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The real problem with current keyboards is the physical arrangement of the keys. Staggered rows instead of columns make them less ergonomic, the oversized space

The real problem with current keyboards is the physical arrangement of the keys. Staggered rows instead of columns make them less ergonomic, the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard. The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text. While the weak pinky finger has to cover more keys than the others. These things are more significant than qwerty vs dvorak. Need to type faster? Spend some time practising every day and you will gain more speed within weeks than from just switching layouts. Most people don't as speed often isn't actually that important. I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed. Need less hand movement? Placing symbols, arrow keys etc as secondary function onto the central keys with a programmable keyboard helps with that, changing to dvorak doesn't as much because on a modern keyboard you can reach all letters without hand movement either way.

k__ 1y ago
"The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text." To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.
- alpaca128 1y ago
  That key makes up about 15% in English text, and it could be covered by 10% of fingers but instead it's 20%. Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. Altough I haven't looked at actual keypress stats and how those are distributed across fingers. Might be interesting to look into. On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. It's like a novice golfer complaining that it hurts their hips when they rotate through the swing, or a tennis player complaining that trying to add spin with a wrist twist feels weird, or any millions of other example of "feels weird without practice". Hell, most people can't do the most basic of yoga poses without practice. Muscles need to be stretched and trained into doing what you want them to do. Once they are, all of the complaints go away and things feel normal. Is QWERTY the most efficient, no. But as someone else commented, speed is not my issue. Thinking what needs to be typed is definitely my speed regulator. If I were to just do basic text dictation or re-typing while reading a direct source, my speeds increase dramatically. I find that most typing complaints are from those that never had formal typing instruction and are self taught with games or similar. I was fortunate to have one full year of typing while in high school, and it is by far the most used class instruction I've ever had.
    - goosedragons 1y ago
      Nah dawg. I was a practiced touch typist for years. We had oodles of typing in elementary school. Pain in my pinkies didn't get better. Only worse because keys like {}| are far more important in programming than writing English and add to pinkie stress. Switching to a Kinesis Advantage with thumb keys and layers to put keys like {} under better fingers resolved my problem.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        Yeah, the parent's implication is just wrong: > As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. Becoming a good typist doesn't magically change your pinkie from being the weakest finger on your hand to the strongest. That's basic anatomy. And, specifically if you are a good typist, then your neutral hand position will absolutely involve stretching your pinkie to hit enter/backspace/shift - they're exactly wrong with their assertion. I'm vaguely aware of the Kinesis Advantage - it looks like a pretty solid ergonomic keyboard (although it may not be for me because it's not a split keyboard and my shoulders are pretty wide). Does the software do QMK stuff like mod-tap?
- KingEllis 1y ago
  I had never considered until now that my left thumb never touches the keyboard.
  - adornKey 1y ago
    I think having Shift available for the thumb would help a lot (in the middle just below Space bar). Most experimental layouts that add more features make the mistake to overload it, some of these things even look totally thumb-driven.... This make everything very confusing. Just Shift for a start, would be good. The pinky is too much overloaded. Offloading some of it to the thumb would actually be an improvement.
stevage 1y ago
I still miss a Compaq keyboard I had with a split spacebar. You could choose various options; I had the left side as backspace. I don't agree with your statement about switching though. I was a very good Qwerty typist, but I'm much faster and more accurate on Dvorak. Switching was one of the most useful things I have ever done.
Zambyte 1y ago
I switched to Dvorak around five years ago now. I decided to switch at the same time as switching to a columnar split keyboard (specifically the ZSA Moonlander, which is still my primary keyboard (my secondary is the ZSA Voyager for travel)). I did this switch at the same time, because I felt like it would be a sufficiently different keyboard that I wouldn't have as concrete of muscle memory, and I wouldn't be fighting my QWERTY instincts as much. A big part of why I wanted to make the switch at all is because I was experiencing fatigue in my hands, and I felt that it could be due to my improper typing habits that I developed from mostly learning to type through playing videogames. I wanted to properly type from the home row, and the split columnar keyboard basically enforces that, and Dvorak makes it even easier. I will say though, I type at about the same speed that I did before I made the switch. Switching layouts almost certainly will not enable you to type faster. Switching layouts encourages you to deliberately practice typing on that layout (I did lots of typing challenges while learning) which will make you faster. The biggest benefit for me has actually been in my back! The split keyboard allows me to rotate my shoulders back a lot more, which makes me feel way better at the end of the day. My hands are less fatigued too, but I don't feel like that was as big of a deal for me.
- yoyohello13 1y ago
  Same for me. I’ve got a Voyager as my main keyboard and I use Colemak. I didn’t have any fatigue or anything, I was just curious what all the hype with alternative layouts was about. I’m about the same speed as I was on qwerty, but my back and shoulders feel a lot better with the split keyboard. It feels really good to type with an alternative layout, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, the learning process was pretty arduous for me, and I’ve kind of lost my ability to use qwerty. I would definitely recommend a split keyboard though. The ergonomics are much better.
- adrian_b 1y ago
