Eliphalet's Legacy: QWERTY (OT)

[Ed. note: I decided to publish this anyway, because I worked hard on it. Please just ignore it if the topic bugs you! I'll understand.  —Mike]

You probably already know there are alternative keyboard layouts. The standard one is the only one that never had a name; it's called merely by its beginning letter sequence, starting from the top left: QWERTY. On the Mac it's called "U.S.," which isn't a name but merely a label.

QWERTY dates from 1878, when E.* Remington and Sons, a maker of firearms, revamped the arrangement inherited from a new typewriting machine they had just bought the rights to. The co-inventor of that device, Christopher Latham Scholes, along with Amos Densmore, the brother of his financial backer, did indeed perform experiments to create a sensible ordering of the letters and numbers—what we now call a layout. There are various tales and stories floating around about why they did what they did. On their device, the first letters of the top row ended up as "QWE.TY". Remington and Sons then tweaked that layout in the same way its engineers went over the mechanism and improved that; one change they made, among others, was to put the "R" where the period had been, among other changes, allegedly so salesmen could type the phrase "typewriter quote" using only the top row of letters. No one knows if that's true. Another perhaps apocryphal story is that common bigrams (two-setter sequences) were placed far away from each other to purposely slow typists down, to minimize jamming of the typebars. There's no direct evidence for that, either.

Eliphalet Remington, whose company made guns and typewriters
and who made QWERTY stick...they knew not what they did!

A couple of things are true. First, there were no QWERTY touch-typists in 1878! Because how could there have been? The product and its layout were both brand new. So, obviously, they didn't get input from statistically large numbers of touch-typists when putting the finishing touches on QWERTY. Second, Scholes and Densmore didn't experiment all that much; you can see vestiges of plain old alphabetical order in the home row of QWERTY, in the D-F-G-H-J-K-L sequence. And of course they didn't have computers to help with things like finger-travel analysis (your fingers have to move about 2.3X times as far typing in QWERTY as in Colemak, for example). They probably did know about letter frequency, the analysis of which dates back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi in the ninth century—and was pretty well known to every compositor working on a printing press—and yet they didn't do a very good job managing that either.

The quest for better
As far as alternates to QWERTY are concerned, such as they are, the chief advantage is not speed but comfort. You keep your fingers on the home row more, and reach awkwardly with your weaker fingers less. Common bigrams and trigams "flow" better, and awkward things like common combinations using one finger on different rows are minimized. The main alternate layouts are Dvorak (1936), Colemak (2006), and Workman (2010). Workman is integrated with Linux and was developed by a programmer, O.J. Bucao. Colemak and Dvorak are integrated in Mac OS. Windows supports Dvorak. There are many other layouts, due to the fact that, on programmable keyboards, anybody can make their own. As you might expect, there are guys out on the wilds of the internet who are waaaay into the weeds in the search for the perfect layout, which they will find one day right next to Bigfoot, who will be sipping the elixir of the gods out of the Holy Grail. Vlogger Ben Frain, however, who reviews next-gen keyboards**, gets right to the core of it: "I'll save you a lot of time, and say that the single biggest gain you'll make with keyboard layouts is moving away from QWERTY. Whether you choose Workman over Colemak or Colemak over Dvorak is fairly academic. The big gains are in just switching away from QWERTY, because all of the other ones are so much better...."

If you'd like to try Dvorak or Colemak, and don't want to buy a new keyboard or reprogram the one you have, here's how to go about it, in the Mac OS at least. Go to Apple menu > System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input. Then, across from "Input Sources," click on "Edit." While you're in the box that comes up, make sure the top item, "Show Input menu in menu bar," is turned on. The thing you probably would have missed in that box is that, way down in the lower left-hand corner, there's a little "+" sign. Click on that and it brings up all the alternatives available in Mac OS (no support for Workman or Colemak-DH yet, unfortunately). Select the layout you want to try and click "add." Now you can go to the Menu bar, find the Input menu, and click on it to quickly switch back and forth between your normal layout and your new one.

