I’ve been thinking a lot about how coders use keyboards, given that they weren’t specifically designed for writing code, and yet we are some of the heaviest users around. I ran some frequency analysis on a Drupal installation to see how often certain characters occur in the source code. Specifically, I was looking at non-letter characters (specials and numbers). The code that does this is available as a simple drush command.

The major observation is that the number keys across the top of the keyboard should be inverted, so that SHIFT+NUM types a number, whereas hitting the key creates the symbol. The symbols are used far more frequently than the numeric counterparts. Especially the () parenthesis, the $ and the *.

Another interesting observation is the underscore occurs 3 times more frequently than the dash.

Here are the full results:

Keyboards just weren’t designed for coders.