On Typing – Layout and Speed
As a scientist my usual workday can be divided in three, sometimes 4 essential steps:
Reading a lot of information Looking out of the window ⇒ that is, thinking Writing down new results And finally sometimes, implementing proof-of-concepts As is evident from this list, at least one third up to half of my work, therefore, is made up by writing either reports or code. To improve the efficiency of this task, I started thinking about our standard keyboard layout. QWERTY (or QWERTZ for the Germans) was invented to prevent neighbouring letter arms in your typewriter from getting tangled up with each other. You may notice that optimizing for this goal may not result in an optimal setup for typing. But, stop, let us think about that. We do not actually use typewriters anymore. And our main goal for optimization, thus, changed. Hence, there were several attempts of enhancing typing efficiency in different languages. With the beginning of 2017, I started to use the German layout variant neo. It is similar but not equal to the more general DVORAK. The idea of these layouts is to reorganize the letters in a way, that the most common and often used keys lie closer to each other and reside on the home row. The home row is the one your fingers will rest on anyway, when using proper 10-finger typing. By adopting to such a different keyboard layout, you, thus, gain the advantage of having to move your fingers much less. Some people who converted to these layouts claim that it helps them remove strain on hands and fingers. Others suggest that by having your fingers move less they are able to type faster.
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