I · The edge
What you do with letters that don't fit
QWERTY was drawn for a language with twenty-six letters and ended up, in one variant or another, on nearly every keyboard in the world. Romanian has thirty-one. The five extras went wherever room was left: onto the right-edge keys that carry the square brackets, the semicolon, the apostrophe and the backslash in English. The Romanian standard of 2004 fixed them there, and that arrangement is what every operating system now offers as “Romanian (Standard)”.
The right edge is one finger's territory. In classical touch typing, the right little finger owns everything to the right of p, along with the key it rests on. That is where ă, â, î, ș and ț ended up.
Together the five letters make up 6% of the letters in Romanian text — more than b, f, h, j, k, v, x and z combined, which come to 5.2%.
The arrangement in use before the standard put the same five letters on exactly the same five keys. Their position is not a matter of taste: it was the only room going.
| Letter | Sits on the key for | Distance from rest | How often it appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| ș | semicolon | 0 cm | 1.07% |
| ț | apostrophe | 1.9 cm | 0.96% |
| ă | left square bracket | 2.4 cm | 2.50% |
| î | right square bracket | 3.8 cm | 0.99% |
| â | backslash | 5.6 cm | 0.48% |
II · The measure
How much each finger presses
Eight million characters of Romanian and the same amount of English, run through the keyboard character by character with the shifts in their proper places, divide the work as follows. In Romanian typed on the standard layout, the right little finger accounts for 9.6% of all keypresses. In English, 4.7%.
The gap does not come from shift, which is pressed about as often in both languages. It comes from the five letters, which on their own account for 4.8% of everything you press.
The finger pays in three ways at once: it presses more often, it travels further — almost three metres per thousand characters against a metre and a half in English — and it is far more often asked to catch two different keys in a row, something English demands of it four and a half times less.
The hands, on the other hand, come out better balanced in Romanian than in English: 44% left and 40% right, against 48% and 37%. The standard layout leaves the right hand alone and loads a single finger of it.
It shows in the home row, the one the fingers rest on. In English it takes 25.8% of all presses. In standard Romanian, 22.5%: four of the five letters sit a row higher, and the hand climbs after them.
III · The instrument
Put your own text on the keyboard
Type something or paste a passage, and the keyboard heats up underneath it. The same words moved from one arrangement to another change cost completely: watch the little finger's bar as you switch layouts.
Measure a text
Colour shows how often each key was struck in the text above, relative to the busiest key in it. The small dash under eight keys marks where the fingers rest.
IV · The other two routes
Who pays instead of the little finger
The layout called “Romanian (Programmers)” solves the problem by moving it. The letters stay where English speakers already know them — ă on a, î on i, â on q, ș on s, ț on t — and are called up by holding AltGr with the thumb. The right little finger drops to 4.8%, exactly its English share. In exchange, a hundred characters now cost 107.8 keypresses instead of 103.0, and the thumb ends up doing nearly a fifth of all the work.
The third option is the one most hurried messages use: Romanian without diacritics, sa for să and tara for țară. It costs 103.0 keypresses per hundred characters and fourteen metres of travel per thousand — slightly less than English demands on the same keyboard, which needs 103.4 keypresses and 14.6 metres.
Every arrangement shifts the cost somewhere else. The standard puts it on the weakest finger of the right hand, Programmers splits it between the thumb and the sheer number of presses, and going without diacritics removes it from the account altogether by erasing the difference between the two languages.
| How you type | Presses per 100 characters | Finger travel per 1,000 characters | Right little finger |
|---|---|---|---|
| Romanian, standard layout | 103.0 | 15.3 m | 9.6% |
| Romanian, Programmers | 107.8 | 14.2 m | 4.8% |
| Romanian without diacritics | 103.0 | 14.1 m | 5.0% |
| English, US QWERTY | 103.4 | 14.6 m | 4.7% |
V · The reckoning
Why writing without diacritics wins
Dropping the diacritics is usually read as laziness. The measurement offers a plainer explanation: of the three ways to write Romanian on an ordinary keyboard, only one costs nothing. The standard asks a weak finger to press twice as often and travel nearly 90% further than it would in English. Programmers asks for nearly five extra keypresses in every hundred characters. Typing sa for să asks for exactly what English asks.
None of which makes the stripped text better. Peste (“over”) and pește (“fish”) remain two different words, and anyone who types them identically leaves the reader guessing. It does explain why the choice makes itself whenever someone is typing fast: the keyboard we write Romanian on was drawn for another language, the whole difference between the two was pushed into the top right corner, and people in a hurry push it back out.