“QWERTY wasn't designed to solve type bar jamming” [pdf]
63 comments
·March 16, 2025analog31
In the next century, researchers will discover that the GUI wasn't designed to make computing harder by forcing people to find cryptic little symbols, randomly arranged on the screen, and break routine operations into tiny sequences of manual steps. And it wasn't called a "personal computer" because it turned each person into a computer.
sudahtigabulan
This reminds me of Motel of the Mysteries :^)
zaik
"A common misunderstanding is that GUIs were invented to give ancient computers enough time for processing by slowing down user input speed. However our research shows that counterintuitively input latency was better at the time when GUIs were invented and then gradually got worse..."
qbane
And paid subscriptions are not even necessary for offline apps
ForTheKidz
> GUI wasn't designed to make computing harder by forcing people to find cryptic little symbols
That was absolutely the result of moving to a 2d-ui: icon spam and little discoverability. I can't say I've ever wanted an icon toolbar when I have a menu right there that's activated by common keystrokes without clogging my screen.
Of course, some people only know "save" as a floppy-disk icon. Good luck raising them the remaining way.
somat
Ha. so the reason that I is next to 8 is that early typewriters used the I as a 1(no independent 1 key) and the morse transcription company wanted to type years(1871) quickly. I love it.
readthenotes1
"The legend was referred by Prof. James V. Wertsch,[22, 23] a professor of the Department of Psychology, Clark University, then it was regarded as an established theory in the field of psychology. "
The reproducibility crisis struck early, it seems.
userbinator
Whatever its intent, QWERTY definitely hasn't impeded the fastest typists, who can regularly exceed 200wpm these days.
Odd to see no mention of the Linotype layout, also known as the "Etaoin Shrdlu", given that was also a common competing keyboard layout in that era.
0cf8612b2e1e
Humans do not have fins, but Micheal Phelps can still cut through water. That elites can thrive is not a compelling argument when most people just want technology to get out of the way.
An alternative layout with commonly used symbols on the home row makes the QWERTY deficiencies immediately apparent. Significantly less effort required for writing prose when using something like DVORAK.
perching_aix
I really don't think people who type slowly do so because of QWERTY. Anecdotally, my dad basically isn't able to develop muscle memory for the key locations and will frequently revert to the "scan and then press with one finger" method. You could give him any layout and he would still type slowly. Pretty sure even an alphabetical order would trip him up, because it'd need to be broken into multiple rows, so he'd need muscle memory again.
And while this is speculative, given how close typing speeds seem on a cursory search between layouts, this suggests to me that the vast majority of the performance comes not from the layout, but from touch typing and effective use of multiple hands and fingers at the same time. All layout agnostic skills.
This is not to say that on an input method level, things cannot be further improved. I sometimes see stenography [0] related software and demonstrations on YouTube for example. It also isn't to say that there cannot be a benefit health wise (i.e. ergonomically) to alternative layouts. It's just that for speed I'm not convinced it affects much, and so I think it's the wrong thing to try and change. Especially considering that sometimes things that are suboptimal can be better by being the standard.
BobbyTables2
I can average over 85wpm when typing English sentences in typing games.
But outside that, I find I can’t really think meaningfully and simultaneously type that quickly for a sustained amount of time.
Maybe very fast typing speeds are more useful to stenographers?
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fumufumu
[dead]
queuebert
Dvorak is way more comfortable and is very fast for me, but its emphasis on alternating hands causes me to frequently invert pairs of letters when typing fast, probably because my left and right brain isn't perfectly coordinated.
I have considered switching to Colemak, which is supposed to have less of that, but as a 100+ wpm typer of Dvorak it really is diminishing returns.
opan
Colemak has flaws of its own, bandaged over with "Mod-DH", but I'd say just skip it and go to Workman. It aims for 50/50 hand usage unlike other layouts, but it does not encourage the constant alteration like Dvorak. Common bigrams like "th" and "en" are easy to type with one hand, encouraging smooth finger-roll motions. It doesn't have Dvorak's `ls -l` problem.