The Input Menu in the Menu Bar on a Mac

You can also make the change virtually at keybr.com, by going to Settings > Keyboard > Layout. (Moving the "Unlock more letters" slider all the way to the right will let you try exercises using the whole alphabet.) Be sure to click "Done" to make your changes. Of course this only changes things in that one browser page, but it lets you start exploring how a different layout feels. Helpfully, a representation of the new layout will appear on the screen below the typing exercises.

'Can't get there from here'
Shai Coleman's Colemak, August Dvorak's Dvorak, and E. Remington and Sons' QWERTY are the three major layouts, but. Visualize a pea next to a tennis ball next to, maybe, an office building, and that's about the relative penetration of the three in tech culture. QWERTY, flagrantly horrid as it is, is so dominant it is immortal. Can't be killed, never going to die. Like the pointless and mindless horizontally staggered layout inherited from mechanical typewriters, we all learn it because it is universally used, and it is universally used because we all learned it. The only way to break its vise-grip would be to make a concerted and coordinated attempt to train large numbers of young children on an alternative from the start of their keyboarding lives. I don't know about where you live, but we in America are great at just such social engineering projects; we are politically highly unified and hurl ourselves with gusto into mass civic undertakings that require high levels of social cooperation. Uhhhh....

I tried changing layouts a few years ago, to Dvorak. After several months of practice I got up to about 20 WPM in Dvorak on the Kinesis Advantage2, an ergonomically comfortable but surprisingly unwieldy keyboard. Its combination of great ergonomics and poor haptics is almost disconcerting. The manual is more than 30 pages long, much of it, I must say, over my head. I am too timid to do anything along the lines of programming on that scary thing, because each time I do I @#$! it up and find myself in need of rescue. But I digress. Whatever the reason, I never got "the feel of the wheel." Muscle memory never kicked in. I bailed out before the magic happened (you don't want to bail out before the magic happens) because the common computer key commands aren't convenient in Dvorak. Which stands to reason; they didn't exist when William Dealey and August Dvorak patented their layout in 1936. In Dvorak, for instance, the "Z" for Command-Z is all the way over to the right and the "C" for Command-C is in the top row and also under the right hand. Both are two-handed operations, which is not what you want.

Colemak, which I'm trying to learn now, has 70 years on Dvorak. It was invented in 2006 by Shai Coleman. In Colemak, the common commands are still easy to reach, and most of the punctuation keys remain in the same place they are in QWERTY. So the transition is allegedly easier.

Straight Colemak. There are innumerable variants.

Well, you couldn't prove it by me so far. I am apparently an outlier on the klutz spectrum, at the wrong end; a splendid scientific specimen of clumsiness. My brain and fingers don't appear to be closely connected. As a four-fingered typist my whole life, my ring and pinky fingers have not been asked to perform independently for 67 years, and they don't know what the hell to do when confronted with unaccustomed nerve signals asking them to move.

But then, my own goal is only to make my typing more comfortable and, secondarily, less interrupted by mistakes, which I make in great numbers.

You can use keybr.com to practice Colemak, but my experience is that it's frustrating because it measures progress according to speed, which, speaking for myself, makes me get all frazzled because I'm always rushing. I like Colemak Club and Colemak Camp better (they're all but the same). It won't take long before you start to feel how much easier and smoother Colemak is than QWERTY. Because what Ben Frain was talking about is not subtle. Get this: when typing English prose, 74% of all the keystrokes you make in Colemak will be right there on the home row; for QWERTY the number is a mere 34%. By comparison, it feels like you hardly need to move your hands. That seems worth pursuing, which is why I'm trying again.

Mike

*The "E" stood for "Eliphalet," and it's a good thing I didn't know that was a name when my son Xander was born.

**And who eloquently described the "dicking around" self-interrogation starting at about 3:03 here. I should watch that every morning before starting work.

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Joel Becker: "Thank you for posting this, Mike. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I wasn't even aware of Colemak, which amuses me, because I'm a Linux hacker, and I've known vocal Dvorak nuts my entire career. I myself have never cared to try an alternate layout, for the same reason Tom Passin mentions—switching back when using someone else's computer is too annoying. I don't even swap Ctrl and Caps Lock like many of my computer nerd friends do, for the same reason. I just got my fingers used to the normal location of Ctrl. But I would love a readout a year from now on how your Colemak experiment is going. I think it would be fantastic if it makes your typing experience better!"

