Typing as tactile patterns, not single letters; alternative fingering of bottom row.

["Michael Edwards" mje@xxxxxxxx]

                         Michael Edwards.

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[Walter Jowers:]

>Different musical instruments (sax, flute clarinet) give slightly
>different tactile feedback. Also, when I'm playing an instrument (I'm a
>musician myself), the melody in my head helps keep me on course, I think.
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   Well, when I play the organ or the piano, I never forget which instrument
I'm using and wrongly use the fingering style for the other instrument. But,
after all, the keyboards on the two are laid out identically. (Piano-style
fingering on the organ would sound very obvious, because the chords and melodies
would sound horribly disjointed. When people at a church service complain about
how horrible the organ-playing by an amateur fill-in was, I would think this was
the most likely reason for it; the organist is probably used to playing only the
piano. Organ-style fingering on the piano would probably have little audible
effect, and is sometimes also good piano technique - but it would often be
impossible because piano music is designed for piano fingering techniques, not
organ ones.)
   The analogy with typing keyboards might be better if, for instance, the
piano stayed as it is, and the organ keyboard was arranged in reverse, with the
high notes to the left and the low notes to the right. Of course this has never
been done (to my knowledge), but if it was, I wonder whether musicians could
adapt to either system. Qwerty vs. Dvorak seems to me to be a bit more like
that.

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>But when I'm typing, I'm just looking for the letter, "a." Right now, that
>means left pinky, home row.
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   I'm not so sure. I can only speak for myself, but I find that the finding
of particular letters is almost unconscious. At the conscious level, if I want
to type "cat", it's the whole pattern "c-a-t", I'm searching for, and I think
about it as a pattern or a path to follow: a triangular path in that case, with
the apex pointing to the left. That seems to figure more in my thinking much
more than "find c; find a; find t". The actual tactile pattern helps me
remember it and to find it quickly. I don't know if this is typical of
touch-typists or not; maybe a life-time of playing the piano helps me think in
this sort of way. And I've been told that musicians, especially players of
keyboard instruments, do take to touch-typing more easily than the general
population, on average.
   Now if I learned the Dvorak keyboard, obviously I would have to learn new
patterns for all words. But I suppose it's conceivable that two sets of
patterns could live in my memory. But, for me at least, I believe the long-term
change would be at that pattern level, not just at the level of learning several
dozen new positions for characters. I could probably learn that fairly quickly,
and then could ignore that aspect of it.

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>I don't know what it would be on Dvorak, but I
>suspect any variation would scramble my brain/finger coordination.
>
>Finally, there's this: My business partner hunts-and-pecks fairly well on a
>standard keyboard. But my split (ergo) keyboard drives him nuts, puts him in
>a rage.
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   I assume you mean those keyboards with a big vertical gap down the middle
separating the left and right hand halves, and with those halves angled
slightly.
   That raises an interesting question. (I hope I'm not, all of a sudden,
asking too much on this list; but of course I would always appreciate any
responses.) I would find one of these keyboards totally unusable, because they
put "b" on the left side of the keyboard; but, following the book I used to
learn typing perhaps 15 years ago, I type "b" with my right hand, and the other
keys on the bottom row are correspondingly shifted one finger along, all the
way. I gather this is an old-fashioned system not much in use now, but I've
*never* read in any book an acknowledgement that two systems exist: books simply
follow one system or the other. I had the misfortune to learn the obsolete
system, at a time when I was unaware that there were two systems at all.
   If your business partner uses the same fingering system that I do, this
might be why your split keyboard puts him in a rage - he would be quite unable
to touch-type on it. But if he hunts and pecks on a standard keyboard, then
presumably he does here too, and I wouldn't see this as such an issue then.
   I wonder if the newer system (the one I don't use) was adopted because it
was better, and perhaps put less straing on the hands. Would it be worth
relearning the new fingering, either in conjunction with the Dvorak keyboard, or
just as a separate thing, for qwerty too?
   (I think the numbers in the top row are also one finger different in the
two systems - but I don't use the numbers quite often enough to do this with
touch-typing, so that's not so much an issue with me.)

   (By the way, I believe the Dvorak who invented the keyboard was related to
the composer Antonin Dvorak.)

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.