Why typing sucks now

I used machine learning to create the world's worst (and best) keyboard layouts. Along the way I learned how QWERTY came to be, how simulated annealing works, and got a little better at typing.

Music by Julian, camera by Julia, story by James.

---------- II ----------

0:00 I get a brilliant idea
0:22 QWERTY origins
3:37 Hill climbing
4:35 Why QWERTY sucks
5:35 Simulated annealing
9:30 World's best keyboards
11:56 World's worst keyboard
13:58 A keyboard for geese

---------- II ----------

Hi, I'm James. I explore the world looking for engineering stories which explore complex issues in interesting ways. I studied Mechanical Engineering from the University of Western Australia and am currently undertaking a PhD in space robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[AtomicFrontier]

You have no idea the weird looks people gave me as I brought out the freaking "Keyboard From Hell" into my lectures. At least it was quieter than that typewriter kid!

[Sillybutts]

Loss keyboard at 3:50 is a true feat of modern engineering.

[half-faust]

As a PhD student myself, I think most of "unpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, caffeine-addicted PhD student" is redundant

[powertomato]

Dworak did not only optimize the finger travel-time and a frequency, he also optimized the layout such that the fingers would alternate on the most frequent two-letter combinations. Like ensuring that E and R or T and H would be on opposite sides of the keyboard

[johannesvartdal]

This feels like a Tom Scott video. Well done, I like it 👏🏻

[uKhyta]

As someone who switched from QWERTY to DVORAK around 4 months ago, I can attest that switching a keyboard layout and getting used to it again takes a really long time. I was at around 80 WPM with QWERTY and it took roughly 2 and a half months (maybe closer to 3 months) to get back to that speed with DVORAK. One thing that is beneficial with DVORAK is less pain in my wrists when writing for a long time.

[jdk]

Love that this was both a history lesson on keyboards, and lesson on machine learning

[BSEUNHIR]

I'd caution against attributing the health hazards of typing to the QWERTY layout. Only a fraction of people actually touch type with proper form and a very large portion of injuries results from bending the wrist back too far, often as a result of having the keyboard too close to the edge of the desk.

[cymno]

10:00 This layout demonstrates the need to choose your performance metric carefully. No penalty for same finger movement meant that for many common bigrams the right index finger has to hit two different keys in quick succession. E.g. for AN (2% of bigrams), and also (in order of decreasing frequency) EN, ND, ED, AL, LE, DE, NE, and EA (0.69% of bigrams). For the word AND the same finger has to hit 3 keys!

[mina]

7:02 — I'm confused about the image of Dvorak. The image is of Antonin Dvořák, the composer. At first I thought it was the joke but the image is also labelled August Dvorak which in all seems like a mistake in the graphic.

[bragtime]

Dear James,

After watching a video by someone on this topic from a year ago and getting excited about the topic but not content with how far they took it, I thought about modifying their code myself to take it far enough. I never finished the project and it just kind of sat there at the end of the day, but I went YouTube searching again today and saw this awesome video. I'm so happy you put in the work regarding the code and made it available for others (I'm not really a coder lol), so I can modify it to use my own dataset and generate my own unique keyboard. You did the heavy lifting for others, and did a bang up job with this extremely good video.

Infinite thanks for your great help,
-Carmen

[pixeljuggler]

I’ve used Dvorak for 16 years and love it. Along the way I also learned Maltron which was super wacky with the letter E on the thumb. Maltron was supposedly developed to make learning it easier. I was touch typing within a day! It was uncanny! I gave it up because it used a nonstandard keyboard and I couldn’t use the layout on a laptop … so Dvorak it is.

[sephreed]

An MIT student did something similar about 10 years ago. I took their "most efficient layout" and modified it to keep my most common hotkeys in place (zxcv). I also gave the semi-colon a strong position as I use it in programming a lot. That's been my layout for 8+ years. I'm the only person in the world who uses this.

[stijndederper]

I really enjoy all the strange places and interesting locations you choose for just talking portion. It feels somewhat wonderful 😄

[scottpiddington]

I really appreciate that you went to the Northern Presidetial range and Mount Washington in the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire to explain hill climbing. Of course the Chrystal Cascade waterfall was a nice touch too! Great work on the whole project! Keep climbing.

[seanrrichards]

I switched over to a Dvorak in 2000 or so and used it until about 2016 or so. There was a learning curve but I did ok with it. The biggest problems I had with it was changing keys when I bought a new keyboard, laptops were a pain and bringing in my keyboard to new work and then getting IT to allow permissions to load a new keyboard was painful. The absolute worst was entering in my network or computer logon password. Until the system booted up and loaded the Dvorak driver the computer assumed you had Qwerty, 100% a pain. I switched back, learned touch typing a little more and that is where I am. Great vid though!!

[Talon_]

I feel the badness of the worst keyboard can be improved by mapping a letter like Q to the Spacebar

[danswrkshop]

I switched to Dvorak probably 20 years ago and still love it. When I saw the title of this video, I knew I had to watch it for at least some mention of Dvorak. You didn't disappoint!

[solsang]

You must take the space, enter and caps key into the mix, they are also part of a keyboard and can have better or worse positions or sizes, and sizing each key should be part of making a new keyboard :)

[Patrick.Schmitz]

A few years back I tried experimenting with alternative layouts, like Dvorak and Colemak. The biggest issue I had, apart from getting familiar with the new layout, is that the optimizations are language dependant. Typing may improve for one language, but gets worse for another. As someone who is multilingual it was no overall improvement for me. It still seems that qwerty is the least worse layout for me.