[ken]

I never understood why ortholinear keyboards aren't the standard. It's bizarre that the fingers on my left hand would move slightly to the left for the top row, but the fingers on my right hand would also move slightly to the left for the top row. And to the right, on both hands, for the bottom row. Fingers don't naturally move like that! My hands have mirror symmetry. Why doesn't my keyboard?

The number 6 exemplifies the problem. Touch-typing classes teach that it's pressed by the right hand, but the number row has drifted so far left that it's actually closer to the left hand. Sure enough, (non-ortho) split keyboards can't agree which side of the split to put it on. Sometimes even different models from the same company disagree.

Staggered keys is even crazier, to me, than QWERTY. There's no spending 2 weeks relearning where every letter is. There's no messing up spatial mnemonics like Z/X/C/V. It just instantly fixes your fingers from being slightly out of alignment.

And the craziest is when touchscreens do it. Keys were only staggered in that funny way to make room for the keylevers. Computer keyboards never had keylevers, but touchscreens really never had keylevers!

[IronBacon]

You aren't alone, the thing boggles my mind too. I like better staggered columns layout than ortholinear, but yeah staggered rows don't make any sense, I hate using the keyboard in my notebook.

Joking, I would say only Apple could find the "courage" to introduce columns staggered/ortholinear keyboards... ^__~

[ken]

You joke, but I've wondered the same thing. Apple, of all companies, is happy to re-examine (or discard) the status quo. They dropped the headphone jack on many products -- as they said, it's "over 100 years old, used to help quickly exchange in switchboards". Yet their keyboards still look pretty much like a 19th-century Remington.

[IronBacon]

I would bet that if they dropped the staggered rows they would by followed by the rest of the industry in heartbeat.

Instead they put an OLED on it and in a single move they pissed off all the Vim users (or that's what I recall)... ^__^

[hinkley]

You are holding your forearms at an angle. To reach things closer to your body, you move your right arm back and to the right. To reach things farther away, you reach up to the left.

So the question is, do you move only your finger when reaching for the number line, or move your whole lower arm?

[jupp0r]

> I never understood why ortholinear keyboards aren't the standard.

Same as querty: it’s there so typewriter stamps don’t hit each other.