Are you using the wrong keyboard?
Plus, a look at the keyboard you really should be using!
I stared at my keyboard in a daze.
It was one of those days as a newsletter writer where you start to panic. Nothing flows from your fingers as you tell your brain to write something interesting.
The blank white page is a scary proposition for any writer. Devoid of ideas, I tend to abandon the session and go for a walk. Within 5-10 mins of de-stressing in nature an idea usually starts to grow. Your subliminal mind starts to work the idea to the point where you arrive back at your front door with something to at least make a start with.
Over the last couple of years of writing this newsletter I know the ideas will come and so the stress subsides pretty quickly now. I know I can combine a few ideas and get them out. I know I wont let you down.
Today was different.
Today, I glanced down and wondered about the strange array of letters in front of me. I needed to explore the tool that we all use so often on a daily basis. For those of us who write straight to a computer it’s the tool where our ideas crystallise and start to take on their form.
The keyboard.
It’s rather strange when you think about it. Questions started to gather in my head.
Why are the letters not in alphabetical order?
Why are the keys actually arranged in the order they are? What’s the history here?
Who decided on the order and why is the layout still in use today?
Plus, what are the most used letters and where to they fall?
And finally, I take a look at the keyboard we should ACTUALLY be using!
Let’s start with some history
In the late 1800’s along came the typewriter. New technology brings new challenges and this was no exception.
The pen had a new competitor; a new way of writing was born.
The QWERTY layout was created in the 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee. In collaboration with Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé, he was also the inventor of the first practical typewriter.
If you’ve used a traditional typewriter you will be familiar with the mechanical arms that smash into the paper as you literally hit the keys. Writing was very much a physical endeavour.
The layout of the keys was designed around this mechanism. The primary reason for the QWERTY layout's design was to prevent jams in mechanical typewriters. Put two regularly used letters together and a fast typist will be pushing its neighbour letter before the other arm is back in place.
Clashing of arms was a regular and annoying occurrence.
To solve this problem, Sholes and his team arranged the keys in such a way that commonly used pairs of letters were placed further apart on the keyboard.
But E and R are used extensively but are side by side?
Probably the strangest pairing on the keyboard is E and R. Heavily used together in words, why would you place them together?
The reason is trade offs.
Yes, Sholes wanted to stop clashing of arms but he also wanted to create a typewriter that was quick to use. Time is money after all.
So a balance was sought and E and R were the two letters that moved in together.
Technology that stuck
Typists were trained to use the new tool from the beginning. The mind can be quickly taught to feel for the letters rather than have a need for actually seeing the keys. The touch typist was born.
As the typewriter spread so did the skill to use it quickly and efficiently. Standardisation quickly became embedded. there was no going back. And, as we switched to modern electronic keyboards, the standardisation transferred across leaving us this historical legacy.
Lets think about what we would do differently if designing from scratch
If we were designing a keyboard today we might start with the most popular letters. So, here they are:
The most commonly used letters, according to analyses of English text, are as follows:
E is the most used letter in the English language, appearing in about 11% of all words.
T is the next most common letter, often used in conjunction with other high-frequency letters.
A is another highly used vowel, appearing frequently in many words.
O is also a common vowel, found in many words and useful in a wide range of positions within words.
I is a frequently used vowel, particularly in the first-person singular pronoun.
N is the most common consonant after "T," appearing often in the middle or at the end of words.
S is common both as a consonant in various words and as a plural marker for nouns.
H is frequently used, often in combination with other common letters like "T" (in "the") or "S."
R appears frequently in many verb conjugations and is common in both the initial and final positions of words.
D is another common consonant, often used in past tense constructions.
This feels like a good place to start if we were looking to create a new keyboard that moves away from the Victorian era constraints of mechanical keyboards.
In a parallel universe, this is the keyboard we are all using
That brings us nicely to the Dvorak Keyboard shown below with those popular letters highlighted in a heat map across the middle.
Notice the very different layout.
Created by Dr. August Dvorak in the 1930s, this layout was designed for efficiency and speed. The vowels and most common consonants are placed on the “home row”, reducing finger movement and potentially increasing typing speed.
Despite these benefits, it has not replaced QWERTY due to the significant retraining required for proficiency.
Maybe in a parallel universe somewhere this keyboard is in use?! And, of course, you can always buy one on Amazon!
Two Recommendations - what to consume this week
1. How Lenny Rachitsky Got 531,000 Substack Subscribers | How I Write Podcast
2. Packy McCormick - How To Publish Your Best Ideas Online
Top 3 articles of the week
Finding great articles on Substack can be difficult. Fear not, I have been digging deep into the discovery areas of the platform so you don’t have to.
Here are my top three posts to read this week:
Public Speaking Is Not Scarier Than Death by
9 things to know about yourself so you write more stuff people want to read by
What to read next
And finally… it’s 2 weeks to go until my Half Marathon for Prostate Cancer UK! Eeek
I’ve just finished my longest run yet at 16km. I’m nearly there with the training and then its recovery into the final week before Easter Sunday race day.
If you’d like to sponsor me that would be amazing! Here’s the link. Thank you so much to everyone who has donated so far to this great cause.
And a post outline my “why” here:
A quick question
So I can make the types of posts you’d like to see….
Thank you for reading and see you next week!
Oh, and please hit Like below (if you liked it of course!)
Oh wow. I don't think my brain could cope with a different keyboard any more than it can cope with driving on the other side of the road!!
My programmer friend swears by Dvorak. I trained on typewriters in high school, so I have been on QWERTY for too long. However, I always thought having more memorable passwords and then learning to type them in Dvorak on your QWERTY keyboard would be clever. So 'password' would be 'ra;;,soh' on my QWERTY keyboard.
One thing I also heard, but do not have a source for, was that the choice of letters on the top row was influenced by the desire to be able to type "typewriter" all on that row. As your fingers covered the middle and bottom rows, those were the easiest to see, so this worked in the favor of salesmen.