On 04/17/2016 07:39 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Even though QWERTY wasn't designed with touch-typing in mind, it's > interesting to look at some of the weaknesses of the system. It is almost > as if it had been designed to make touch-typing as inefficient as > possible :-) Just consider the home keys. The home keys require the least > amount of finger or hand movement, and are therefore the fastest to reach. > With QWERTY, the eight home keys only cover a fraction over a quarter of > all key presses: ASDF JKL; have frequencies of > > 8.12% 6.28% 4.32% 2.30% 0.10% 0.69% 3.98% and effectively 0% > > making a total of 25.79%. If you also include G and H as "virtual > home-keys", that rises to 33.74%. > > But that's far less than the obvious tactic of using the most common > letters ETAOIN as the home keys, which would cover 51.18% just from those > eight keys alone. The 19th century Blickensderfer typewriter used a similar > layout, with the ten home keys DHIATENSOR as the home keys. This would > allow the typist to make just under 74% of all alphabetical key presses > without moving the hands.
While they Dvorak layout also puts more coverage in the home row, and also lets the touch typist alternate more equally between the fingers, I had to quit using it because it just wasn't as comfortable to use with vi, especially for things like cursor navigation, and I didn't really want to remap all the keys. vi is very flexible and I bet there are key mappings for vi that work better with Dvorak. Maybe if I try it again I'll have another look. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
