The Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard

The Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard

Fitaly minimizes finger and hand travel

The Fitaly One-Finger Keyboard minimizes pen or finger travel as well as hand travel:

A first characteristic of the One-Finger Keyboard layout is the square form adopted for the alphabetical part of the keyboard. Assuming an initial position of the pen (or finger) at the center, this results in small travels to the other keys.

In addition, key placement is conditioned by frequencies of letters in the English language. These are indicated for each letter (in occurrences per 10,000 letters) in the figure below, based on the Brown Corpus for the English language.

The most frequent letter is by far the space character, with a frequency of 17.4%. To account for this fact, two large space keys are provided. This also has the effect of minimizing the distance of any letter to a space: it is either 1 or 2 (that is, adjacent or one key away).

Z
20 V
77 C
230 H
415 W
138 K
49

F
176 I
551 T
701 A
615 L
319 Y
133

(space)
1741 N
550 E
976 (space)
1741

G
147 D
305 O
590 R
497 S
497 B
110

Q
20 J
20 U
210 M
187 P
150 X
20

Following a tradition that names keyboards after their major row (such as QWERTY and AZERTY), we will refer to the One-Finger Keyboard as the FITALY keyboard in what follows.

As can be seen in figures given below, the most frequent letters are quite closely grouped in the FITALY keyboard:

Z V C H W K

F I T A L Y

(space) N E (space)

G D O R S B

Q J U M P X

The six letters of the colored area taneor represent a combined frequency of 39.3%, and, together with the space keys, of 56.7%. So more than half of all keystrokes will happen in this colored area.

Z V C H W K

F I T A L Y

(space) N E (space)

G D O R S B

Q J U M P X

The ten letters of the colored area italnedors and the space keys represent a combined frequency of 73.4%. Close to three quarters of all keystrokes will happen in this colored area.

Z V C H W K

F I T A L Y

(space) N E (space)

G D O R S B

Q J U M P X

Finally, the colored area obtained with the addition of the letters ch and um brings this combined frequency to 84% of all keystrokes.

In other words, using these key placements means that more than half of the keys will be one away from the center keys N and E and 84% of all keys will be two away at most. In comparison, these distances range up to 5 keys away from the center keys on the QWERTY keyboard. Similarly, the maximum distance between two letters is 5 on the FITALY keyboard

The difference is most striking on the six most frequent letters taneor: the largest travel between any two keys is 2 on the FITALY keyboard, compared to 8 for A-O on the QWERTY keyboard.