I personally went QWERTY -> Dvorak -> Workman. While I spent under 2 years with Dvorak, I have been using Workman for over 3 years now and think I'll likely stick with it. There are other crazy layouts like QGMLWB and Halmak, but I think their higher on-paper efficiency comes at the cost of other things, and Workman seemed like it struck the best balance to me. I had comfort/ergonomics in mind and was trying to get away from some hand pain which seemed to only switch hands going from QWERTY to Dvorak, but is now gone with Workman.
anthropodie
> causes me to frequently invert pairs of letters when typing fast
I am a Dvorak user and this happens to me too. I thought it happens when I'm stressed out.
karmakaze
I got into alternate keyboard layouts and developed my own (roughly an optimized NIRO). When I tried using it on my small Surface Go I found that my fingers would 'jam' typing letters close together, so I leave that in QWERTY so it happens much less.
jerf
We've had a few conversations on HN about how QWERTY may not be optimal for mobile swiping, but it's better than the layouts optimized for typing. Dvorak, with all the vowels on the left hand home row, would be terrible for swiping, what with all the English words just a vowel away from each other.
As it is the UIO vowel complex is a frequent problem with swiping. I'd like to see U and O moved away from each other, in theory.
Terr_
Yeah, there is a conflict between "use your very best fingers for everything" versus "spread the work across fingers so that it gets done sooner."
I tend to favor the latter.
0cf8612b2e1e
I can believe it. For a physical keyboard, I would much prefer a layout with a DVORAK-like home row, but probably not for mobile. The imprecision of touch and swiping text entry likely do markedly worse when high frequency characters are on top of each other.
batperson
I found the opposite when I went through a split keyboard phase and did Colemak-DH layout. As far as english goes I found that a lot of words had a smoother "flow" when it comes to finger location.
In the end I went back to a regular qwerty because my WPM on split keyboards/colemak-DH was considerably worse even after many months of practice.
kreyenborgi
Pretty sure Micheal Phelps has fins though
wkat4242
Yeah it isn't the reason but I do have to say that typing on a pc is nothing like a mechanical typewriter especially an ancient one.
You really had to give the keys a hard whack and had to push them all the way down. It was pretty heavy and the hammers could really get stuck. All this did really limit typing speed.
When I was in school we had an optional typing course and I was encouraged to do it as a computer nerd. But I never thought it was relevant as they didn't even use electric typewriters. They wanted to teach the ability to hit every key with the same amount of force. A skill that is completely useless these days obviously. These days we hit keys with the least amount of force and our colleagues thank us for it :)
taneq
Even at a bit less than 200WPM, my physical ability to press keys is seldom the limiting factor for composing prose, let alone for coding. I would suspect that this is the case for most halfway competent keyboard users using more than three fingers, and that QWERTY is “good enough”.
frompdx
The keyboard arrangement was incidentally changed into QWERTY, first to receive telegraphs, then to thrash out a compromise between inventors and producers, and at last to evade old patents.
volemo
> efficiency for the coming decade
They were future proofing though: the "I" is between "8" and "9", so they were optimising for the next 130 years, not merely coming decades.
jader201
This still doesn’t explain one of my biggest peeves with keyboards:
Why are the keys angled up and to the left — for both hands?
Was this to solve the type bar jamming?
Or is that also an urban legend?
I know there are modern keyboards that solve this, by either splitting the keyboard and angling in the natural direction of your fingers (so to the right for the left hand, and vice versa), or just ortholinear keyboards that have straight rows of keys (but still angled ergonomically).
But that ridiculousness has lived on, such that even “economic” split keyboards will still angle both sides to the left.
kragen
The key levers had to be staggered on their way back to the type bars so they wouldn't hit each other. The angle isn't ergonomic in origin but mechanical. You probably haven't ever seen a mechanical typewriter, but maybe you can find one to experiment with, or at least a YouTube video showing the workings.
