What's the Best Keyboard Layout for You? - General

crystal84
New member

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Registered: 08-Aug-2010
Posts: 3

08-Aug-2010 00:55:05#1 What's the Best Keyboard Layout for You?

Poking around online today and found a keyboard analyzer. It tells you which keyboard (qwerty, dvorak, colemak, and a few others) is best for you based on text you paste into the input box. Of course, it's better if you typed this text yourself and submitted more than one sample. Here's the website - check it out!

http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

About me: I learned qwerty in high school and have been using since (~10 years), but I'm not a fast typer (~40 wpm avg, ~60 on a really good day). I just started learning Colemak earlier this week (still working on the home row), and was wondering if it was really worth learning because I don't do a whole lot of typing. That's when I found the analyzer - it said the best for me, based on 5 samples of my writing, was Colemak. Guess I got lucky. :) I found I can cut the distance my fingers travel by 50% and I can increase the number of strokes on the home row from 30% to 70%. Wow!

Anyway, I thought others might benefit from this tool in analyzing their writing and seeing just how much they can gain by switching to a different layout. Enjoy!

DreymaR
Member

Reputation: 214
From: Viken, Norway
Registered: 13-Dec-2006
Posts: 5,371

Website

09-Aug-2010 07:47:59#2 Re: What's the Best Keyboard Layout for You?

Welcome!

I hope it doesn't come as a complete surprise to you that this analyzer (and several similar ones) was already known to this board. And yes, its kind often favours Colemak. But to be brutally honest, the results are very dependent on the modeling assumptions you make and it's a very open question whether they really show you what's best for you. To be sure, I think you'd have to break open some very costly research and nobody have done that...

Many have tried to develop even better layouts based on algorithms like these too, and there's a whole plethora of such optimized layouts around. Myself, I think that Colemak strikes the best balance between moving what should be moved to where it should be moved, and leaving what doesn't need moving alone. That's a highly individual assessment of course. There may be possible or available layouts that does this even better, but if so I have a quite firm belief that the benefits from that further optimisiation would be minute. Again my own feeling on the matter.

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