Updated September 24, 2021 1.2k votes 444 voters 63k views
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Vote up the keyboards that offer the best alternative to the traditional QWERTY set up.
Look at your keyboard. Do the letters in the top left corner spell Q W E R T Y? They probably do. Why is that? Simply put, QWERTY is the visually inspired name of the most popular keyboard arrangement in the world. Designed by Christopher Latham Sholes and sold to the E. Remington and Sons Co., QWERTY made its first appearance on typewriters in the 1870s.
Standardization and decades of worldwide muscle memory have made QWERTY second nature to most of us by now, but that doesn't mean that QWERTY keyboard alternatives are without merit. While other keyboard layouts are not as widely used as the QWERTY, different kinds of keyboards can be more natural for some people and provide specialized advantages for certain situations. Here are some cool alternative computer keyboards that offer a sometimes better set up than the old standby, QWERTY.
Workman is a keyboard based on the natural behaviors of the different digits on the hand. If you hold out your hands in a typing position, you'll notice our index fingers tend to curl inward while our middle and outer fingers tend to stretch outward. Workman was developed by coders who do a lot of typing with the goal of minimizing hand fatigue.
The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was patented by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey, in 1936. It was designed to minimize finger movement and facilitate faster typing rates than the standard QWERTY. The main difference in terms of layout is that for Latin letter languages such as English, Dvorak keyboards have more common letters in the middle, or home row, of keys.
While the DSK has yet to replace the QWERTY keyboard, it is available on most modern operating systems, if you're looking to increase your words per minute score.
PLUM is probably one of the easiest keyboards to learn typing on if you'd never encountered QWERTY. The square grid helps minimize hand twisting and the keys are arranged to help new typists learn even faster than QWERTY. PLUM also uses mnemonic devices in the keys arrangements to help with memorization. The home row keys read "readonthis." Brilliant!
This European keyboard switches the positions of the "Y" and "Z" keys from the QWERTY keyboard. This keyboard is a very popular choice throughout Central Europe, as "Z" is a much more common letter in German.
The Neo Users Group developed this German-centered keyboard in 2004. The German language optimizations include letter positioning and letter grouping. Neo also includes multiple layers of completely different key layouts that can be activated, which are themed by upper and lowercase, special symbols, or multilingual characters.
Age of Maltron? PCD Maltron Ltd., which was founded by Lillian Malt, developed alternative ergonomic keyboard models designed to completely prevent repetitive strain injury from typing. Their flagship keyboard is the Fully Ergonomic 3D Keyboard. The keys are arranged in separate blocks with slanted surfaces to give maximum comfort and support to the hands.
