I've been thinking a lot about how we use keyboards, especially as coders, so I ran some frequency analysis on a Drupal installation to see how often certain characters are used, with a view to optimise my keyboard. Specifically, I was looking at non-letter characters (specials and numbers). The code that does this is available as a simple drush command here.

Here are the results:

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

The next interesting one is that the underscore is around 3 times more frequent than the dash. Worthy of a swop too.

I'm going to use ControllerMate to swop these all out.