You say QWERTY, I say DVORAK...

Engadget has a story on a new keyboard that's using the ABCDEF... style key layout. While beginner typist friendly its certainly not friendly to the regular keyboard users hands. As you may know the familiar QWERTY layout was designed to be friendly to the manual typewriter internals - by placing frequently used keys far apart it reduced the number of jams. As a by-product it required the typist to use the most finger motion compounding the problem of repetative strain injuries in typists. Now we're all typists we are all suffering dailing from the archaic QWERTY keypad. And the ABCDEF layout isn't really much better.

A long time ago (1936) the Dvorak layout was figured out to be the one requiring the least amount of finger motion. Named after its inventor August Dvorak and not the key layout it was made an ANSI standard in 1982. Placing the most used letters close together meant few trips to the peripheries of the keyboard and less straing on the fingers. Dvorak also claimed his layout was actually faster - although this is now widely disputed (see Wikipedia for some papers on this topic) - and hence that Dvorak was the Betamax of keyboard layouts. Other layouts are possible, including Dvorak layouts for one handed typists (left or right hand only), and ones that use chorded keypresses (multiple keys pressed at a time).

To me the big problem is, if I went out and retrained myself to use a non-QWERTY layout what would I do everytime I went to use someone elses keyboard? Or when someone else wanted to use my keyboard? Much pain and suffering would ensue. The solution seems to me that keyboards should be designed to have a tiny LCD or some other kind of presistent display technology, that can be remapped on the fly. Inserting some kind of personality card, detecting the user precence via RFID, or even scanning a thumbprint (its fine for non-high security uses) could remap the keys to the current users favourite layout. Since the well trained keyboard user seldom looks at the keyboard anyway the actual labels on the keys aren't that important most of the time.

An alternative is that we all carry our own keyboard with us and have it connect wirelessly with whatever system we are using - indeed in my vision of componentized and networked personal computing systems everyone should be able to walk up to any computer and do this anyway. There should be no requirement to touch anyone elses computer physically to use it, even for POS and vending style applications. With the advent of folding and rollable keyboards this seems even more feasible.