Surely you have ever noticed that PC keyboards , including those of laptops, have notches on the F and J keys (in addition, those keyboards that also have a number pad also have one more notch at 5). This is something that for most users goes unnoticed since we are used to seeing it but, have you ever wondered why these notches on the keyboard? In this article we are going to tell you about it.
The keyboard is an element that has become something of such daily and widespread commercial use that these details often go unnoticed. The notches on the F, J and 5 keys of the number pad on keyboards have always been there, and we use them daily without realizing or knowing what they are there for, but once you know it they can change the way in the one you use this extremely common peripheral.
Why do keyboards have these notches on some keys?
If you look at the QWERTY keyboard that you use every day with your PC, you will notice that there are a total of three keys (as we have said before, F, J and the 5 of the number pad) that have small notches or rather protrusions. No matter what keyboard you have, whether you use a laptop, or have an Apple Mac , those notches will be there, and you’ve probably never wondered why.
These three keys are part of the center line of keys on QWERTY keyboards , known as the start row. The purpose of these notches on the F and J keys is to guide the user to correctly position their hands according to typing standards, so that they can correctly position them on the keyboard to reach all the keys equally without looking, as if it were a braille code.
According to these notches, we must place the index finger of the left hand on the notch of the F key, while the index finger of the right hand must be placed on the J key, so that the rest of the fingers of the two hands remain arranged in an organized way to be able to reach the rest of the keyboard keys without problems.
Actually, for most people these notches are of little use in everyday keyboard use. This is because most people have never taken typing classes and rather rely on their experience after a long time using keyboards; For this reason, over years and years of self-evolved typing habits, people have their own way of using the keyboard and you would be surprised at how fast a person can write who has never taught typing classes but who He has been using his keyboard for years, including typing without looking at the device (which is essential for great typing speed).
However and with everything, a professional typist will always have a greater speed but above all a greater precision when writing (you can consult, for example, the 10FastFingers database, in which you will see that an “average” user is able to type 80 PPM (words per minute), while a professional can exceed 200.
And it is shown that no matter how much experience you have using a keyboard, those who have taken typing classes are capable of typing much faster and are much less mistaken than those who do not … and for this there are these notches on keyboards, because a One of the most important things when learning to type is to position your hands correctly on the keyboard to be able to write without looking at it; These notches are simply for that, because knowing that you must place your index fingers on the notches you will be able to do it without having to look thanks to the sense of touch.
The exceptions that confirm the rule
Of course, in the world we live in there are few things that are completely universal and therefore we also find exceptions regarding keyboard notches. For starters, they have no use in the keyboards of touchscreen devices like the smartphones that are so widespread today; In our smartphones and tablets we mainly use our thumbs to type, and although we can type very quickly in this way, researchers have begun to feel the need to create a faster keyboard than the most widely used QWERTY.
Obviously, on a smartphone we do not write as on a PC keyboard: we do not have our hands resting on the table or both hands ready with all the fingers ready to press keys, but as a general rule we write by holding the device with both hands and typing just with your thumbs. This creates difficulties in two ways: the typing speed is limited and of course it is sovereignly lower than what we can achieve on a PC keyboard, and on the other hand, with the screens of increasingly larger devices, it is quite difficult to reach the keys that are in the center area.
For these reasons, researchers have created a new type of keyboard called KALQ , with a rather unusual layout that moves the most frequent keys to the edges of the screen, leaving the center area practically empty or only with a number pad there. Currently this type of keyboard is not extended and can only be used by installing third-party applications, but the intention is to extend its use to make it a standard on touch screens.
Touchscreens obviously don’t have those notches that are characteristic of PC keyboards as there is no finger touch feel possible, but there are other exceptions as well, such as non-QWERTY keyboards; Although it is true that the QWERTY key layout (and its variants such as AZERTY) are the most typical and widespread throughout the world, there are other distributions such as DVORAK or TypeMatrix keyboards that are also widely used and that, in some cases, do not count. with these notches or, if they have them, they are located on different keys.
