DreymaR said:
This image shows a weighted average of key frequencies in the 4 biggest Western languages using Latin letters - English, Spanish, French and German. [...]
I added a stipulated number of 500 M to the English-speaking figure [because so many use it as a second language], bringing it to 1010 M English "users" in total versus 643 M Spanish+Portuguese "users".
I was looking at this again, and I must say it's really fascinating how the yellows stay on the home row while the bright reds are in the easily reachable upper/lower row spots and the darker tones in the corners as they should be - even if this is an image of weighted language usage!
As long as I tried to make realistic estimates of how a foreigner in the Western world would use the keyboard, this image would show pretty much the same: That Colemak has a really nice frequency distribution, while QWERTY obviously is all over the place and Dvorak is good but "leaks out" in the upper right-hand area so the pinky and ring finger get too much to do. Dvorak has frequent inwards index finger stretches as well (U's placement on home position and I on a stretch being the major contributing single factor).
The US Dvorak (as opposed to the Norwegian one!) is really good at avoiding the bottom left-hand row which used to be very problematic to me. Now that I've shifted that one I feel that the CVB are quite all right; the ZX aren't supposed to be easy but they're not horrible either. I think the relatively high frequency of the C in languages like Spanish/Portuguese shouldn't be a problem in light of this.
While QWERTY is a mess in general, at least you can see that the outward corner positions aren't too badly off. With the notable excepton of N, the bottom row is mostly okay. The right-hand home row though, could make a brave man whimper. If - perish the thought! - I were to use QWERTY again, I'd consider using a different home position, with the two middle fingers gravitating one row up (and the left-hand index finger hitting C!). Sounds radical, but it might actually help by the looks of things. I think some QWERTY users do that to some extent.
Just glancing at the images, it might appear that the right-hand bias is quite substantial in Colemak. But the images aren't designed to answer such questions and could easily be misread if so applied. How much is the hand weight percentage of Colemak in English, again?
Last edited by DreymaR (22-Oct-2008 08:22:55)