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Writer's pictureAbhimanyu Kumar Sharma

Why keyboards aren't in alphabetical order??

Updated: Nov 5, 2022

Have you ever thought about why the keyboards of the devices you use to type aren't in alphabetical order? Or are you just as annoyed as me about the fact that we have a messed-up keyboard instead of an alphabetical keyboard? Maybe your friends are pissed about it and now you are curious about knowing this. Whatever the reason, we now have an answer which makes a lot of sense, so let's dive right into knowing it.


There was a man named Sholes who used to spend most of his time with a nice alphabetically order typewriter that was pretty new at the time, and yeah I am talking about a time almost 200 years ago. So, this guy is writing or rather typing the first chapter of a book, and guess what? He mistakenly presses the B key when he wanted the word to be AN. Sholes then decides to bring change so he would never mess up again. He tries a bunch of different placements for the keys and finds out the QWERTY arrangement to be the most useful. The QWERTY arrangement is basically the current arrangement we have, that is the first row of keys starts with them.


He also went on with describing the touch typing method which is quite popular now. This method basically meant you could type without seeing, and therefore Sholes set up something called home keys so it's easier. Home keys are the keys where you rest your hand and other keys are in the range that your hands can access. So here's a secret, the home keys for your left hand are ASDF and for your right are JKL. This is the case because these letters are in the middle in terms of rows and they are on the corners in terms of columns. This increases the surface are your hands can cover, so this is probably why we have this weird keyboard and not the one that we aesthetic people want.


Next time someone asks you this question, just tell them to use a keyboard from another language may be French or Italian, and ask them how it went because these languages have the aesthetic keyboards that we all want :/



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