Typing challenge

The point is to measure the difference. Take one passage and write it twice with the cursor — once on the round wheel, once on an ordinary keyboard laid out in rows. The keyboard counts your characters, your selections and your time, so at the end you are not comparing opinions. You are comparing two numbers.

Everything else is held still: same word prediction, same voice, same buttons. The only thing that changes between the two runs is how far the cursor has to travel — which is the entire claim this project makes.

And there is a second thing that happens, which matters more than the stopwatch: after a hundred characters on the traditional layout you stop needing the argument explained. You feel it. That crawl across the screen for one letter, then back again for the next, is what writing a sentence costs someone who types with their eyes — every sentence, all day.

  1. Pick a passage — or let it draw one for you.
  2. Write it on the traditional keyboard first. Note the time and the number of selections.
  3. Write it again on the round wheel and compare.
  4. Start with a short one. A thousand characters with a cursor is a long afternoon.

Tem trechos nos dois idiomas. Em verso, o mesmo texto nos dois teclados; em prosa, dois textos de tamanho quase igual — para o segundo turno não virar teste de memória.

Let it pick one

Not knowing what comes is half of it.

Short — a minute or two

Where to start. Enough to feel the difference, not enough to hurt.

Medium — a sonnet, a poem entire

Around five hundred characters: long enough that the layout starts to decide things.

Long — the real thing

Eight hundred characters and up. This is where the two keyboards stop being comparable by feel and the numbers do the talking.

Prose, in pairs

Two passages of nearly identical length, one for each keyboard.

Sources and copyright. Everything here is in the public domain, taken from Wikisource and quoted word for word: Shakespeare from the Yale editions of 1919 and 1923, Camões in modernised spelling, Homer in Samuel Butler's 1900 translation, Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto from the Brazilian originals. Line breaks are flattened into a single line, because the keyboard types one.

Some names are missing for the same reason: Manuel Bandeira died in 1968, so his poems are under copyright in Brazil until 2039 and are not ours to hand out.

The competition is the plan. Customise your keyboard, draw a passage, run it on both — the best runs win books. It starts when there are enough of us; say if you want in.