Computer Hope

Just out of curiosity what is everyone's top five letter keys they've typed since staring WhatPulse? Below is my top letter keys.

E, T, S, O, and A

To see this information right click the WP icon and click key frequencies. I'm still fascinated that the letter 'e' is my top letter I've typed and that the key is not worn off like many of the other keys on my keyboard.

E, Space, S, T and R.

the E is only a few hundred ahead of spacebar, actually.

I'm in the same boat with the E-key- it's hardly worn off at all. maybe it's because while touch typing you don't usually "slide" your finger over the e key like one would do with others? I don't know.

etaoinshrdlu is the first part of the frequency order that typesetters used to be familiar with, back in the day when type was manually set.

The letters on Linotype keyboards were arranged by letter frequency, so ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard. Linotype operators who had made a typing error could not easily go back to delete it, and had to finish the line before they could eject the slug and re-key a new one. Since the line with the error would be discarded and hence its contents did not matter, the quickest way to finish the line was to run a finger down the keys, creating this nonsense phrase.

If the slug with the error made it as far as the compositors, the distinctive set of letters served to quickly identify it for removal. Occasionally, however, the phrase would be overlooked and be printed erroneously. This happened often enough that ETAOIN SHRDLU is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

Thanks for sharing BC and very well done post Salmon Trout. Fascinating stuff I wasn't aware of.

I have that feature turned off, but in a few days I'll tell which keys are in the lead.  My guess is Ctrl and Alt.

(and the arrow keys too)

After typing this, SPACE is in the lead.  Then ETAS.

E T A O I   Appears the letter E is quite popular.

Left, D, Right, A, Up.  E is 13th.

Quote from: overthehill on June 23, 2010, 10:38:33 PM
E T A O I   Appears the letter E is quite popular.

Really? 

Quote from: Salmon Trout on June 24, 2010, 11:38:44 AM
Really? 

Quote from: overthehill on June 24, 2010, 09:26:32 PM

E is the most common letter in the english language.

Quote from: BC_Programmer on June 21, 2010, 03:18:16 AM

the E is only a few hundred ahead of spacebar, actually.

Quote from: Fleexy on June 24, 2010, 08:05:47 AM
Left, D, Right, A, Up.  E is 13th.

Fair enough, but the spacebar almost beat out E. And E is 13th.
Also if this was strictly typing letters, docs, etc., I could see that E would be promanent. And possibly that's what you do and most others do. But for me, most of my typing is done here at CH. And copying "Quotes" ,deleting areas of those quotes, adding, subtracting, underlining, capitalizing etc.,etc. I was a little surprised to see that E was even at the top of my list.

In the interim Space has now surpassed E:

Space     : 26,293
E         : 24,689
T         : 13,916
Backspace : 11,603
11,026    : O

What's notable here is not that Space is in first (I'll get to that in a moment) but rather that the difference between E and T is over 10,000, which is hardly "beating by a nose".

Space is not a letter, so it doesn't really count.

Quote from: overthehill on June 24, 2010, 10:31:04 PM
Also if this was strictly typing letters, docs, etc., I could see that E would be promanent. And possibly that's what you do and most others do. But for me, most of my typing is done here at CH. And copying "Quotes" ,deleting areas of those quotes, adding, subtracting, underlining, capitalizing etc.,etc. I was a little surprised to see that E was even at the top of my list.

Actually, most of my  "typing" is done into either VB6 or Visual Studio 2008; a small snippet of something I was working on recently:


   private Object HandleFunction(String funcname, CParser[] parameters)
        {
            //step one: convert parameters into their executed results; pretty simple with lambda expressions.
            Object[] paramresults = new Object[parameters.Length];
            for(int i=0;i<parameters.Length-1;i++)
                paramresults[i] = parameters[i].Execute();
               
            //now, we look  through all our evaluation plugins, and find one that implements this function:

            IEvalPlugin foundPlug = EvalPlugins.FirstOrDefault((a) => a.CanHandleFunction(funcname));
            if (foundPlug != null)
                return foundPlug.HandleFunction(funcname, new List<object>(paramresults));


            return null;

        }


Note that the curly brackets are <EVERYWHERE> (which is not really shown well in the snippet, oh well) so somebody might expect them to be "prominent" but they are not- I only have 256 or so recorded since I installed whatpulse, which was nearly a year ago, I think.

Most of the key frequencies, aside from a few significant operations and characters that wouldn't be used as often, are about the same frequency, and trust me, I do a <lot> of editing of stuff to get things working sometimes, deleting blocks, moving blocks, etc. pretty much the same thing we both to to reorganize quotes. This can be evidenced by the curious popularity of the backspace key, which has certainly risen up in the ranks since I started working more extensively with C#. But, the fact remains that all the typing I do for various things- blog posts, forum posts, whatever, is predominantly the actual typing, not the editing. (and like I said, I do a lot of editing). One can only surmise this is the case for most people- they may think they edited a lot, but really editing doesn't take nearly enough keystrokes to "override" those keystrokes used to create the content in the first place. moving and editing a few quotes created using the "quote" button might take 6 keys or so keys, but typing the response will always take more.

Actually, the windows key is in tenth place, which is higher then I would have expected. turns out I now use the search bar without realizing it to open everything, instead of using the "run" dialog like I used to.

Quote from: overthehill on June 24, 2010, 10:31:04 PM

Quote from: Fleexy
Demographic is at least as important as anything else- Fleexy, to my understanding, is the youngest member on the board (11 if I remember) and while this certainly is a generalization, I don't know any touch typists that are 11 year's old (I was hunting and pecking when I was 16, for example... probably because I didn't have a computer until much later, though). Also, you'll note that there are arrow keys present, as well. This makes me believe that much if the time, Fleexy is playing a game or other program of some sort that uses the arrow keys- perhaps A and D are both "function" keys that do something in that game/program? I don't know.

Fair enough, but the spacebar almost beat out E. And E is 13th.

After quite a few VB .NET form modules, E has slipped to 14th.

I'm writing an Internet browser.

ack, I messed up my quoting.

Quote from: BC_Programmer on June 26, 2010, 07:29:03 PM
ack, I messed up my quoting.