Ever since it was devised, people have sought to improve on the QWERTY keyboard - the Dvorak keyboard above is a famous example. Of course, there is a sense in which an established order is best simply because it is established. For example, try to think of an improvement on this arbitrary sequence: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
But clearly there is an ergonomic aspect to a keyboard that ought to admit of some sort of optimisation. So why not make keyboards so that you can unplug and swap the keys? Then people could experiment to find the pattern that worked best for them. Optionally, a mouse click could upload that pattern to a central website, where statistics on popular (and unpopular) patterns could be gathered.
Then we could just let the best patterns evolve...
Look at http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Presumably the way this works is to remap the incoming letters from the keyboard using a look-up table. You then swap the key tops so the letters are physically in the right place.
ReplyDeleteThat's pretty much what I was proposing in effect, but definitely a neater way of achieving the same result.