Keyboard Layout, Is Inverted Number Row Better?

What is Inverted Number Row

Some keyboard layouts have inverted number row.

Layouts with inverted number row

Keyboard with inverted number row include:

• French Keyboard Layouts (AZERTY),
• French Ergonomic Keyboard Layouts: dvorak-fr, bepo, bvofrak
• Programer's Dvorak

Is inverted number row more efficient?

Here is number row of conventional keyboard:

!@#$% ^&*()
12345 67890

I have tried the inverted number row, for a few weeks around 2005, but in the end i abandoned it.

One problem is that the numbers are needed often too, especially a sequence of numbers like credit cards, ID numbers, dates “2010-08-30” or if you do a lot scientific programing with code such as x^2 - 1/5 * 1.6. But now you need to press Shift for the numbers.

And if you type Chinese with pinyin input method, you need to type one of the number 1 2 3 4 about every 6 keystrokes. [see Chinese Input Methods]

Is Numbers Used More Often or the Symbols?

is numbers used more often or the symbols? The answer depends on what type of text you type.

• If you don't program but writes lots of blogs or chat, number is more frequent.
• If you do scientific programing a lot, for example, Mathematica, Julia, R, number is more frequent.
• If you code lots of C, Java, Ruby, JavaScript: symbols is more frequent.

To compute and plot your own, see Character Frequency Plot