CLS and the CLI

Nope. Nothing to do with crime scenes or forensics.

Those of you of a certain age (commonly known as getting on a bit) and of a sufficiently nerdy inclination, might recognise CLI as an acronym for Command Line Interface and CLS as the mnemonic command entered into the CLI, at the command prompt, to CLear Screen.

Okay. Nostalgia time over. We've moved on from there and now we have multi-touch screens, mouse gestures and voice recognition to control our computing devices.

But one thing hasn't changed.

Ten U.S. Lynx*

CLS also happens to be the initials of one Christopher Latham Sholes, the man largely responsible for the QWERTY keyboard layout that most English speaking people still use to input text to their computers. He invented it, along with the typewriter, way back in the 1870s.

I've heard it suggested (usually with an accompanying wink) that the layout was designed to slow typists down, but the reality is the reverse of that. The clever design of the mechanical typewriter, which ensured that letters were typed in perfect alignment, also had the unfortunate side effect that if two adjacent keys were pressed in quick succesion, the metal arms, which bashed the letters onto the ink ribbon, would jam together. The design of the QWERTY layout minimizes the liklihood of that happening, which helped typists achieve greater speed without jams.

So why on earth are we still using it now that our keyboards are electronic devices which cannot suffer from such mechanical jams?

Inertia? Probably. Apathy? Probably that too. The thing is that for all its quirkiness, it works well enough. The billions of words typed on it every day are testament to that. There are other layout designs, such as the Dvorak layout which has been around for years, but none of them have been able to topple king QWERTY from his dominant position.

It's not really an issue for me. I'm not a very proficient typist so the layout of the alphabetic keys won't make any significant difference to my output. But oh how I wish the pereipheral keys were in the same place on UK and USA keyboards. @Hello world@. That's what you'll get if you forget you are using a USA keyboard and hit the keys you would use on a UK keyboard to type "Hello World", and vice versa too.

I can understand that the £ and € symbols are superfluous on USA keyboards, but why oh why is it necessary to swap @ and ", both of which get the same amount of usage regardless of which country one happens to be in? It beats me. If someone can explain it I'd be all ears.

Perhaps it won't be long before it's no longer an issue. I can imagine a keyboard on which the keytop markings are displayed using LCD technology, or e-ink perhaps, and the user can select the layout of their choice via a pop-up menu. Or if they are really fussy, they could program the display for each key individually, and save it as a new layout.

Remember, you saw it here first!



* _{The sharp-eyed will have noticed that not all the lynx pictured are USA natives. Some are indeed Iberian. But come on, they're cute, and as tenuous links go, they're cuddly too!}

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