  I also do not agree with TFA that the keyboard layout does not really matter. I have switched a few years ago to Dvorak. I do not think that this has changed much my typing speed, which has never been important for me. However, it has greatly increased my typing comfort. Now I consider that switching to Dvorak was one of my best decisions and I only regret that I have spent decades using Qwerty without trying alternatives. Of course, using an ergonomic keyboard is at least as important as the key layout.
justsomehnguy 1y ago
> the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard This is what puzzles me most of the mechanical keyboard market: you can have whatever shit cramped in on a 60%/75% keyboard but the spacebar is still the long slab. Eg: Shurikey Hanzo 001 65% is especially... bold in this
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  What puzzles me about the mechanical keyboard market is why they go for the small keyboards to begin with. I can't imagine anyone has a desk so small that the handful of inches shaved off really makes a difference. So why subject oneself to having to relearn all the muscle memory, and the lack of useful keys? It makes no sense to me.
  - mechanicum 1y ago
    It’s about hand movement, not desk space. The “missing” keys are on additional layers reached via a modifier key, or by overloading keys on tap/hold, or by increasingly esoteric methods the smaller the board gets: chording, tap dance, etc. They’re typically no less accessible than capital letters, while allowing you to keep your fingers on the home row. For me, the additional keys on my larger keyboards rarely prove useful in practice. I end up mostly using the same subset available on the 60% I’m typing on now – it’s quicker and more comfortable than reaching over to the dedicated key.
    - adornKey 1y ago
      On the other hand there is spatial memory. Overloading things has some downsides - it adds more possibilities for errors - and makes muscle memory complicated. In a lot of software those extra function keys are well used, easily go into muscle memory and help to safe a lot of time.
      - alpaca128 1y ago
        I actually make fewer errors and in some cases reach higher speeds when typing a lot of special symbols as everything is reachable without moving my hands and I arranged all special symbols in a way that makes sense to me. Muscle memory works perfectly fine, with the difference that I don't need to make blind error prone hand movements across the keyboard to use arrow keys etc.
userbinator 1y ago
I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed. If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers, you are being bottlenecked by your typing. Most people think and speak faster than they can type, especially in short bursts; and I'm saying that, as someone who can comfortably type at ~160-180wpm and burst over 200 for a few seconds at a time, I still find myself waiting for my fingers. Holding a conversation over IM is one of the most common places where this bottleneck becomes very noticeable.
- kqr 1y ago
  Also when trying out different ways to form a sentence, or prototyping simple code. Typing fast is not about throughput, it is about latency.[1] [1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-not-throughput https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...
- iLemming 1y ago
  > If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers I'm not sure, I don't think that happens a lot to me, especially because I speak and type in multiple languages. I as well, feel bottlenecked by the brain, not typing speed. Even when I use voice-to-text software, I struggle to speak out loud my thoughts in a well-structured and well-paced manner, which somehow doesn't happen during normal conversations, only when I'm trying to write my thoughts down. That being said, as someone who keeps their hands on the keyboard a dozen hours a day, of course I would love to find a way to type much, much faster and more accurately. I bet it comes in very handy when taking notes during Zoom meetings, etc., but my vim-muscle memory freaks out even thinking of having to rebind hjkl keys to something else. I wonder if vimmers who switched to Dvorak or Colemak can share their perspective. I've never gotten brave enough to give them a try, always felt like a waste of time for questionable benefit, but that's probably how most people think about vim-navigation, which has become an inextricable part of my keyboard workflow and I am very grateful for my younger self for learning vim-navigation.
knorker 1y ago
The much reduced hand movement is extremely comfortable, paying dividends every day. And it fixed my RSI. Of course over long periods of time we're bottlenecked by our brains. But the things to write come in bursts, and typing speed blocks there. Also transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed. My experience completely contradicts your assertions.
- alpaca128 1y ago
  The part about hand movement confuses me. On qwerty you can reach all letters without moving the hands. On both qwerty and dvorak you still need to move or stretch the hands to reach backspace, arrow keys, escape etc. So how does dvorak reduce hand movement? > the things to write come in bursts In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me. > transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed That's a very specific use-case and I wouldn't type fast enough for that no matter what layout. At that point I'd probably learn stenography instead.
  - knorker 1y ago
    The physical keys are the same ones no matter if it's qwerty or dvorak, of course, so yes you can reach the keys without shifting your wrists over. But some movement is there, and once I reached even 10 wpm or something, it was immediately noticeable that this is more comfortable because so much of what I now type is on the home row. Fingers need to stretch less, wrists wiggle less. > In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me. I don't do Dvorak for the speed. I did it for the comfort and getting rid of RSI. But I'm also faster. To me it's a bit of a separate question of "does speed matter?". I'd say yes, because sometimes you're taking notes while someone is talking, and the less time you have to type while listening, and the less you are behind on noting down what was said, the easier it is to not lose the thread. > [transcribing what someone is saying is] a very specific use-case Some version of this happens every single meeting I'm in. You don't necessarily need word for word, or maybe you want word for word, but you don't need every sentence, but note taking during a meeting will be much worse if you can't type fast.
dsego 1y ago
The stagger is beneficial for the right hand but makes it harder for the left hand. An ortholinear layout is not more comfortable, ideally there should either be a symmetrical or columnar stagger.

