Welcome, Young Typist

Welcome to Relaxed Typing. This site is dedicated to making typing more relaxed and enjoyable. Did you know that the standard QWERTY arrangement of the letters is not the only way you can type?

Until about 6 years ago, I had always taken the arrangement of the letters on the keyboard for granted. Then I read about why QWERTY was designed originally and that alternatives existed. Nowadays, knowledge of this becoming more common.

Still, those who have gone down the path to learn a new layout remain somewhat obscure and uncommon; the space being occupied perhaps mostly by programmers or very serious writers. However, I don't think that needs to be the case!

By changing the arrangement of letters you use in your typing, you can make your typing experience abundantly, and permanently, more enjoyable and relaxed. Many people have already taken the time to design other layouts that they, in their own respective philosophies, feel are better. All of those options are presented here for you to choose from. And if you are so inspired, as I was, you can also create your own layout!

We believe here that people should take greater advantage of optimizing their typing experience, since typing is something we all are doing increasingly A LOT of, and after all, why not?

Many people can see, for example, in the United States, how it might be advantageous to use the metric system over the standard system. Unfortunately, this is not something we can easily go out and change.

QWERTY has a similar ubiquity to the Standard Measurement System in the US, however, it is VERY EASY to change! Since the keyboard is run by software and not only hardware, you can even change it without moving the letters! (To some this will be obvious).

6 years ago I designed the FHAY keyboard layout and have used it ever since! Millions of keystrokes later, I am still enjoying it just as much as ever. I want you to be able to enjoy it too, or consider another layout you may enjoy, maybe even your own. You only have the whole rest of your life to be typing, after all.

The Fhay Keyboard Layout

* pronounced "fay"

If you have never heard this before, perhaps you will be as surprised as I was to discover that the ubiquitious QWERTY keyboard layout we use today does not have some hidden and meaningful arrangement to the letters. It was designed in 1878 for typewriters with two main goals in mind :

• To be inefficient, preventing early typewriters from jamming, and
• As a marketing ploy to spell "typewriter" using only the top row.

Knowing that typing, both for writing and programming, would probably be with me for the rest of my life, I set out to find a different and more efficient system. For several months I tried the Dvorak layout, followed by the Colemak layout. However, I still found both of these alternatives dissatisfying. So I set out to create my own system, with these, in my opinion, much more worthy design goals :

• The most common letters are placed as closely as possible in descending order to the most desirable positions on the keyboard,
• The most common digraphs (two letter sequences) and trigraphs, flow off the fingers in a comfortable and memorable way,
• The layout is intuitively memorable and easy to learn,
• The layout has a simple name that is visible in the layout (for distinguishing it and reference)
• The layout makes use of a "curved" home row, as the two middle fingers on the hand are generally longer than the two outer fingers, preventing clenching of the hand (you can see this on the blue squares in the practice program).

For a year or so I tried many different arrangements and put lots of thought into the theory of keyboards, however I was always dissatisfied with the designs. Eventually, I decided to start over from scratch and use a kaizen approach. Using my accumulated knowledge as a guide, I made one letter swap a day for about two months, mostly by feel. During this time I used the keyboard at work continously to learn to touch type on it as I designed it. With this approach, I arrived at the fhay layout. The practice program here will allow you to try out and learn the fhay layout if you so desire. Hopefully the fhay layout may provide a vastly more pleasant and ergonomic typing experience in english. If you find the fhay layout displeasing, as I found the other layouts that I tried, and typing is a significant part of your life, I encourage you to try out my kaizen approach above and design your own layout by feel. I will have information posted soon about how to install fhay or any other other custom layouts on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Enjoy :)!