Keyboards Are Terrible

A standard ANSI or ISO qwerty keyboard is a terrible design from beginning to end. Place your hands on your knees, relax your wrists, and follow me, as we explore the individual problems in hardware, software, and layout, and look at alternatives to them all.

You might have already heard of alternative layouts to the qwerty arrangement, so let's actually start instead with talking about hardware.

Hardware

Did you ever wonder about the benefit of the diagonal alignment of keys? Why W sits atop S, but also slightly edges over to the A? Well, that's called row stagger and it's not for any ergonomic reasons. If it were it would've made sense to mirror the stagger for the other hand. The real reason is the hardware limitations of typewriters. Those needed their type bars not to overlap. The hardware fix is to remove this row stagger, resulting in an "ortholinear" or "matrix layout" (which looks like a chessboard).

Instead of row stagger, we can add column stagger (referred to as a "columnar layout"). We can move the columns for our middle fingers up a bit and the pinkie columns down. This fits their different lengths much better and allows them to rest easier.

Imagining our keyboard now, you might be thinking that it's a disaster for the wrists. Without row stagger we want to come in at a straight angle, but with the keyboard placed right in front we have to bend our arms and—crucially—our wrists at unnatural angles. But there's nothing forcing us to place all the keys right at the center. A "split keyboard" can either mean that the middle of it is just an empty piece of plastic, or that it's literally split into two halves. We can place these comfortably right where our hands naturally want to sit.

To make this even more comfortable on the wrists, we can "tent" the halves. This means that we're raising them up at an angle—like a tent. The inner sides (where the index fingers are) are raised to a level that's comfortable. Some people even go up to 90°, but most people are happy somewhere between 10° and 50°.

Next, let us consider our thumbs. They're our strongest fingers. On a traditional layout they also get the most important key, the Space Bar. But it's pretty sad that both thumbs have to share one key, when the index fingers are responsible for six letter keys (and two number keys) each! Placing a couple extra keys for the thumbs is called a "thumb cluster" and utilizes our strongest fingers appropriately.

Finally, we can add some diagonal rotation to the columns to fit better with the direction that our fingers naturally curl. That's kind of like what the staggered rows sometimes unintentionally did for one of the hands, but this time it's intentional. This is called "splay."

Whew, our keyboard looks quite different now. More like a snow angel, but instead of an angel it's our hands, and instead of snow it's a keyboard. Maybe it's not really like a snow angel after all…

Layout

After taking a look at the physical shape of the keyboard, let's look at its spiritual shape: its layout.

There exists lots of controversy and mystery around the origin of the qwerty layout. Last I heard, the idea that it should slow down typing on typewriters has been called into question. Luckily, we don't need to know how qwerty originated to know that it is deeply flawed.

Qwerty has lots of common same-finger bigrams (two consecutive letters typed with the same finger). It's also prone to scissoring (requiring two fingers next to each other to move apart vertically, by requiring a letter from the top row followed by one from the bottom row). The letters on the home row (which don't require moving fingers) aren't all that common.

Actually, there's an awesome document online, explaining how these stats are measured and how they can be compared across different layouts. It also has such comparisons for quite a number of layouts. You can find the document here.

Layouts always have to choose what stats to optimize for, and some of the stats just come down to personal preference. My personal recommendation would be the Colemak layout. It's not too far from qwerty, it's got very decent stats, and it's got excellent multi-language support, if you need an Umlaut (like Ä) or similar.

Colemak also comes with an interesting modification, which I'll talk about in our last section, "Software."

Software

The process of "rebinding" allows you to change the function of keys. This means you can place often-used functions to keys that are closer physically. On a standard keyboard, for example, the CAPS LOCK key is quite reachable by the left pinkie, but probably doesn't see much use. Meanwhile, the Backspace key is far away and seeing a lot of use now that you're trying out a new layout. If only—Colemak has a version that swaps the functionality of these two keys.

Upper case letters are called that, because early printers (the occupation, not the machine) had the iron blocks with these capital letters in a literal case that was placed above the lower case containing the non-capital letters. Thanks to layers we don't need to have different keys for lower and upper case letters. We hold down the Shift key and all the letters get swapped out as if by magic. We might think about placing layer swap functionality onto our new thumb clusters. We could have a layer that moves all the numbers right onto our home row, eliminating the need to travel up two rows.

Furthermore, there are some keys that only really make sense as being held down (e.g. Alt, Ctrl, Shift), while most others only make sense as quick taps. A popular modification taking advantage of this fact is called "home row mods." It places the aforementioned held-down-keys, or simply "modifier keys" as hold functionality onto the home row. A quick tap on the J key (assuming qwerty layout) still results in a J, but holding it down activates Shift. The capital letter is then meant to be pressed on the left side of the keyboard. To type a capital letter on the right-hand side, the home row mods are mirrored. Holding the F key with the left index finger allows typing capital letters with the right hand.

Both of these strategies combine to move functionality from faraway keys directly beneath your fingertips. This results in a bit more mental load, especially in the beginning, but it can greatly reduce the strain on your fingers. You might end up only needing 34 keys!

But how do you actually do this? Well, there's firmware for custom keyboards that allows you to flash all this functionality onto your keyboard. For wired keyboards that's QMK, and for wireless it's ZMK.

If you don't have a custom keyboard, all's not lost. The tool kanata allows most of the same functionality as the firmwares and it can rebind any keyboard as long as kanata is running on the same machine the keyboard is being used on. Even the built-in laptop ones.

Conclusion

A standard qwerty keyboard does everything wrong a keyboard can do wrong. Different hardware can fit our natural hand shapes better, while different layout and key behaviours can move frequent functionality to the keys our fingers are closest to.

Following up on the strategies laid out in this post will not only result in a more comfortable typing experience, but also a more compact keyboard which might even afford more desk space.

Thoughts? Reach out via Mastodon @Optional@dice.camp, message me via SimpleX, or shoot me an email.