@half-faust
As a PhD student myself, I think most of "unpaid, overworked, sleep-deprived, caffeine-addicted PhD student" is redundant
@streetcube-x3h
As someone who switched from QWERTY to DVORAK around 4 months ago, I can attest that switching a keyboard layout and getting used to it again takes a really long time. I was at around 80 WPM with QWERTY and it took roughly 2 and a half months (maybe closer to 3 months) to get back to that speed with DVORAK. One thing that is beneficial with DVORAK is less pain in my wrists when writing for a long time.
@Glarses
this gives me a really bad idea
@powertomato
Dworak did not only optimize the finger travel-time and a frequency, he also optimized the layout such that the fingers would alternate on the most frequent two-letter combinations. Like ensuring that E and R or T and H would be on opposite sides of the keyboard
@prettylitch1785
The youngest old man I ever seen
@jdk7278
Love that this was both a history lesson on keyboards, and lesson on machine learning
@stijndederper6326
I really enjoy all the strange places and interesting locations you choose for just talking portion. It feels somewhat wonderful 😄
@cymno
10:00 This layout demonstrates the need to choose your performance metric carefully. No penalty for same finger movement meant that for many common bigrams the right index finger has to hit two different keys in quick succession. E.g. for AN (2% of bigrams), and also (in order of decreasing frequency) EN, ND, ED, AL, LE, DE, NE, and EA (0.69% of bigrams). For the word AND the same finger has to hit 3 keys!
@bramweinreder2346
I made one improvement at work. Requested a compact keyboard without numpad area, so I could use my mouse at a more relaxed wrist angle. Then requested a separate numpad that I use left handed to divide the work load more evenly between left and right. Haven't looked back since.
@BSEUNHIR
I'd caution against attributing the health hazards of typing to the QWERTY layout. Only a fraction of people actually touch type with proper form and a very large portion of injuries results from bending the wrist back too far, often as a result of having the keyboard too close to the edge of the desk.
@scheimong
5:02 Ah I see what you did there.
@Talon_24
I feel the badness of the worst keyboard can be improved by mapping a letter like Q to the Spacebar
@Tr1ploid
There's another dimension to this, and that is the fact that QWERTY isn't just used for English. Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Baltics, also use it. Belgium and France use AZERTY, Germany, central Europe and the balkans use QWERTZ. In Belgium, there's a really common issue on Windows where people accidentally switch keyboard layouts from AZERTY (Belgium and France standard) to QWERTY. All it takes usually is to accidentally press alt+shift to switch between keyboard settings as for some reason most WIndows installations come with both presets configured. AZERTY and QWERTY only have minor differences in letters (A<->Q, W<->Z, and M<->comma) but almost all of the special characters are completely different. AZERTY is ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS if you are a computer programmer because many of the symbols are only accessible using the ALT key. Whenever you boot up a video game for the first time in Belgium, the first thing you ALWAYS check is the keyboard settings to see if the developers did correct localisation, and if not, go through the entire thing to make sure your WSAD becomes ZSQD. I usually don't change the M for map anymore, I am so used to pressing the comma button for opening a map that it doesn't bother me. What is annoying however is all the number keys. In AZERTY, numbers are on the same keys, but they are accessed through SHIFT+number key. The default names for the keys are all symbols. "1234567890" becomes "&é"'(§è!çà ". This is good for French people so they have access to their accent aigu's etcetera, but very annoying to have a video game tell you to press "à " for rocket launcher and "§" for shotgun.
@bragtime1052
Dear James, After watching a video by someone on this topic from a year ago and getting excited about the topic but not content with how far they took it, I thought about modifying their code myself to take it far enough. I never finished the project and it just kind of sat there at the end of the day, but I went YouTube searching again today and saw this awesome video. I'm so happy you put in the work regarding the code and made it available for others (I'm not really a coder lol), so I can modify it to use my own dataset and generate my own unique keyboard. You did the heavy lifting for others, and did a bang up job with this extremely good video. Infinite thanks for your great help, -Carmen
@alvin_row
Finally, the channel that will continue on Tom Scott's legacy. Extremely well put together video my dude! Feel proud!
@mina86
7:02 — I'm confused about the image of Dvorak. The image is of Antonin Dvořák, the composer. At first I thought it was the joke but the image is also labelled August Dvorak which in all seems like a mistake in the graphic.
@QuiznosBear
No mention of Linotype layout - which is one of the optimized layouts that resulted in the historic jams that led to QWERTY and other jam-free formats. QWERTY wasn't to slow people down - it was to split the common letters to non adjacent armatures, which also extended the life of ribbons (and reduced jams)
@seanrrichards
I switched over to a Dvorak in 2000 or so and used it until about 2016 or so. There was a learning curve but I did ok with it. The biggest problems I had with it was changing keys when I bought a new keyboard, laptops were a pain and bringing in my keyboard to new work and then getting IT to allow permissions to load a new keyboard was painful. The absolute worst was entering in my network or computer logon password. Until the system booted up and loaded the Dvorak driver the computer assumed you had Qwerty, 100% a pain. I switched back, learned touch typing a little more and that is where I am. Great vid though!!
@sephreed1938
An MIT student did something similar about 10 years ago. I took their "most efficient layout" and modified it to keep my most common hotkeys in place (zxcv). I also gave the semi-colon a strong position as I use it in programming a lot. That's been my layout for 8+ years. I'm the only person in the world who uses this.
@AtomicFrontier