4:45 PM
It all started when I spilled some Guinness in my Apple keyboard a couple months ago. I tried to clean it up quickly, but after it dried, a couple keys didn't work. I ran it through the dishwasher, I heard that can work on NPR, but although it came out clean as new, the bad keys were still on vacation.
After moving around the corner in my building I pulled the keyboard out again and decided to take another shot at repairs. I discovered that the keys pop out really easily, there's a simple center post and two snappy clips. It was so much fun to pop out the keys that even though only Caps lock, Tab, and tilde are broken, I ended up with this:
So what would you do in this situation? Once all the keys are in a pile, it's a perfect time to make some changes instead of putting them back in those lame places they started in. The name for those lame places is the
QWERTY keybard layout. (Ironic how long it took me to type QWERTY...)
wikipedia:[O]nce an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document. A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together. The effect this rearrangement of letters had on maximum typing speed is a disputed issue. Some sources assert that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down typing speed to further reduce jamming.
So while QWERTY wasnt designed to be the slowest layout, it does try to help the typewriter deal with fast typers, and as a result, it is a slow and antiquated system that has become a
anachronistic standard at best. Why do people still use it? Plainly, it is already on the keyboard, and people want to do what's familiar. Maybe they don't want to question common wisdom and norms. And sure, once you learn it, you can be pretty fast.
Programmers do like to question norms of course. And sometimes do wildly impractical projects, like using the fastest layout,
Dvorak:
Once I had the keys in place, it took 10 seconds to switch keyboard layouts in OS X. Windows makes it easy too... you can probably find the tempting Dvorak option on your machine right now. Don't you want to click it, and ditch that lame layout from the 1800's? Look at
the metrics, and imagine yourself Instantly typing 40% faster!
So that last claim is a bold lie. I've now spent almost an hour typing this, which is completely infuriating, so I'm going to get dinner. Check back in a week or two to see how long I can make myself do this.
(did I mention I've tried twice before?)
5:45 PM
