lot, really nicely made video btw, makes me kind of wish I finished my ml phd this stuff is so much fun to play with.
Too bad the 8 keys changed don't add up - 2 K's and no H!
@@OwenSkarpness I didn't notice that haha, might be a little better if one of those was a h
A long time ago I wrote (in Shockwave-anybody remember that?) an Auto-Optimizing Keyboard. It kept the last bunch of letters you typed and moved them to the optimal locations in the home row … as you typed.
Holy shit I haven't thought about Shockwave in YEARS! That was a trippy brain blast, suddenly memories of playing bad games as a teenager came flooding back
Did the ever changing format lead to backspace moving to the home row? 😂
I was a Quality Assurance Engineer on Shockwave and Director. That was a lot of fun.
I've been touch typing for over 30 years. I used Dvorak for a while, when working from home in the 90's, but that made it a nightmare to use a keyboard anywhere else. When I worked on other people's computers around the turn of the century (I made a lot of money from y2k fears) I reverted to QWERTY. I would love it if we could agree on an optimized layout and get everyone on board - particularly moving vowels to the home keys - but that's the real challenge; IF WE COULD AGREE.
We need the optimized keyboard to be ambidextrous so we don't totally alienate lefties. We need it to be optimized for all languages that use the Latin alphabet - or it won't be widely adopted. Meet those requirements and I'll be glad to try it out and support efforts to make it a standard. I'm not interested in a keyboard that is optimized for English because I mostly type in French.
well in your case AZERTY might also work. I have used it once on a laptop I had borrowed from a Belgium friend and I did get used to it pretty fast.
Well done video, didnt think much about keyboard layouts recently, but non the less fun to watch and very insightfull. Thankyou @AtomicFrontier. :-)
first video I've seen from this channel, and the information is so detailed, placed in an interesting way and with such a nice edit. Subscribed and watching more immediately.
I really love the essay that you show at 12:29. Especially the topic is great!
I was always a fast typist on QWERTY but at some point I started to hit a speed limit and also noticed that going on full speed caused "typewriter's cramps" (tenovaginitis) more and more often the older I got. So I switched to Dvorak. Once I was able to reach the same speed as before on Dvorak, I noticed that it was way easier on my hands. However, Dvorak allowed me to break my former speed limit and become even faster than before; so fast, that I could write as fast as people normally talk with ease (I could transcribe what people say in real time and without using shorthand). The problem is that a few years later my cramps came back because I think I was going too fast now. It got so bad that at some point I was just looking for a keyboard layout that would not cause me any pain, which is more important than speed, and so I ended up with Colemak. I cannot achieve my former speeds with Colemak but thanks to the fact that Colemak is optimized for even smaller finger movement and more pleasant rolling motions, whereas Dvorak is more optimized on hand alteration, I can now type at pretty good speed and with almost no pain, if I don't overdo it and use the right keyboard. As for the right keyboard, a split ergonomic keyboard works best for me and a low height one (like a notebook keyboard) works better than a half height or full height one and also way better than a mechanical ones, as I need way less force to push down the keys (almost no force at all) and the keys also travel a way shorter distances, so there's way less finger movement with only a minimal amount of force applied and that let's me type for hours and hours, every day of the week with no bigger issues, as that's part of my job.
@@kennethng9653They don't need to be far apart, they just need to match the natural position of my hands. It's not necessary for my forearms to be parallel to each other, like the two sides of the letter H. It's fine if I move my hands closer together so that my forearms form the shape of the two sides of the letter A, as long as my hands follow my forearms in a straight line. Bending the hands to either side creates an unnatural bend in the wrist; most people do this on a standard keyboard, they angle the left hand to the left and the right hand to the right. This is a position that you can do for a short time without any problems, but you should not do this for hours a day and several days a week. The reason is that this flexion compresses your carpal tunnels and the nerves that run through them, causing the infamous carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS).
Bending your forearms together is not a problem as long as your elbows stay close to your body (anything else puts strain on your shoulders) and your forearms are supported from below. So I would always use a chair with an armrest, and the armrest should be at the same height as the table or maybe even slightly above it (bending the wrists slightly downwards is more natural than bending them slightly upwards). So I place both halves at such an angle that my hands form a straight line with my forearms, which is important. The mouse is to the right of my right half, and since my keyboards don't have a numpad, I only have to move my right hand slightly to get to the mouse, and when I reach the mouse, my forearm is roughly perpendicular to my body and not leaning to the right like most people who use a full-size keyboard with a numpad, because that's bad for the shoulders and often the cause of tension and pain in the shoulder blade area for office workers.
