Overview
Counting and visualising which keyboard keys I press the most often
Background
I noticed something yesterday.
The lettering on my left Ctrl button is a lot more faded than the lettering on my right Ctrl button.
I must press the left Ctrl button more often than I do the right one.
That got me looking at the rest of the keys on the keyboard. Some of them are faded, too. Some a little, some a lot.
I must press some of those keys more than I do others.
I’ve played hangman, so I know that there are some letters that occur more frequently in English words than others. So I could have just said that those are the keys I probably use the most and left it at that.
But… I don’t spend that much time writing documents or large chunks of English.
I’m a code monkey. I’m not sure that distribution would necessarily apply to me.
For example, I probably use the semi-colon key quite a lot – at the end of every line when writing in some languages. That wouldn’t be true for people writing English.
So I wondered how much I use each keyboard key in comparison to each other.
Being an obsessive compulsive geek, I couldn’t leave that as an idle wondering. I had to find out. I had to go and get the data.