Keyboards!

(The "!" is there to make the title seem more interesting. I know, it doesn't work.)

I can't say that I've ever found using a keyboard particularly stressful, despite the warnings about RSI that are on most keyboards now. Usually they say something terrifying implying that using a keyboard will as good as kill you - the one I'm using just now says "Some experts believe that the use of any keyboard may cause serious injury", as if it's going to suddenly leap up and eat me or something. I think the only damage that this keyboard could do to me is initiate biological warfare by giving me some sort of disease, as it's so dirty that when I take the wrist-rest off, the covered portion is a completely different colour.

This is what happens when you use a QWERTY keyboard too much.

Other people evidently don't find keyboards quite as comfortable as I do, because there have been a number of attempts to improve on the century-old design. The first that I remember was the Microsoft Natural keyboard, which split the keys in to two sections, each of them at an angle to the user, so that the wrist bend required to use it was more natural. When trying to use one, I just found the amount I had to bend my wrists was too far in the other direction.

Another problem I had with splitting the keys was the way I type - I type fast, but I don't type very well, strictly speaking. I tended to ignore all the typing lessons in school because I had been using computers since the Commodore 64 when I was about three - in fact, I don't even remember learning how to type, it was somehow as natural for me as learning how to read and write. I found that the rigid method of typing they taught was much more uncomfortable than my own way of doing it.

You don't really notice the way you type until... well, until you read this paragraph, I suppose, and it's difficult to examine because it requires slowing things down and thinking about things. It seems that my method is keeping my left hand still on the commonly accepted "home row" position, using all its fingers, and allowing my right hand to move freely, only ever using my second and third fingers to hit keys with it. As a result, even though I am right handed, I find it much easier to type with my left hand than my right when attempting both separately.

Quite a few ergonomically designed keyboards rely on splitting the keyboard slightly between the left and right hands, but there have been a few radically different styles attempted as well. Old chording keyboards, for example, reduced the limb requirement to one hand and relied on pressing "chords" of keys to input letters, making typing like bashing out chords on a piano. Continuing the instrumental theme, some modern models take the splitting tactic too far, place the keys upright and make typing disturbingly reminiscent of playing the accordion.

Trying out most of these alternative designs isn't really possible without buying the new equipment, short of cutting your keyboard in half with a Greatknife or meat cleaver, but another approach to making keyboards more comfortable is using alternate keyboard layouts.

On the oldest machines (mostly for typesetting), keys were arranged according to the usage of the letter in English - the column ETAOIN came first, with Q and Z being relegated to the very end. You can see an attempt at reproducing this on my laptop, a result of an evening's boredom while revising for exams. (By the way, if you're not familiar with my laptop, the name "Slimnote VX" is incredibly ironic as it shares many characteristics - size, weight and processing capability included - with a bucket of bricks.)

Machines with keyboards as we know them were first produced by Remington, an American gun manufacturer that had decided that the next logical step from producing lethal weapons was to manufacture sewing machines and typewriters. The current English QWERTY design for its keyboard came about largely as a coincidence - Christopher Sholes, a typewriter designer, decided to move the printing levers further apart (not the keys themselves as is widely thought), in an attempt to prevent jams, necessitating that the keys were placed in convenient places to reach the levers.

I actually remember using the family's typewriter when I was very young - it was so resistant to anyone trying to type on it that you virtually had to ball your hands in to fists and smash them down on the keys to get it to do anything. This would probably cause some sort of injury, if not RSI, fairly quickly because of the most efficient typing action being flailing your arms round in a circle like a windmill.

Interestingly, after the idea of typing had been around for a while and faster mechanisms were possible, Sholes himself attempted to redesign the layout to make it more comfortable to type on. The layout that he suggested bore absolutely no resemblance to QWERTY:

 X P M C H R T N S D G K
  J B W F L A E I O U Y
 Q V . ,   ' ! ? - ; _

An important feature of this keyboard was that the vowels were all under one hand - this allowed a much greater typing speed because it was more common for letters to alternate between hands. Because QWERTY had already been established, this keyboard never caught on. As kibet already pointed out in the comments, this may be something to do with the way that it mysteriously doesn't appear to have a Z key.

Dvorak, another layout which took this idea further, was designed in the 1930s - it seems to have been recently been developing something of a Linux-like following. The key layout may look even more insane than the French keyboard, but looking at it more closely shows the reasoning behind its design. The keys on the home row are all from the first two rows of the typesetting keyboard (therefore the most used in the English language), and all the vowels are again under one hand. The more commonly used punctuation is nearer the home positions. Only the A and M keys remain the same from QWERTY.

As a result of the key positions, it's possible to type a lot more quickly in Dvorak - the fingers don't have to move as much to type common words, as many of the most frequently used letters are on the home row. If you use a normal keyboard all day, you're apprarently likely to move your fingers as much as sixteen miles, but using Dvorak this distance is reduced to one mile. (To be honest I find this claim a little extravagant).

It's easy to see some of the advantages of Dvorak by just looking at the typing lessons for it. I remember school typing lessons being endless rows of "A glass lad; dad's sad flask" and other gibberish. In Dvorak, the lessons start in pretty much the same way with the unfortunate "Beavis and Butthead Lesson" ("uh huh uh huh uh huh uh huh, h u uh hu uhh huh uhh") but after learning the home keys for just three fingers on each hand it's possible to type entire sentences like "Hunt the neon then toot out the tune onto the tent", although why you'd ever want to is beyond me.

The point of saying all this? I think I'm going to try it. I've got plenty of old keyboards at home that I can pull apart and rearrange, and if the frustration of forgetting how to type for a week or so isn't too stressful in itself, I'm going to see if Dvorak really can improve my typing.