Special Characters

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Thu Jun 16 12:29:49 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 22:19 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 06/15/2011 09:52 PM, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> > I realize that they are based on
> > character frequency in English,
> 
> No.  They were arranged that way to minimize the possibility of keyboard 
> jams in early manual typewriters.

The way that was done was to separate as much as possible letters that
tend to group together in English, thus slowing down the typist. That's
also why the vowels are mostly on the left hand, which is harder for
most people. IOW the layout was designed to be as inefficient as
possible :-)

The Dvorák keyboard tries to go the opposite way. It's available in most
systems including Linux by just changing the keyboard map, though it'll
drive you crazy if you don't move the keycaps around to match, or use
some kind of overlay.

poc



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