Bill Tyler: "There's a lot of value in standardization, even when the standard doesn't represent the very best possible solution to a problem. There are zillions of people who know and are comfortable with QWERTY. For myself, I can type on a QWERTY keyboard faster than I can think, which isn't always an advantage. As others have pointed out, learning a non-standard layout really means having to know at least two layouts, one for your own personal machine(s) and another one for working on anyone else's keyboard, including, possibly, the one supplied to you by your employer. I've known about Dvorak for maybe half a century, and never been convinced it was worth the effort to learn it."

robert e: "Thanks for publishing this informative piece, Mike.

''I tried a bit of Colemac practice on both keybr.com and on monkeytype.com and it was an interesting experience. It was quickly obvious that the layout would reduce movement and stretching. Keybr.com's approach reminds me a lot of guitar and piano teaching methods, which was reassuring, but it also recalls the notion that speed is a product of both good rhythm and extremely slow, deliberate practice. So it's unfortunate that the 'grading' system encourages you rush.

"After a few minutes, I realized that, counter-intuitively, Colemac's similarities to QWERTY were going to be as much an obstacle for me as its differences. The most frustrating moments seemed to happen when a string started out with fingerings identical to QWERTY, then diverged. Presumably, that's when I had to fight my brain the most.

"That made me wonder if a physically different keyboard might help me learn a new typing layout faster. It makes sense, but since you had already started me semi-seriously shopping for an ergonomic keyboard, it was probably also a bit of rationalization. (Though a related idea does seem to work for musicians, and is supported by learning research. In theory, one would learn more quickly rotating among a number of different keyboards, as well as by interleaving different kinds of goals (accuracy vs. speed, say, or vs. smoothness), spending time purposely making mistakes (over- or under-reaching? wrong-fingering?), and alternating awareness between finger vs. wrist vs. arm movements vs. posture, etc.

"Keyboard shopping made realize that, compared to human hands, there's a very narrow range of sizes and shapes of keyboards of any given type (i.e., flat, split, etc.). I wonder if this is a factor in the higher incidence of carpal tunnel injuries among women vs. men."

Comments

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

Thanks for sharing your research into typing and keyboards. I never knew about the variant layouts, or the nextgen keyboards. To me it makes sense to use the thumb instead of pinky for shift, control etc.

I too basically think and write for a living. And I also don’t need extraordinary speed, just greater efficiency and comfort.

One of these days I’ll find the time to give the change a go, and maybe find the budget for a better keyboard. In Australia we get an instant deduction of up to $300 AUD (instead of having to depreciate) for work expenses. There’s my limit ;~)

[Andrew]

I’m not going to read it, but good for you posting it!

[Bear.]

Quite a good article at https://hackaday.com/2016/03/15/the-origin-of-qwerty/ by Brian Benchoff arguing the influence of morse code operators upon the layout of the Qwerty keyboard - and rebutting the Stephen J Gould argument that the layout arose from marketing(Gould, Stephen Jay. Ch. 4 “The Panda’s Thumb of Technology” in Bully for Brontosaurus. New York: Norton, 1991). As an aside, that article first appeared as Gould's monthly column for Natural History published by the NY Museum of natural History in the mid-late 1980s. My grandmother lived pretty much next door to the museum and was a life member - she used to mail the magazine to me in Australia each month after she read it, and I always enjoyed Gould's articles and remember that I actually clipped the typewriter article before recycling the magazine. Of course, I've now lost the clipping ...

[Tom Passin]

I've always stayed away from alternative keyboard layouts because I want to be able to type on other computers. I don't want to find out it's too hard to switch back and forth.

To me one of the greatest sins of layout was changing the location of the left control key to the bottom left. I use that key often, CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V being examples, and having to stretch down for the key with the left little finger is hard, inaccurate, and (I think) asking for RSI or tendon strain. I always swap it with the caps lock key as the first thing I do on a new computer.

