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.

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

I saw.

605    Backspace
600    Space
390    E
314    A
302    T

Welcome to the WP team mat123, it's interesting that backspace is pressed so much. Do you make errors or have an idea of why out of curiosity.

only thing i can think of is that i make a lot of changes to my bat program
or copy paste modify
for ex
if have this code

set op11=0
set op12=0
set op13=0
set op14=0
set op15=0

and to change it to this

set op21=0
set op22=0
set op23=0
set op24=0
set op25=0

i backspace each those ones to make them a 2

space
e
r
o
n

are my top 5

<Right>
<Left>
<Up>
<Space>
<Down>

Quote from: Fleexy on August 03, 2010, 04:06:43 PM
<Right>
<Left>
<Up>
<Space>
<Down>

so fleexy likes to play pc games  , like space invaders 

Whew, And sometimes I think I play too many games... but their key counts never get anywhere near the top half!

I've found I don't really like to play games as much as I used to, sure every once in a while I find a great one that catches my attention until I finish it, but I find I can't go back and play them over and over and over again like I did with older games. Not sure if this is a nostalgia thing, since I can still go through Super Mario World despite not only having gone through the bloody game hundreds of times before but even had a week or so where I would sit down and try to make a Emulator movie where I went through the entire game every day. bloody thing kept losing sync about 15 or so minutes into the 3 hour recording, or wether I'm just getting old

Not that I feel bad that I find, for example, C# generics more exciting then what new vehicles I can add to the latest GTA clone game. 



Lately the Curly braces and square brackets have been getting a thorough boost, no doubt because I'm practically halted all my work in VB6(which doesn't use either curly braces or square brackets for basic syntax*) and am now working full on in C#, which has them all over the place - curly braces for blocks, square brackets for indexers.

I also took note of my curiously high use of parentheses, which at first I passed off as those I use for programming and expressions and whatnot, but I've come to think that I use parentheses an awful lot when they aren't necessary (such as here, for example). I've always found them to be a sign of poorly structured writing so I will probably make some effort to improve that.

See, Whatpulse changes lives!


*Re square brackets in VB6... yes, I am well aware that they can be used to access hidden members, such as the NewEnum method of the collection object, as in collectionobj.[_NewEnum](), but *censored* that's hardly a common use case.

[/i]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3771470/Key%20Frequencies.html

Quote from: Fleexy on August 04, 2010, 02:37:44 PM
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3771470/Key%20Frequencies.html

yes fleexy , those 5 keys are the one's you use when you play space invader's 


EDIT; so i have been told , not that i would know

quote form BCP; See, Whatpulse changes lives!


i have tried 5 or 6 times to make the whatpulse sig; i can bring it up and type in what i want and save it  but when i go back to get the code it fails so i have give up 

Quote from: harry 48 on August 04, 2010, 04:14:42 PM
i have tried 5 or 6 times to make the whatpulse sig; i can bring it up and type in what i want and save it  but when i go back to get the code it fails so i have give up 

Probably not enough area to allow your WP sig. overthehill

Quote from: overthehill on August 04, 2010, 08:57:14 PM
Probably not enough area to allow your WP sig. overthehill

no its not that , i can make it similar to yours and when i go to get the code the one i made is not there , its an earlier one i tried to make and failed

It was just a thought. I know that I had some(actually lots) problems, attempting to get my sigs. in that area. When I noticed the text in yours ( I had to get rid of mine) and also only part of your F@H is showing, I thought that the allotted area may have been too small for what you wanted to get in there. overthehill

Other than W, A, Space, D, and S (keys I use for gaming), E is my top key. Surprisingly, Backspace is 9th, followed by "Unknown"...

*bump!*

After a huge amount of Minecraft and Visual Basic,

168,907 Space
136,896 Down
125,258 W
81,233 A
74,792 E

E is the most common letter in English and also the key that opens your inventory in Minecraft...

Quote from: Fleexy on July 09, 2012, 10:58:33 AM
*bump!*

After a huge amount of Minecraft and Visual Basic,

168,907 Space
136,896 Down
125,258 W
81,233 A
74,792 E

E is the most common letter in English and also the key that opens your inventory in Minecraft...

My top 5.    Space - E- Delete -T- Right Shift.  No idea why these 5 and no idea when I last reset ?  Anyway, they are almost exactly 1/10th the number of your top 5. I have no time for playing games though, I'm long retired  

BTW, it's nice to see a new post here. overthehill