k__ 1y ago

"The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text." To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.

alpaca128 1y ago
That key makes up about 15% in English text, and it could be covered by 10% of fingers but instead it's 20%. Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. Altough I haven't looked at actual keypress stats and how those are distributed across fingers. Might be interesting to look into. On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. It's like a novice golfer complaining that it hurts their hips when they rotate through the swing, or a tennis player complaining that trying to add spin with a wrist twist feels weird, or any millions of other example of "feels weird without practice". Hell, most people can't do the most basic of yoga poses without practice. Muscles need to be stretched and trained into doing what you want them to do. Once they are, all of the complaints go away and things feel normal. Is QWERTY the most efficient, no. But as someone else commented, speed is not my issue. Thinking what needs to be typed is definitely my speed regulator. If I were to just do basic text dictation or re-typing while reading a direct source, my speeds increase dramatically. I find that most typing complaints are from those that never had formal typing instruction and are self taught with games or similar. I was fortunate to have one full year of typing while in high school, and it is by far the most used class instruction I've ever had.
  - goosedragons 1y ago
    Nah dawg. I was a practiced touch typist for years. We had oodles of typing in elementary school. Pain in my pinkies didn't get better. Only worse because keys like {}| are far more important in programming than writing English and add to pinkie stress. Switching to a Kinesis Advantage with thumb keys and layers to put keys like {} under better fingers resolved my problem.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      Yeah, the parent's implication is just wrong: > As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. Becoming a good typist doesn't magically change your pinkie from being the weakest finger on your hand to the strongest. That's basic anatomy. And, specifically if you are a good typist, then your neutral hand position will absolutely involve stretching your pinkie to hit enter/backspace/shift - they're exactly wrong with their assertion. I'm vaguely aware of the Kinesis Advantage - it looks like a pretty solid ergonomic keyboard (although it may not be for me because it's not a split keyboard and my shoulders are pretty wide). Does the software do QMK stuff like mod-tap?
KingEllis 1y ago
I had never considered until now that my left thumb never touches the keyboard.
- adornKey 1y ago
  I think having Shift available for the thumb would help a lot (in the middle just below Space bar). Most experimental layouts that add more features make the mistake to overload it, some of these things even look totally thumb-driven.... This make everything very confusing. Just Shift for a start, would be good. The pinky is too much overloaded. Offloading some of it to the thumb would actually be an improvement.