Yes, this contradicts what I wrote about not changing the layout so I can type on other machines. But it's only one key, so it's easier to keep in mind.

[Sean]

Mike said

"I decided to publish this anyway, because I worked hard on it"

What about nobody caring how hard you worked?

Just sayin'

[Somebody does care...I do. --Mike]

[Don Craig]

Gotcha! That second footnote is an orphan; there is no ** reference in the main text. If you’re gonna use ‘em, you should point to ‘em.

[Well I'll be darned. Wonder how that disappeared. Fixed now. Thanks. --Mike]

[Herman Krieger]

You put your finger on the problem. Qwerty is certainly Queer.

[David Brown]

Being a touch typist can be a curse. All four of my siblings were high school and college trained touch typists. One sister was the state champion! All three sisters were then restricted to “secretarial” jobs, rather than professions. My brother spent two tours in the Navy, and was trained in aviation ordinance for everything from small arms to air-to-air missiles. However, somewhere on his service record, it said “35wpm” and after graduating each ordinance school, he got a new typewriter. Even his sea duty was in the bowels of an aircraft carrier being Radar O’Reilly. I never took high school typing.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Putting bigrams far from each other may or may not slow you down, but it does reduce jamming, because the keys are coming in on more independent paths.

Also it tends to put common bigrams on opposite hands, which is good for speed.

QWERTY is clearly not the best possible layout, but none of the other conventional ones (big keyboards for touch typing using both hands) are enough better to be worth switching.

[darlene]

I decided to publish this anyway, because I worked hard on it. Please just ignore it if the topic bugs you! I'll understand. —Mike

Thanks! I found the article on keyboard layouts quite fascinating. Despite using the QWERTY layout without issues since high school, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's more to my liking than any talk of "razors." Topics on male grooming hold no interest to me, a realization I've gathered from the titles of articles on this site (though I understand who your audience is). I hope your birthday was enjoyable! Wishing you a belated happy birthday, Mike.

[JH]

I learned to type on one of those old mechanical Remington machines which was good practice for becoming a programmer in the early 1960s. I had to type on an IBM 026 Card Punch with a stiff mechanical keyboard. You had to be accurate because mistakes punching cards was a one-shot deal - no backspace for correction!

But it was good practice for writing - accuracy does count.

A humorous tale is I was hired by a high tech company as a marketing manager with a secretary but my first task was creating a catalogue and applications book. My handwriting was not great and the typists had trouble, so I immediately put in a request for a new IBM Electric typewriter with memory - they had just become available - and that was wonderful for making corrections. I was told by my boss that managers do not type in the company! My response was heard in the far end of the building and I got my typewriter.

[Scott]

When I used to work for a living (before retiring), I was in Europe often and frequently needed to use local computer keyboards. There are a few differences between the US version of QWERTY and the European ones I used; if I recall correctly, the Z was moved and some of the special characters above the numbers were as well. It was difficult enough to keep even this small number of variations straight and still be fluid while typing. So anyone who will ever have a regular need to use others’ keyboards is well advised to not make even small customizations on their own.

[Craig Beyers]

Like JH, I worked for a consulting company where we “professional” types collected data, analyzed that data, and wrote reports. Everyone hand wrote their reports on standard lined paper, subjecting our secretaries to the onerous task of deciphering said handwriting from multiple engineers while typing up our reports and handing them back for our review, editing, and correcting their typing mistakes. At one point my secretary complained to me she couldn’t consistently read my handwriting (I had the same problem at times with my own work!). I needed a solution and requested a typewriter. Management told me “secretaries type, not engineers”. With support from my secretary I was able to convince management that because I was a touch-typist, a typewriter would make her more efficient by making me more efficient. Someone on staff found me an old IBM typewriter, the kind that the IBM Selectric replaced, and had it cleaned up for me. I used that typewriter for about 11 years and it did make my secretaries work easier and more efficient. But all this was just before word processing became ubiquitous in offices, before every engineer had a PC on his or her desktop, and before secretaries became secretaries again and not just typists with corollary duties. I don’t miss the old days.