However, I don't use a mouse either, only for gaming. For normal desktop work, I use an external touchpad because I like to use gestures to navigate and scrolling with two fingers is much less tiring than with a scroll wheel (and I have to scroll a lot). Also, this way I prefer to move my fingers rather than my hand most of the time, because during mouse pointer operations my hand rests on a cushion below the touchpad and only has to move a little when I go left/right, but not at all when I go up/down or scroll up/down.
My last trick is not to use the arrow keys, which you need quite often. Instead, I've turned the capslock key into an additional modifier, and when I press it, the JKLI keys become arrow keys (JKLI according to QWERTY layout, not Colemak layout). Also H moves a word to the left and ; moves a word to the right with this modifier. So I don't have to move my right hand away from home row position when navigating with the arrow keys.
Just curious, do you type on a membrane or mechanical keyboard? I decided to switch to a mechanical 2 years ago due to pain and it was the best thing ever. My fingers don't hurt anymore because I'm using much less effort to press the sluggish and sticky keys and my typing speed also is faster as well. I am interested in trying other layouts though
@@kupo150 I have collected all kinds of keyboards, probably 40 to 50 of them over the years, in order to find the optimal keyboard for me. But all the mechanical keyboards I've tested so far are not suitable for me because the key travel path is too long. On my current membrane keyboard, a short travel keyboard (like a notebook keyboard), the key travel path is tiny and I need almost no force at all to press the keys because when I lift my finger and drop it on the key, the force is almost enough to press it. Usually people have problems with membrane keyboards because they literally hammer their keys (you can actually "hear" how hard they hit it), when in fact a gentle touch would suffice. With a mechanical keyboard, there is less strain on the fingers when hammering as the key is gradually slowed down before coming to a complete stop, whereas with a membrane keyboard there is no slowdown, the key stops abruptly and all the surplus force acts back on the bones, muscles and joints. But once you learned to type with almost no force, meaning there is no surplus force anymore, mechanical keyboards don't work for you anymore, as when I type on a mechanical keyboard the same way as I'm typing right now, I'm in fact not typing at all, as no keystroke is ever registered, because with that amount of force I cannot push the key down to the point where it would register a keystroke. I need to push harder and farther to type with a mechanical keyboard and this is more tiring for my fingers. Also when I get used to this kind of typing again, I cannot type on notebook keyboards anymore, as then I will have the issue of using too much force again and the result will be a very painful experience after only an hour of typing on a notebook keyboard which is not able to absorb that extra amount force and this is nothing I can change like just flipping a switch. It took me several months of training to learn typing fast and accurately while almost exhibiting no force on the keys; when I type it look as if I'm petting my keyboard, as you barely ever see me lifting my finger or visually pressing anything down. A lot of people type like this: ua-cam.com/users/shortsIdH1TF6pUH8?feature=share and this will kill you when you type on a membrane keyboard. With such a keyboard, you need to type at least as gentle as in this video: ua-cam.com/video/MKT6Uhk5-Iw/v-deo.html Yet when using a layout like Colemak, there's is way less movement as you rarely ever leave the home row and even if you do, you don't move the entire hand around, you just move a single finger up/down, while the rest stays on the home row. ua-cam.com/video/7TVKvZkbndc/v-deo.html Also compare this: ua-cam.com/video/8PCMgDk315Y/v-deo.html See how much more gentle the movements are to the right vs to the left (forget the middle one, Logitech keyboards aren't good).
@@xcoder1122 very interesting stuff. I think I used to slam type a bit with membrane but I do feel like my pressure with a mechanical has decreased a lot. I slam sometimes still. I always used crap logitec membranes I guess. The issue I had was that my shift key got worn down to a point where it was getting stuck and it caused a lot of extra effort that my pinky finger started getting a lot of pain from the strain. Once I switched to my Huntsman keyboard all my strain pain went away. Of course a new membrane would have worked in the short term but I also don't like the squish feeling of membranes either. I also don't care for laptop style keys either that are really thin, I like more things to feel
I didn't find a significant improvement when switching to Dvorak, but one thing I did find is that, when my hands started cramping up, switching between them provided a vast improvement.
