Why you should care
Maybe Q, K and Y keys are only getting in your way.
When Ray
McEnaney types, he’s confident it’s the most efficient way possible. But
it’s not typing school that’s given him this feeling. It’s his
keyboard. Frustrated with the limitations of the traditional QWERTY
layout, McEnaney spent the last decade designing a new one. Considering
that the universal key arrangement was designed in the typewriter age — patented in 1878 — an alternative seems due. This one’s inspired by a bee.
McEnaney
wasn’t satisfied with other typing options people turn to — the most
prominent being Dvorak, which aims to minimize how far the fingers
travel and reduce fatigue. He thought the learning curve was too great:
Users need to seriously commit to becoming proficient. That’s how we get
to the BeeRaider,
his oddly shaped keyboard that resembles a bee in flight, with two
“wings” of keys arranged on either side of a radial center. It’s a buzzy
concept: The layout is larger, with the keys you need most at the
center (which gives you less fatigue, McEnaney says). Keys that he
considers “more useless” — including Q, K and X — are placed farther
away.
… it’s an implicit knowledge of where the fingers go; the motor system learns where the keys are, and that’s how you learn to type.Kristy Snyder, cognitive neuroscience researcher at Vanderbilt University
