The keyboard pictured above is the key mapping I use when programming. Most of the time I spend at the keyboard is writing software. A few months ago I determined that my bad typing position was going to ruin my hands. I read that one of the best ways to improve your typing posture is to learn a new keymap, so that is what I did.

I first tried to learn the dvorak keymap, but after a couple hours of that I realized there was no real advantage to learning that mapping since it is laid out for typing English. Software does not look like English, so I wrote a small program to count character pairs in over 1800 files written in perl, C, and python.

I looked at the results, and laid out the keyboard as you see above. You'll note that 'aneortis' were the most common letters. '(' ')' ',' and '.' were soon after, so I put them right in the middle.

I still type my emails and other English on the standard qwerty keyboard. When I code though, aneortis keeps my hands in good shape. If you are inspired to create your own keymap, drop me an email; I like to see your results.

problems, questions, suggestions? mac4-wp@theory.org