In addition to shifting the weighting, there's also the text it's trying to write. I suspect each language could end up with a keyboard that isn't just english + letters, but optimized differently because they type differently. I like the idea of throwing wikipedia at it as training material, open source, and nicely random.
Different languages have different optimal layouts. Like, Colemak-DH works great for English but isn't great for other languages. Dvorak works well for basically all western languages though, and makes a great default since it's so universal and quite a bit better than qwerty.
wikipedia may be better but there are charts of letter frequency. At least in English. Of course some may be codebreaker tables from the 1960s.
The issue of letter frequency charts over pure text data is that frequency charts only account for single letter presses, and doesn't tell you anything about how letters are ordered in real-usage, so it overlooks important things like the relationship of popular letter combos like an, th, sh, ght, ugh, ch. If you leave out important information like that, you're going to create a keyboard that may be more painful to use than it has to be. Imagine a keyboard that puts "T" on your index finger, but g and h on the keys just below and above it because of their middling to low typical usage. Such a keyboard would be really cumbersome when typing words like "thought" "through" and "thigh" due to the overly heavy usage of a single finger for those words. @@kitefan1
Wonderful video.
Very informative.
Doers and makers like you inspire me so much.
Subscribed.
I switched over to a Dvorak in 2000 or so and used it until about 2016 or so. There was a learning curve but I did ok with it. The biggest problems I had with it was changing keys when I bought a new keyboard, laptops were a pain and bringing in my keyboard to new work and then getting IT to allow permissions to load a new keyboard was painful. The absolute worst was entering in my network or computer logon password. Until the system booted up and loaded the Dvorak driver the computer assumed you had Qwerty, 100% a pain. I switched back, learned touch typing a little more and that is where I am. Great vid though!!
As a keyboard enthusiast and machine learning scientist, I see why this video has been recommended to me.
As none of that, I don't see why this video was recommended to me, but it was entertaining and informative nonetheless.
3:48 I can’t escape it
dear god
Lmao I didn't see it at first. Had to rewatch after reading your comment. That was beautiful
I found your channel auto recommended and just wanted to say fantastic work, very informative and entertaining
No mention of Linotype layout - which is one of the optimized layouts that resulted in the historic jams that led to QWERTY and other jam-free formats.
QWERTY wasn't to slow people down - it was to split the common letters to non adjacent armatures, which also extended the life of ribbons (and reduced jams)
Good to know that Dvorak is pretty close to the Utopia keyboard. I’ll be sticking with it since it’s natively supported by all common OS’es and relatively ubiquitous among alternative layouts.
I switched to colemak in the beginning of this year and I can totally attest that learning a new keyboard layout totally sucks. I took it more as a personal challange than as a "I want to type more comfortable" and I'm quite happy to have done that. And it comes with the disatvantage of being completely unable to touch type on a QUERTY keyboard anymore, although that interestingly wasn't really a problem at any point.
I too have noticed they not typing on qwerty has basically not been a problem, but I still type qwerty on my phone because I can't be bothered to learn an optimised phone keyboard system and there's just no point typing colemak on it. Still I get by on other people's keyboards when I must and it's honestly fine. If I absolutely need to do some substantial typing work my split ortho keyboard uses hardcoded colemak-dh (with a qwerty compatibility layer) so I could bring that anywhere I went if I needed to. In reality I always have my laptop which I have meticulously rearranged the keycaps on so it looks the part too!!
@@minerscale I learned to touch type Colemak, but never changed my keycaps, so when typing with less than 10 fingers, I still type QWERTY. I also still type QWERTY on my phone.
At home and at work I use QMK keyboards for which I have a Colemak and a QWERTY layer. When playing games for example I just switch to QWERTY, I just can't be bothered to rearrange the controls for every game. When I have to type text in it I just have to switch back to Colemak shortly.
I switched to a split ortolinear/columnar keyboard when doing the change. It means that my fingers feel the difference and type Colemak-dh. When typing on a laptop or other normal keyboard the switch to qwerty is automatic as it feels so different.
@@NightmareQueenJune QMK rules!
