Analysis of the keyboard layout from a programmers perspective

Abstract

The design of the computer keyboard has been different throughout its entire lifespan, but in the last hundred years nothing much have changed. Alternative layouts do exist, but they have not been able to fully reach the market in the way one would expect. Are the alternative layouts really as good as they claim to be? This thesis investigates the relations between a few common keyboard layouts and compares them by means of the effort required to use them, based of a few hand-picked software projects written in the programming language Java.