stevage 1y ago

I still miss a Compaq keyboard I had with a split spacebar. You could choose various options; I had the left side as backspace. I don't agree with your statement about switching though. I was a very good Qwerty typist, but I'm much faster and more accurate on Dvorak. Switching was one of the most useful things I have ever done.

Zambyte 1y ago

I switched to Dvorak around five years ago now. I decided to switch at the same time as switching to a columnar split keyboard (specifically the ZSA Moonlander, which is still my primary keyboard (my secondary is the ZSA Voyager for travel)). I did this switch at the same time, because I felt like it would be a sufficiently different keyboard that I wouldn't have as concrete of muscle memory, and I wouldn't be fighting my QWERTY instincts as much. A big part of why I wanted to make the switch at all is because I was experiencing fatigue in my hands, and I felt that it could be due to my improper typing habits that I developed from mostly learning to type through playing videogames. I wanted to properly type from the home row, and the split columnar keyboard basically enforces that, and Dvorak makes it even easier. I will say though, I type at about the same speed that I did before I made the switch. Switching layouts almost certainly will not enable you to type faster. Switching layouts encourages you to deliberately practice typing on that layout (I did lots of typing challenges while learning) which will make you faster. The biggest benefit for me has actually been in my back! The split keyboard allows me to rotate my shoulders back a lot more, which makes me feel way better at the end of the day. My hands are less fatigued too, but I don't feel like that was as big of a deal for me.

yoyohello13 1y ago
Same for me. I’ve got a Voyager as my main keyboard and I use Colemak. I didn’t have any fatigue or anything, I was just curious what all the hype with alternative layouts was about. I’m about the same speed as I was on qwerty, but my back and shoulders feel a lot better with the split keyboard. It feels really good to type with an alternative layout, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, the learning process was pretty arduous for me, and I’ve kind of lost my ability to use qwerty. I would definitely recommend a split keyboard though. The ergonomics are much better.
adrian_b 1y ago
I also do not agree with TFA that the keyboard layout does not really matter. I have switched a few years ago to Dvorak. I do not think that this has changed much my typing speed, which has never been important for me. However, it has greatly increased my typing comfort. Now I consider that switching to Dvorak was one of my best decisions and I only regret that I have spent decades using Qwerty without trying alternatives. Of course, using an ergonomic keyboard is at least as important as the key layout.

justsomehnguy 1y ago

> the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard This is what puzzles me most of the mechanical keyboard market: you can have whatever shit cramped in on a 60%/75% keyboard but the spacebar is still the long slab. Eg: Shurikey Hanzo 001 65% is especially... bold in this