@@GarrettW I was afraid that my overall speed for both layouts would suffer so I didn't try to do that. It also seemed to be too much work for the party trick of being able to switch between the two.
I was hoping for detailed analysis of how the geese typed at the end!
great vid thanks!
Having learned dvorak around 10 years ago, I can testify the huge improvement it gives you. The main point is actually making less mistakes, which makes you so much faster in the end. Never had any finger or wrist pain after, even with huge amounts of writing. Would always recommend!
As another commenter said: It's not the best. But it is far better than qwerty.
One other point though: Only switching very few letters does not make it easier. It makes it harder, especially if you happen to switch between both layouts later on. I do that frequently (one computer running on qwerty, one on dvorak) and whenever words start with ma or am (same position for both), it gets me confused. You want it to be quite different so your brain does a complete rewiring instead of using old circuits.
The REAL homerow is W A D SHIFT SPACE.
They tried to get me to use the standard home row in school but im a gamer and use gamer homerow. Which means the majority of my typing is my index and middle fingers. My right Pinky is only ever used for shift and CTRL and my left pinky is only used for ENTER. No its not nearly as fast or efficient as standard homerow but it is something to consider for keyboard design. I can still type at an acceptable 50 WPM though.
Just an observation.
Yes... and for the right hand -> H J K L ... if I changed the keyboard layout I'd never be able to use VIM again.
@@markomacek920 Ugh. The only reason for HJKL is because it was dragged forward from the control characters on a dumb terminal that VI's original programmer was using in the mid 70s. I use IJKL for arrow keys and that makes a whole lot more sense IMO.
I love that you the changed the color variants on physical keyboards to illustrate the points. Great video!
There's another dimension to this, and that is the fact that QWERTY isn't just used for English. Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Baltics, also use it. Belgium and France use AZERTY, Germany, central Europe and the balkans use QWERTZ.
In Belgium, there's a really common issue on Windows where people accidentally switch keyboard layouts from AZERTY (Belgium and France standard) to QWERTY. All it takes usually is to accidentally press alt+shift to switch between keyboard settings as for some reason most WIndows installations come with both presets configured.
AZERTY and QWERTY only have minor differences in letters (AQ, WZ, and Mcomma) but almost all of the special characters are completely different.
AZERTY is ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS if you are a computer programmer because many of the symbols are only accessible using the ALT key.
Whenever you boot up a video game for the first time in Belgium, the first thing you ALWAYS check is the keyboard settings to see if the developers did correct localisation, and if not, go through the entire thing to make sure your WSAD becomes ZSQD. I usually don't change the M for map anymore, I am so used to pressing the comma button for opening a map that it doesn't bother me.
What is annoying however is all the number keys. In AZERTY, numbers are on the same keys, but they are accessed through SHIFT+number key. The default names for the keys are all symbols. "1234567890" becomes "&é"'(§è!çà". This is good for French people so they have access to their accent aigu's etcetera, but very annoying to have a video game tell you to press "à" for rocket launcher and "§" for shotgun.
In 2004 i started learning Dvorak. For a while, i continued also typing QWERTY. It was tough, very tough. But if I'd go from one to the other, I'd make a few mistakes, and then my brain would click and i'd be okay - with one exception, my typing speed went way down.
So with that experiment done, I ditched QWERTY altogether and went exclusively with Dvorak.
Coworkers can't use my machine, because other than the A and M keys, none of the other letters match.
It was a painful re-wiring of my brain, but I'm glad I did it.
In 2008 i had to ditch the mouse - too much hand pain. Now I use a giant track ball. LOVE IT.
As a software developer, it would be interesting to see how different keyboard layouts perform with languages like Javascript, C, Python, etc. Each language has their own quirks and regularly used character, or is it not enough to make a difference?
Well, I think, as a programmer, you're supposed to spend about 30% of your time just trying to figure out exactly what that function was supposed to do, 30% of the time waiting for your program to compile, and 20% of your time looking for answers on Stack Overflow, so I mean it really doesn't matter for that final 20% of the day
Python would obviously place the curly braces and semi column on less important positions whilst in many other programming language they would be on super prominent positions as they're frequently used.
