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Comment by wahsd | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of how many times the story has or hasn't been posted or discussed; it grinds my gears that we are still using the qwerty, after it was a shitty layout to accommodate a shitty typewriter design and for pitching purposes. Then the horrible layout made it's way, absent of any kind of rationale or relationship, into the computer keyboard, which didn't even have any typing mechanism. Now it has even been transferred into the PDA (can we just start calling PDAs what they are...which is not a phone) and tablets, which now don't even have physical keyboards. Sometimes it blows my mind how humans just drag stupid nonsense from the primitive past into the future.

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On physical keyboards Qwerty isn't very good, but it turns out that touch screen devices have different keyboard layout needs. Since autocorrect finds potential mistypes by looking at adjacent keys to the one tapped, clustering high frequency keys all together isn't a good idea. The two most popular alternative keyboard layouts (Colemak and Dvorak) do this clustering to try to minimize the distance your fingers need to travel.

Typing on a touch screen and on a physical keyboard are so different (at least for smaller devices like phones) that you can use an alternative layout on your computer and stick with Qwerty on your touch device.

What keeps you from switching to colemak or dvorak? It's not like you can't use a different, alternative keyboard layout.

Sure, qwerty sucks. But I don't think it's the limiting factor. I reckon that with any keyboard layout, a much more substantial improvement in typing ability will come from spending some quality time with a typing tutor program. The people I know who spent time switching to dvorak, it seems, never spent much time learning to type qwerty very well....

I used to type about 80 WPM with QWERTY, and I would peak at a hair under 100 when I was on a roll.

I switched to Colemak a few years ago, and I currently type around 90 WPM ordinarily, and can peak at about 120 when I'm concentrating.

I have no idea if it's just that I've naturally progressed, or if Colemak is naturally faster, but in any case, I was a competent typist before I switched, and have significantly improved since.

Switch to Dvoraks. Android supports it. Also:

>Now it has even been transferred into the PDA (can we just start calling PDAs what they are...which is not a phone) and tablets

I'd reverse that statement, phones are still phones, but tablets are PDAs.

Words change their meaning over time. "Phone" used to mean "device wired into the wall used for spoken communication."

Now it means, "Pocket computer that's usually connected to the Internet."

What's wrong with that?

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