I honestly don’t get why the heck we use this stupid layout… please somebody help me understand.
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Institutional inertia is the long and short of it.
We started with typewriters in the QWERTY layout, and so we have keyboards in the QWERTY layout. There are alternatives like AZERTY and Dvorak, and probably some oddballs that I don’t know about, but the default is QWERTY because it always has been.
Trying to re-standardize to another layout would involve so much reconfiguring in terms of numerous industries, customer expectations, etc, etc.
The answer is that we dont. There are many other designs out there for keyboards that are faster and all you need to do is learn how to use them. Why we started using it in the first place is that it made things easier for people moving from a typewriter to a keyboard in the first place.
Inertia. There was already a large established user base trained on typewriters when computer keyboards were introduced. Those people bought qwerty keyboards, so that’s what gets made.
Sure you can use a different key layout, but it’s an uphill battle. You’ll likely end up needing to use qwerty anyway on machines you don’t own, and even on the machines you do own you’ll have to go remapping a bunch of hotkeys that were assigned to be convenient on qwerty.
For a major improvement in speed, look at a stenography keyboard. Where you use multiple keys simultaneously. These are used by court reporters.
I assume that typewriters wouldn’t work with computers, that and the fact that typewriters couldn’t really do backspaces.
I know that people make custom mechanical keyboards with their own layouts, that might be closer to what you want.
As for the qwerty layout, that might just have been because it’s been around for a long time.
While a very well practiced typist can type faster on some other layouts, the gain is honestly not huge and would have a significant period of retraining. And very few people actually type enough to have any meaningful benefit, let alone enough to outweigh the effort and loss in productivity in switching.
Within English it’s because it became the default while keyboards were in use, and when we moved to computers basically everyone who would be using a keyboard was familiar QWERTY the convention stuck.
There’s some other standards, albeit with much more limited following. Proponents say they’re faster for typing, but a while back the GSA (IIRC) tried training typists on it vs QWERTY and didn’t see much/any advantage that would make a change worthwhile, so stuck with QWERTY as standard.
If you’d like to try some of these other ones (Eg [Dvorak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout)) you can configure your keyboard to match it and change your OS to recognize it.
The first computer users were familiar with QWERTY, so they kept it for computers. Then each following generation learned to type on QWERTY. You can learn a different layout if you want to.
You can use different keyboards. It is programmed in your computer to accept different keyboards. So use a different keyboard.
Because people _hate_ change of any kind.
Also, these days you can map your keyboard to any configuration you prefer.
What other layout would you suggest?
What alternate layout would your friends suggest?
What other layout would the guy across the hall suggest?
What layout does the 120 WPM secretary that you’ve never met suggest?
Unless you think all those answers are the same, that’s why we’re still using QWERTY. Everyone agrees that QWERTY is ok to good. Nearly nobody agrees what would be better than QWERTY.
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