If you were to let it position tab as well then that would be in a prominent position for python (assuming you're not some weirdo that hits spacebar an awful lot and just have the IDE set to insert spaces when hitting tab) whilst for other programming languages it might depend on your coding style (although likely still a very prominent position if you stick to the most common conventions)
I'm a long-term programmer, and it doesn't slow me down at all. As I touch type, I know where what is, without looking. And now with AI auto-complete, it's even better.
@@howmuchmorecanItake If you're doing unity built C, you'll definitely not wait that long for compilation. 100k LOC should be less than 10 seconds for a full rebuild on a skylake machine with MSVC and all the compiler flags removing the unnecessary things. And as my experience increases, SO has basically become one of the biggest sources of disinformation, rather than a support - so I spend a decreasing amount of time there, and much more time (relatively) with documentation, trial-and-error prototyping or asking experts.
I was just thinking of running this with a large swath of code on GitHub. Typing mod keys like shift+( all day sucks
I switched to Dvorak myself a couple years ago, as I was developing a RSI from my job. My wrists thank me today. It was truly one of the best decisions I've made. Glad to see the science backs it up! Even if it's not the absolute most optimal thing possible, it's a massive improvement over QWERTY nonetheless. And besides, "most optimal" is a moving target, as you showed with your experiment when using different sets of training data. Everyone's most-typed words are a bit different, plus Language use is also changing over time. I'm happy with the compromise. Dvorak's layout is wonderful, and much healthier to type with.
Dvorak was never a real improvement. It was just hyped by the owner trying to make money.
I would actually like one that optimised for writing code. I wouldn't even mind having a separate keyboard for normal words.
Also, the keyboard layouts are designed for touch typing right? Like you're supposed to have your hands on the home row and follow the finger rules. I never learned to do that and I'm now quite fast at typing while moving my hands around the place. I've built some pretty interesting muscle memory patterns with my hands.
@@_PatrickO Trying to go back to QWERTY after learning Dvorak is like typing with one hand tied behind my back. Maybe Dvorak wanted to make money, but I'm glad he did. See how many words you can spell with the QWERTY home row (e.g., glasses, alfalfa), and how many you can spell with the Dvorak home row: the, these, those, antenna, attenuation. There's just no going back.
@@cdorcey1735 I get that you are used to it. But there is no proof dvorak is faster. Look at the current world records for typing. All the top scores are with Qwerty, not Dvorak. The guiness "record" for barbara blackburn is completely fake and was proven to be fake by karl jobsts in a really in depth video about this.
Thats a pretty awesome and well made format. Techknowledge combined with Sightseeing. Well done, Sir!
Wow this channel is crazy well produced. Subscribed!
You mentioned Dvorak, but I'm moderately surprised there was no mention of the Colemak layout, which is supposed to be even better.
Obvious question: if you were previously around 60wpm with the QWERTY layout, after the exercise did you wind up seeing any improvements on such? Figured I'd ask just out of sheer curiosity ^_^
I agree. Colemak is designed to be relatively easy to learn relative to the benefits it provides. I switched to Colemak DH several years ago and am not looking back!
After 40+ years of using qwerty, i have switched to Colemak DH too, using a 36 key layout on a split ortholinear keyboard. The difference in comfort is amazing and typing feels effortless.
@@darcsentor how much time did it take to switch?
@@Tezla0 after about a week of practice i switched over. Took about a month to feel really comfortable, now a few months later i would never switch back. Used a layout called miryoku_zmk then customised it for my preferences.
Better for what? Dvorak is handy for programmers with common characters like home row -_ for snake_case and kebab-case variables to be easy to input. ',. for characters, lists, and accessing records are also in better positions. I use these symbols more than some Latin characters demoted to the bottom row. I tried a few other layout options, but none of them helped me at my job as much. (And yes, languages that use semicolons, ;, are inferior to options that do)
I'm pretty sure the picture of August Dvorak at 7:02 is actually a picture of Antonin Dvorak, a composer.
Him blindly pulling the first image from duck duck go really shows the effort he put into this video.
@@LightPink yo chill, we all make mistakes sometimes
i stumbled into your channel today and im pretty sure you are now my favorite youtuber. this was amazing
I already know kbd layout history, and this is just you showing what you learned when applying machine learning, which is cool but working solutions are cooler.
I just wanna say, because I must, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU for not making a 3 hour video, one for the typewriter, one for the keyboards, and one for qwerty stuff and your stuff.
