Can you touch-type the bottom left row?

Fix the row shift issue of conventional keyboards

It's impossible to type the left half of the bottom row the way they teach you in touch-typing school! The problem lies with your keyboard, and here's how to fix it without buying one of those expensive ergonomic keyboards.

See how the key rows are shifted so that no keys are exactly below each other? That's because typewriters had levers under the keys, so no two keys could be exactly below each other.

This is actually not that bad for the right hand, since you keep it at an angle to the keyboard. However, for the left hand the arrangement is awful.

Conventional touch-typing says you should type (look at a QWERTY layout) w, s, x with the ring finger, but I find it a lot easier to type w, s, z with the ring finger, e, d, x with the middle finger, and so on. Since I didn't want to type the keys with the wrong finger, I shifted all the keys left by one position. Of course, z had to go somewhere, and that somewhere is on Caps Lock. And now b is empty, so I put Backspace there, since I use it a lot and it's easier to reach it here than its usual position in the corner of the keyboard!

So this is not a change to your keyboard layout because you still type the keys with the same finger you used to, it's a change to the physical key position.

When I made this change, it took me just a few days to get used to it.

The image shows the Qwerty layout, but it's the same thing with Dvorak. The method described below will shift the keys for any layout that comes with Windows.

This change actually works best if you use Dvorak because it doesn't have a character on the Qwerty 'z' key.

Qwerty

How to make the change in Windows Vista, XP, 2000 or 2003

You can use SharpKeys to remap the keys.

Or you can edit the registry yourself. This article explains how it works. Read it so you know what you're doing.

If you don't feel comfortable editing the registry, use SharpKeys or a similar program!

Create a file (with notepad!) rowshift.reg, put this text into it (make sure it has an extra new line at the end), run it, and restart your computer.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,0E,00,30,00,30,00,2F,00,2F,00,2E,00,2E,00,2D,00,2D,00,2C,00,2C,00,3A,00,3A,00,0E,00,00,00,00,00,00

And this is the file that undoes the change:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,01,00,01,00,00,00,00,00,00