Fix QWERTY’s #1 pain point by swapping just two keys (T/K)
Last night I swapped the T and K keys on my keyboard. Right now if I sit here and think really hard about what my fingers are doing I can hit about 70 WPM. It hurts my brain. I had to turn it off so I could speak my stream of consciousness to ghostwrite and edit this article. But, long term, I am never going back, and by the end of this you are probably going to do it too.
To briefly restate what you already know: QWERTY is a 150 year old layout designed for literal typewriters. The mechanical constraint that justified its design has not existed for a century. We kept it anyway. Unfortunate.
As with all of us, I grew up on this keyboard layout and I mindlessly type over 100 WPM. I hate QWERTY but I am not throwing away 22 (maybe more like 17? 18?) years of muscle memory.
But if you actually pay attention to your hands while you type, you’ll notice your left hand is doing way more than its share. This is not your fault. English on QWERTY loads the left hand significantly more than the right — I believe Claude told me the other night it’s a split of about 56/44.
I notice this, but it doesn’t annoy me. The miniscule increase in speed I could get from an ideal 50/50 split is definitely not worth the effort of remapping the entire layout, of relearning how to type from scratch.
But there is one key does annoy me. The letter T. It’s basically an honorary vowel. It shows up constantly — it’s the second most common letter in English, behind the letter E. And it sits way in the middle of the keyboard, requiring a long, long reach by your left index finger, maybe assisted by a little forearm movement. Now look at K. Right hand, comfortable spot, barely shows up in English. K is like an average New Yorker in rent controlled housing — sitting there in prime real estate, doing virtually nothing.
They should switch. It is so obvious once you see it. Why has nobody tried to standardize this?
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The standard suggestion at this point is Dvorak or Colemak, and I am going to stop you right there. I tried Dvorak. It turned me into my dad, who refuses to learn anything from this century. I was hunting and pecking with my eyes at (generously) 10 words per minute. It is like being transplanted into an alternate timeline of keyboard evolution. I do not have that kind of patience and you probably do not either.
Not only that, but using an alternate layout obliterates the ergonomics of every keyboard shortcut in every piece of software you’ve ever known and loved. I feel like if I actually spent the time and learned Dvorak, I’d be signing myself up for a world of pain and toggling my keyboard layout back and forth.
The T/K swap is not remotely in the same category. The adjustment is just: you forget. Repeatedly. That T is now where K was. You find yourself actively planning ahead for the next set of words that contain the letter T.
You type “the” and get “khe.” You feel stupid for a second. You correct it and then feel stupid again three seconds later when you see you’ve typed “the new Copilot updake is sict!”
The ceiling of confusion is low and you are already living it. And every session it gets smaller.
Unlike Dvorak or Colemak, this layout does not involve changing settings in the OS. It takes only two lines of AutoHotKey:
t::k
k::t
That’s it. That is the whole intervention. A few weeks of diminishing friction and then you are just typing, normally, except the most common letter in the language is finally somewhere your hand can naturally reach.
I genuinely do not know why this has not become standardized. I do not understand why Windows natively supports Dvorak but not Qwerky. Above all, I do not know why I did not think of it sooner. But I did think of it, and tonight is my second night of using it, and I absolutely hate it, and I can already tell this is how I will type for the rest of my life.
Go do it. It will hurt for a few weeks by a rapidly diminishing amount. And then forever it will be better. And you get to show all your friends how Qwerky you are.
Disclaimer: 90% of this article was written using a standard QWERTY keyboard without Autohotkey because I do not have that kind of patience.