Something that should be considered with keyboard designs aimed at injury prevention:
The right index finger is already under heavy stress due to all the left clicking, so it should not do any heavy lifting on the keyboard to balance out the strain.
I use the mouse left-handed, so it's my left middle finger that does all the clicking.
@@thekaxmaxfor me it's my thumb because I use a big trackball mouse!
Solution: stop using the mouse, and just use the keyboard. Retvrn to command line :P
@@drdca8263 _a_ solution, not a _good_ one. :P Requires _significant_ mental training and memorisation.
@@drdca8263 I swapped to vim last year and only recently found a vim extension for my browser and won't look back.
it would also be interesting if you found better keyboard shapes and layers in the same way. you briefly show a xy-optimization at 11:22 but there are plenty of other ways to make the keyboard align more with your hand shape. my favorite video about a keyboard is still 'why is this weird keyboard so good?' by 'pinguefy' which goes over a dactyl manuform, showing how much improvement you can get by daring to break into the third dimension, and the 'Ben Vallack' channel shows how awesome layers and chording can be.
I've personally been using the German QWERTZ layout for the better part of six years now. It's quite usable for me, and it makes a lot of sense for a lot of the positions. It's vastly different from the American QWERTY standard, which is annoying when you're an American. But I've memorised where all the keys are, so there's that. But I really like having shift+ period/comma be colon and semicolon, just makes life so much easier. The only disadvantage is that I don't have the Sheffer stroke and carrots key, since on the actual German layout those are a single key, replacing half the right shift. I do plan on getting a German layout keyboard eventually, so i'll be able to type them finally lol. Oh and the y and z are switched. It's SUPER annoying to type on a normal American keyboard for me now.
I love bringing the topic of other layouts up because it's interesting to see what's out there.
The amount of effort you put into your videos is incredible, I love this channel so much
I switched over to Dvorak years ago, so I can't necessarily say how much it improved me vs. QWERTY. What it did do was break me of my bad habit of looking at the keys, so now I can confidently touch-type.
Same here, with the weird twist that if I do look at the keys, I'm back typing QWERTY again.
Did it make me faster? I don't think so. Is it at least 3x more comfortable? Oh yeah. Is touch typing a way bigger advantage than I thought it was back when I couldn't do it? Also yeah. Thanks, Dvorak!
ditto
I switched to Dvorak last year, and I'm now faster, waaaayy more accurate, and can type without looking at all.
Honestly just sounds like you put in more effort.
How does learning a completely different method of typing NOT include putting in a lot of effort though?@@CottidaeSEA
2:12 “Ah yeah I sure hope it does” 😂
I have been on Dvorak for about 20 years. Main advantage is that it is supported under Windows, so there is no problem switching to it. With an extra utility I could implement some special characters and do a couple of layout modifications suitable for other languages. English, German Swedish, French, Greek, Esperanto.
you frame your words a lot like tom scott, 4:12 bit was a lot like him/other mini-documentary type people, the tone and use of environment + camera movement makes me love that scene
Switching to Dvorak was one of the best choices in life I've ever made. It took me about a month to not feel like clunky gloves, and 3 months to be about 80% proficient. I chose Dvorak over Colemak or similar because it was best supported by default over most operating systems. Nowadays I use a ZSA Moonlander with a lightly modified Dvorak and it's amazing. If you do any amount of typing, I 100% recommend learning an optimized layout. Your joints will thank you.
As a fun side note, I'm actually using Qwerty right now because I just wiped my laptop and haven't bothered to switch to it and my mechie is in the other room. I only lost about 20% on my qwerty performance over time and my brain automatically switches by the feel of the keyboard, it's so weird (useful whenever using someone else's keyb). Actually I should just fix that. ...
Ahh there we go. Woah that feels so weird. My muscle memory still thinks this keyboard is qwerty since it has been that way the past two weeks and it is taking me a sentence or two to shift back.
Dvorak puts vowels to left hand, hands alternate.
Algorithm optimizes for assumption which could be wrong. It would be interesting to build model from timing data of different layout users.
