BTW, you have convinced me of the importance of the keyboard and the commenters have indicated the QWERTY is not fast, so I shall write my politician to pass a law to improve this

Hundreds of millions of people get on airplanes and fly to distant places every year. Accidents and delays are so unusual that they are major news stories.

Billions of tonnes of goods are delivered around the world. It is now utterly normal for raw materials and finished goods to move between continents with scarcely a hiccup.

In the First World, and much of the Second World, reliable electricity supply is as common as air. It is interrupted by only by disasters.

I can’t see how these results are “rather to extremely badly”.

I’ll agree that political meddling has imposed unnecessary costs on these activities. But quality hasn’t suffered especially.

(That may change in the next few years for electricity as the Global Warmists get their way.)

differing only in one or two letter positions from the one I’m used to

That might have been a bug, not a feature – IOW, you may find it easier to switch from one layout to another if they are completely different. But then maybe not – I have not tried, so I wouldn’t know.

it is uncomfortable to reflect that one of the most commonplace examples of a standard adopted worldwide voluntarily, rather than imposed by governments,

Are you sure that has been the case? Don’t most people learn touch typing in school? I could be wrong, of course.

Getting back to Brian’s original point, it is uncomfortable to reflect that one of the most commonplace examples of a standard adopted worldwide voluntarily, rather than imposed by governments, is actually, for reasons of path-dependency, a worse standard than what we’d have if a reasonably competent committee of bureaucrats were designing it now.

However I don’t suppose for a moment that if we HAD had bureaucrats laying down the standard we would be better off. They’d have probably banned further development of non-mechanical typewriters in 1980 on health and safety grounds because they allowed people to type at unnatural speed!

You can also use the Grab utility, or use screencapture(1) from the command line: screencapture [-SWCTMPcimswxto] file. See man 1 screencapture for details.

I have a bunch of old Hewlett Packard and Dell PC102 keyboards lying around. They are robust and have good positive tactile feedback. They last practically for ever. But the best keyboard ever, ever, ever was the Apple Extended Keyboard II. To clean it you held it under a tap and scrubbed it. Completely environmentally sealed. Cost a stupid amount of money, but well worth it.

http://vintagecomputerbits.com/catalog/images/products/vintage-keyboards/ibm-keyboards/IBM%20Compact%20Keyboard%20Top.JPG

Regional: mine is becoming increasingly senile.

Brian: I, Pencil.

As I spend a good amount of every day in front of a computer I invested in a mechanical Das Keyboard. I find that the very light tactile action makes typing a pleasure.

Wikipedia says it wasn’t, but in effect it was, since it deliberately separated common key combinations to avoid the typebars jamming together, as they did with a mechanical typewriter if you typed too fast. I can remember this happening with my Dad’s mechanical typewriter that I used as a child, and I was by no means a fast typist.

This has annoyed me for years when I happen to think about it. It’s worse than English spelling, the occasional weirdness of which has annoyed reformers for centuries. At least English spelling is just semi-randomly odd for historical reasons, but the keyboard, the thing many of us spend half our lives using as you point out, Brian, is actively designed to work badly. (Not that I blame the original designer, who ingeniously solved a problem with the technology available to him.)

20-plus years ago I bought, and still do have somewhere, a gadget called a Microwriter, which had a one-handed keyboard. I remember the typing system, in which you pressed chords or combinations of keys that vaguely related to the end-points of the ends of the letters, as being easy to learn and pleasant to use. There was even a left handed version.

Unfortunately, neither it nor its successor the AgendA passed the tipping point.

I don’t know if you can say they’ve advanced though. It seems like in some aspects they’ve got worse (non-mechanical keys, sacrificing real estate for Windows keys, missing insert buttons, stupid power button placement and there’s a whole subculture dedicated to hate of the placement and, for some, even the presence of the caps-lock key). It seems like by and large, inheriting from typewriters came pretty close first try.

At least it is not a ZX81 keyboard I guess.