[This idea is completely different from the one asking to "straighten out the keys".]
For those typists who really want to hike up their words per minute, I suggest a key layout (in this case, English) that looks to the most commonly typed words, affixes, and other common letter combinations.
- Place vowels in the home row, perhaps with "iou" together and "ea" on the other hand.
- From certain vowels, extend combinations like "ight", "ing", "tion", "ers", "qu", and so on, forming natural rolling motions.
- Place punctuation most commonly associated with dialogue on their own letters (i.e. exclamation point, question mark, parentheses).
- Left quotes and brackets go on the left side, and vice versa.
- Place the edit pad on the left, shifting keys (incl. Control and Alt) together, whitespace (incl. tab and enter) together.
This would be an ideal keyboard for those looking to break the typing limits of QWERTY, as well as new typists.
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Many keyboard layouts have come and gone over the years. The QWERTY keyboard was invented to SLOW DOWN typists as typewriter hammers had a problem with locking if they were hit too fast.
What you want is a Dvorak keyboard. It was patented in 1936. If you see a world record it was probably done on a Dvorak. They are layed out like this:~ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ] " < > P Y F G C L R L ? + | A O E U I D H T N S - : Q J K X B M W V Z
The number line was origionally:7 5 3 1 9 0 2 4 6 8
You can learn more about the Dvorak keyboard at Wikipedia.
Hopefully this will turn out better:
~1234567890[]"<>PYFGCLRL?+|AOEUIDHTNS-:QJKXBMWVZ
Origional:7531902468
To heck with it! Go to Wikipedia ;-)
What would be cool is if the manufacture would allow you to stick on the keys and program which key goes where yourself.
Very simply done! First, it is easy to remap a keyboard by software. Second, most keyboards have keys which are easy to pry off. Once you have the first one using a butter knife or something like that you can quickly pull them off.
If you are leary of taking your keys off, you might try doing it to an old keyboard or at least try it with a useless key like the pause/break key.
Incedently, you will probably want to clean where the keys used to be as it gets pretty discusting after a while.