QWERTY was not designed to intentionally slow typists down

[Michael Torrie]

On 04/17/2016 07:39 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Even though QWERTY wasn't designed with touch-typing in mind, it's
> interesting to look at some of the weaknesses of the system. It is almost
> as if it had been designed to make touch-typing as inefficient as
> possible :-) Just consider the home keys. The home keys require the least
> amount of finger or hand movement, and are therefore the fastest to reach.
> With QWERTY, the eight home keys only cover a fraction over a quarter of
> all key presses: ASDF JKL; have frequencies of
> 
> 8.12% 6.28% 4.32% 2.30% 0.10% 0.69% 3.98% and effectively 0%
> 
> making a total of 25.79%. If you also include G and H as "virtual
> home-keys", that rises to 33.74%.
> 
> But that's far less than the obvious tactic of using the most common
> letters ETAOIN as the home keys, which would cover 51.18% just from those
> eight keys alone. The 19th century Blickensderfer typewriter used a similar
> layout, with the ten home keys DHIATENSOR as the home keys. This would
> allow the typist to make just under 74% of all alphabetical key presses
> without moving the hands.

While they Dvorak layout also puts more coverage in the home row, and
also lets the touch typist alternate more equally between the fingers, I
had to quit using it because it just wasn't as comfortable to use with
vi, especially for things like cursor navigation, and I didn't really
want to remap all the keys.  vi is very flexible and I bet there are key
mappings for vi that work better with Dvorak.  Maybe if I try it again
I'll have another look.