bigstrat2003 1y ago
What puzzles me about the mechanical keyboard market is why they go for the small keyboards to begin with. I can't imagine anyone has a desk so small that the handful of inches shaved off really makes a difference. So why subject oneself to having to relearn all the muscle memory, and the lack of useful keys? It makes no sense to me.
- mechanicum 1y ago
  It’s about hand movement, not desk space. The “missing” keys are on additional layers reached via a modifier key, or by overloading keys on tap/hold, or by increasingly esoteric methods the smaller the board gets: chording, tap dance, etc. They’re typically no less accessible than capital letters, while allowing you to keep your fingers on the home row. For me, the additional keys on my larger keyboards rarely prove useful in practice. I end up mostly using the same subset available on the 60% I’m typing on now – it’s quicker and more comfortable than reaching over to the dedicated key.
  - adornKey 1y ago
    On the other hand there is spatial memory. Overloading things has some downsides - it adds more possibilities for errors - and makes muscle memory complicated. In a lot of software those extra function keys are well used, easily go into muscle memory and help to safe a lot of time.
    - alpaca128 1y ago
      I actually make fewer errors and in some cases reach higher speeds when typing a lot of special symbols as everything is reachable without moving my hands and I arranged all special symbols in a way that makes sense to me. Muscle memory works perfectly fine, with the difference that I don't need to make blind error prone hand movements across the keyboard to use arrow keys etc.

userbinator 1y ago

I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed. If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers, you are being bottlenecked by your typing. Most people think and speak faster than they can type, especially in short bursts; and I'm saying that, as someone who can comfortably type at ~160-180wpm and burst over 200 for a few seconds at a time, I still find myself waiting for my fingers. Holding a conversation over IM is one of the most common places where this bottleneck becomes very noticeable.

kqr 1y ago
Also when trying out different ways to form a sentence, or prototyping simple code. Typing fast is not about throughput, it is about latency.[1] [1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-not-throughput https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...
iLemming 1y ago
> If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers I'm not sure, I don't think that happens a lot to me, especially because I speak and type in multiple languages. I as well, feel bottlenecked by the brain, not typing speed. Even when I use voice-to-text software, I struggle to speak out loud my thoughts in a well-structured and well-paced manner, which somehow doesn't happen during normal conversations, only when I'm trying to write my thoughts down. That being said, as someone who keeps their hands on the keyboard a dozen hours a day, of course I would love to find a way to type much, much faster and more accurately. I bet it comes in very handy when taking notes during Zoom meetings, etc., but my vim-muscle memory freaks out even thinking of having to rebind hjkl keys to something else. I wonder if vimmers who switched to Dvorak or Colemak can share their perspective. I've never gotten brave enough to give them a try, always felt like a waste of time for questionable benefit, but that's probably how most people think about vim-navigation, which has become an inextricable part of my keyboard workflow and I am very grateful for my younger self for learning vim-navigation.

knorker 1y ago

The much reduced hand movement is extremely comfortable, paying dividends every day. And it fixed my RSI. Of course over long periods of time we're bottlenecked by our brains. But the things to write come in bursts, and typing speed blocks there. Also transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed. My experience completely contradicts your assertions.

alpaca128 1y ago
The part about hand movement confuses me. On qwerty you can reach all letters without moving the hands. On both qwerty and dvorak you still need to move or stretch the hands to reach backspace, arrow keys, escape etc. So how does dvorak reduce hand movement? > the things to write come in bursts In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me. > transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed That's a very specific use-case and I wouldn't type fast enough for that no matter what layout. At that point I'd probably learn stenography instead.
- knorker 1y ago
  The physical keys are the same ones no matter if it's qwerty or dvorak, of course, so yes you can reach the keys without shifting your wrists over. But some movement is there, and once I reached even 10 wpm or something, it was immediately noticeable that this is more comfortable because so much of what I now type is on the home row. Fingers need to stretch less, wrists wiggle less. > In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me. I don't do Dvorak for the speed. I did it for the comfort and getting rid of RSI. But I'm also faster. To me it's a bit of a separate question of "does speed matter?". I'd say yes, because sometimes you're taking notes while someone is talking, and the less time you have to type while listening, and the less you are behind on noting down what was said, the easier it is to not lose the thread. > [transcribing what someone is saying is] a very specific use-case Some version of this happens every single meeting I'm in. You don't necessarily need word for word, or maybe you want word for word, but you don't need every sentence, but note taking during a meeting will be much worse if you can't type fast.

dsego 1y ago

The stagger is beneficial for the right hand but makes it harder for the left hand. An ortholinear layout is not more comfortable, ideally there should either be a symmetrical or columnar stagger.