Y_Y
> You probably haven't ever seen a mechanical typewriter
Really? I see them all over the place. They're very rarely used for typing (except by hipsters in parks) but the are tons used for decoration or in historical scenes.
ajsnigrutin
I'm more interested why some of us have qwertZ instead of Y there :D
(Z an Y are swapped... mostly a non issues, except with some games, where Z and X are some gameplay controls, and we have a Y down there)
doktorhladnjak
Isn't this based on letter frequency? In languages like German, Z is a fairly common letter. Y not so much. Whereas in English it's the opposite. They put the more commonly used letter in the center.
The_suffocated
Very interesting article. I don’t understand, however, how shorthanders used typewriters for short-writing. The figure on p.168 (above fig. 9) is not explanative.
yorwba
The numbers above the words indicate which finger (index, middle, ring) is used to press a key, the letters below indicate the hand (left or right). Basically a precursor of touch typing that doesn't use the little fingers and doesn't always use the same finger for the same key.
The actual shorthand would be written on paper, with the typewriter being used to expand it to a more readable form.
The_suffocated
Thank you. I mistakenly thought the typewriter was used to type shorthands.
ZeroGravitas
Or shorter: Qwerty wasn't designed.
weinzierl
I don't follow the connection to Morse. Can someone summarize their argument in a comprehensive way?
kens
In original Morse code, S was "dot dot dot", E was "dot", and Z was "dot dot dot space dot". So if you were transcribing Morse code back then, it was ambiguous if you received a "Z" or "SE". To handle this, the "S" key was moved from the right side to a position between "Z" and "E" so you could quickly type either "Z" or "SE" once you figured out what was sent. Modern (i.e. 1865) Morse code changed "Z" to "dash dash dot dot", eliminating the ambiguity.
weinzierl
Yes, but how does it help to have the ambiguous characters close. I could understand if they had left out Z completely similar to early typewriters having no 0 but using the O character instead. The ambiguous Z would always be written as SE.
If they wanted to resolve the ambiguity it makes sense to move SE and Z further apart so the operator does not easily make a typing mistake in addition to the recognition mistake easily.
jrootabega
They had to wait for additional characters to make a good guess as to whether it was Z or SE. So they thought that having your fingers already positioned close to both outcomes would allow you to handle that delay better. Maybe it allowed you to catch back up faster, or made it easier to handle both of those threads in your brain and nerves? Perhaps whatever letters came after Z/SE were unlikely to also be Z/SE, so it made it more likely your right hand would be typing the next character?
bluGill
The first typewriters were for telegraph operators turning morse code into written letters.
Horffupolde
In Morse telegraphs, some words are abbreviated and so characters have a different frequency distribution. For example RECEIVED may be shortened to RX, making X much more frequent than otherwise.
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Dwedit
Now why was fricken Semicolon given the prime real-estate of being an unshifted key?
xethos
Because the smart way (with "M" there instead) was patented. From TFA (emphasis mine):
> In order to evade the patents that were assigned to the Type Writer Company, WS&B slightly changed the design of No. 2 including the keyboard arrangement (Fig. 9), where M was moved next to N, and C was exchanged with X. It was the QWERTY keyboard arrangement as seen nowadays.
AnimalMuppet
To make it easier to code in C and Pascal ;-)
andyferris
If we consider 100-year-old prose, we used the semicolon in places you see a dash now; like this - not this. It was important; it was located with period and comma and apostrophe.
Izkata
It's still used for complex lists: https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/semicolons_in_lists....
So, to summarize, the original typewriter layout (1868) was alphabetical, with the top row (A-N) going left-to-right and the bottom row (O-Z) going right-to-left. Then (1870), the vowels (including Y) were pulled out and put in a separate top row. After that (by 1872), changes were made in order to better support the use case of people receiving Morse code, and that's when we finally start to see something that looks like QWERTY. Additional changes later got it to the modern form, but by 1872 something QWERTY-like was in place.
And yeah -- if you look at the bottom two rows of a QWERTY keyboard, you can still see what remains of that alphabetical ordering, being left-to-right on one row followed by right-to-left on the row below!