I think a good model to use for a generally optimized keyboard for the english language would be to use simulated annealing of 1) the 3000 most commonly used words in the English language (which supposedly accounts for ~80% of daily linguistic communication) weighted by frequency of use, 2) Weight by travel distance from the home keys in a multiplicative manner to word frequency, 3) don't weight by awkwardness of using each finger to type unless you have a large enough sample size of people to get an accurate measurement, which I presume would be several thousand people minimum. 4) For typing on mobile define travel distance by how far each thumb would have to travel from halfway along the keyboard vertically and either one-third or one-quarter in the keyboard from each side. This process could be applied in a multilingual context by using words in every language that uses a Latin script that ammount to 80% of daily communication in each also weighted by frequency of use and travel distance form the home keys, and maybe weight each language by frequency of use.
TIL (today I learned) - I always, incorrectly, thought that Qwerty was related to mechanical keyboard arms - thanks for this video and insight!
I guess once you've been typing with a certain layout for many years (in my case, 43 years), it's nearly impossible to change.
I can touch type - I'm doing it now - I've spent so much time on a querty keyboard, since my ZX81 back in 1982 (I was a year late), any other layout is now an impediment.
Even switching two letters would throw me out. I literally glance at the keyboard once every session.
A session is when I take my hands off the keyboard entirely.
Touch typing is entirely based on muscle memory... which does make buying a new keyboard interesting.
It must have exactly the same spacing and size of keys.
I tought myself the Workman layout (with select changes), which was an interesting comparison to Dvorak. Dvorak does a better job of prioritizing alternation (something you didn't consider in this video) and minimizing consecutive same finger usage (something you also didn't consider). Workman does a much better job of considering the natural range of motion of each finger (much easier for index finger to move downward than the ring finger, for instance)
It does take about a month to get even remotely productive with an alternative layout, and probably 2-3 months to hit your old speed, but honestly? It's worth it. Give it a try!
Workman was the first layout after QWERTY that I tried when getting into touch typing. It's been so long I don't really remember what I exactly I didn't like about it but it kind of felt wrong and "slow". Ended up switching to Dvorak (with some modifications for Ergodox) that I use ever since.
really took use of the opportunity to flip us all off both hands! 🤣🤣🤣
Three times :D
But what about the breathtakingly subtle rickroll at 12:29 ?
To find the "optimal" keyboard one should also find the most common letter pairs and arrange the keyboard so that one of these letter is on one hand and the other on the other hand so that typing consecutive letters seldom falls on one hand.
Fun video.
I would add that one of the big advantages of Dvorak is missing when you setup your objective function: with it (in English) you mostly type one key with your left hand, then one with your right hand, ..., in a very nice alternating flow. Would be fun to see how adding that that changes the results.
Would have been useful to see performance improvements of a keyboard layout trained on one dataset in the other datasets, would convey whether you overfit or if the benefit would translate more generally
A 40% keyboard is already the worst keyboard on the planet to me, never mind the switching around of keys on top of that :P
I've never seen a proper history on the keyboard layout, I also just assumed it was the typewriter jamming thing I'd always heard, so that was informative!
As someone with both serious RSI injuries in both wrists many years back and someone that has been using 'ergonomic' keyboards for over 20 years now, just looking at one of those minimised things actually makes me wince in pain. I have no idea how people can stand the damn things, yet they do seem hugely popular.
@@DrBunnyMedicinal The smaller keyboards and a split actually helped my wrist pain. Less reaching thanks to layers, and split helps get my arms and wrists into better alignment.
I need all my keys
Definitely a numpad
So much easier typing longer numbers with numpad and my blender 3d uses it for viewport navigation which is much better than having to use buttons in the UI
@@error.418 Huh. I really found that an ergonomic KB helped me out, both when I was injured and when I was constantly typing up a storm in a call center
@@Ikxi Oh yes! No keypad == No buy from me. I'm so used to having to type numbers so very frequently
Nice video, I have learned a lot of things, I didn't even knew that might interest me. And one funny thing: on portrait seen in 7:01 is actually composer Antonín Dvořák not August. But after brief googling it seems to be a pretty common mistake on the internet (and some sources even says that they might be distant cousins). 🙂
I made the switch to Dvorak years ago (acknowledges hearty applause). While it didn't take super long to learn where all the keys were, it did take a long time to get back to where I was typing *words* rather than letters. When you type "the", you don't mentally type 't', 'h', 'e'. You type "the" which is several strokes that you don't have to think about. Like you don't have to think about all the motions involved in opening a door, you just open it.
the buckley layout shown at 3:48 has a special place in my heart. it's a complete loss that we don't still use it today. i think in it's time it had mechanical issues with the typewriter carriage getting stuck and was abandoned due to miscarriage problems.
