How good/bad is QWERTY? Seriously.
So in my previous write-up, while highlighting the benefits of alternative and custom layouts, I declared without much evidence that QWERTY is not that bad at all, and also that it is in the top 2% of all the possible layouts. Well, like so many times in life: it depends. I did my original research many years ago - the exact value was in fact 1.82% -, but I forgot to mention that this is only valid in a special case: using my personal corpus and ruleset. It makes sense since back in the day I did this to support the design process of my own custom keymaps. Anyway, it was high time to redo my original experiment, dive in this topic a bit deeper, and reveal the logic and method behind my calculations. Spoiler alert: I was wrong! Or was I? ;) QWERTY Everyone knows QWERTY I guess. Christopher Sholes, Remington 2 typewriter, preventing jamming of type bars, path dependence, whatever. I'm not going to cover it here, check this previous write-up of mine if you are interested...
Jul 1, 2024
- SA Profile
- ABS Double-Shot
- Not MT3 [I don't like the typeface as well as MiTo/SPK]
- Not off-white [unless you could also point me to a set of ASCII BoW Alphas]
As a bonus, I am looking for a "HYPER" key and a "LINE FEED" key; the former I think I can find; the latter is almost a myth except for the photographs of archaic keyboards. [if an ivory-coloured set of MiTo/SPK SA profile (double-shot, natch) were to appear, with ASCII Alphas and × and ÷, I'd invest in it.]