[SkyPuncher]

I strongly, strongly disagree that the layout doesn't matter.

I was experiencing pretty bad pain from typing on a qwerty layout. Qwerty has high percentage of combinations that require jumping rows or contorting your hand.

I switched to Colemak (which follows a similar philosophy as Workman) and my hands have significantly too less pain. I still get some from being a heavy typer, but I no longer experience the worst of the paint.

I know you can't prove anything with one word, but the word nice is a great example.

On qwerty, "n-i" forces an uncomfortable twist with the pointer and middle finger. "c-e" forces a jump of the home row.

On colemak, "n", "i", and "e" are all on the home row with the same hand. "c" is on the opposite hand in the lower row. There's no uncomfortable twisting.

You find these types of improvements across nearly all of the intentional layout designs like drovak, colemak, and workman. Regardless of "proper" posture, they do minimize a lot of difficult typing procedures.

Look at the stats on this comment alone: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/#/load/1mwrX5bH

[deno]

> Qwerty has high percentage of combinations that require jumping rows or contorting your hand.

And my point is it doesn’t matter when your wrist is not glued to your desk. You don’t need to contort anything if your hand is free and relaxed over the keys. If something is far away, I just move my entire hand over there.

Look, here’s me typing “nice” using two different methods:

https://streamable.com/mlys1

(I’m just typing “hello world” at the end)

> I still get some [pain] from being a heavy typer, but I no longer experience the worst of the pain.

In the second example you can see my hands are completely relaxed, I’m not “contorting” anything, I could type like that for hours. Zero pain. None. Nada. Nil.

Colemak, Dvorak, etc, they’re all optimizing how to do least damage with the horrible typing method that no one ought to use in the first place.

[SkyPuncher]

That's a bad example because you don't follow standard keying methods. In you're nice example, you're using your pointer finger to press the "c" key. Standard recommendations say both "c" and "e" keys should be handled by your middle finger on qwerty.

You're also typing incredibly slow where you can physically move your hand to avoid contorting your finger. At faster speeds, which I personally hit frequently when slacking or typing up emails, I can't be moving my hands all over the keyboard.

[deno]

> In you're nice example, you're using your pointer finger to press the "c" key. Standard recommendations say both "c" and "e" keys should be handled by your middle finger on qwerty.

Do you mean in the wrists down example? I used natural fingers and it was still horribly unpleasant.

> You're also typing incredibly slow where you can physically move your hand to avoid contorting your finger. At faster speeds, which I personally hit frequently when slacking or typing up emails, I can't be moving my hands all over the keyboard.

How do you figure that? I can easily hit 100 wpm and that’s way above my thinking speed already.

I take typing seriously. We can race and I’m going to win. Guarantee it. In addition, I can sustain that speed for an hour. Can you?

What do you think moving my hand entails anyway. It’s not going to the other room to pet the cat, it’s literally 0.5–1.0 cm that I don’t even think about… It’s what the brain figures out makes more sense than “contorting” fingers when you have the ability to do so, i.e. if your wrists are not artificially glued down to your desk.

[deno]

Or another way to think about it is it’s the home row moving around. Each hand has a dynamic <x,y> offset, units being keys.

It’s like JIT compilation for your typing… Instead of having AOT plan how to hit each key, with what finger, etc., the brain just figures out which finger is best positioned to hit the key at any given time, which varies depending on context.