No one else may have noticed what you did -- but I did. I saw it. *golfclap*
I've been using the Neo2 layout for over 5 years, which is optimized for letter frequency very similarly to what you did. Never looked back to QWERTY. It takes quite some time to get used to, but it's worth it, even just for the flabbergasted reactions of people seeing my keyboard for the first time 😃
A fellow neo2 user. 😄
I use it on the ErgoDox EZ with blank key caps. Absolutely worth the pain it took to re-learn!
The most striking conclusion from this research is that unpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, caffeine-addicted PhD students make inexplicably painful choices on how to spend their free time 😂
Seriously, it’s a fantastic vid, very well produced, and you totally demolished the subject matter. I’ve clicked the bell, something I never do, and the highest praise I can give a channel.
For those that are (too) used to A/QWERTY/Z to learn something new, or need to maintain a low-entry-barrier (meaning being able to go with whatever keyboard is at hand): You may try to shift your hands-position one character to the right, so that the left F-nub is under the left middle-finger and the right index-finger is on the K. In this position you can make use of your knowledge of the keyboard-layout while also being much more centered and have a better spread/shorter reach, kind of equalizing the asymmetrical orientation. This is especially helpful on laptops and compact industrial, as well as the usual office keyboards. While i learned 10-finger typing on german keyboards, the switch to US-International-with dead-keys Layout reduced the strain further overall, independent of the languages i write in and is extremely helpful when writing code, often switching operating systems and editors over the day (or night).
Would love to try a Dactyl Manuform if only there were key-switches with a much shorter travel, comparable to HP Laptops/Notebooks and Apple MacBooks/Magic Keyboards - simply because with Poly-Arthritis it's a PITA to hunk mechanical switches over the threshold for longer than an hour ..
Love your style btw. keep the middle-fingers coming!
I have been using colemak for about 8 months now and i can say that i find it significantly more comfortable to type with. Retraining my muscle memory was challenging and very frustrating at times but I think it was worth it for the party trick alone. Now I'm using a column staggered 34 key keyboard called the ferris sweep using colemak as the keymap and I can say that it is the most comfortable and effortless typing experience I have ever had, to the point that going back to a normal row stagger keyboard using qwerty feels fatiguing after about 10 minutes. Learning a new layout is not worth it unless you find the challenge fun though.
I cannot believe he made all of those different keyboards for each different input type. So much effort for such amazing detail. And honestly some great conversation pieces to hang on your wall.
This is wonderful. Keep exploring!
This video is very interesting! I would be interested seeing a keyboard optimized for programming, it uses a very different set of characters and frequencies to writing normal prose
Curly bracket keys for instance maybe shouldn't be shift functions but have their own keys.
another youtuber used a dictionary to measure the DISTANCE_on_keyboard_layouts between letters within words, to optimize just for that.
This almost only optimizes for single-finger-typing.
he also made the "longest distances keyboard"
A way to make this something you can use yourself to generate the perfect keyboard for yourself would be amazing, tracking your own inputs for a while and then submitting the generated keyboard layout to be ordered to your door.
I also played around with keyboard optimisation a few years ago. Also used simulated annealing. One new idea I had towards the end was that it may be better to use a home gap rather than a home row. In other words, the better home position is *between* two rows (after optimising the keys in those rows), which allows you to keep more keys closer. The overall penalty for eg moving half a row for most keys is less than a zero penalty for the home row plus the unit penalty for more keys.
Interesting stuff. After a 20 year career as a typographer in the pre-desktop days, I got 3 different RSI problems in my arms, but mainly bilateral epicondylitis and radial nerve syndrome. I got ill in 1992, and my case was an early one that helped Workers Comp decide to allow chiropractic as the primary treatment for workplace injuries, if the injured person prefers. Just to say, I've tried everything. I left typography and entered tech writing, but I do still type many hours a day. I use the TypeMatrix keyboard, which is a small footprint regular grid. Hugely better, totally fixed me up. Will run either qwerty or Dvorak. I have no affiliation, just wanted to share.