In the interim Space has now surpassed E:
Space : 26,293
E : 24,689
T : 13,916
Backspace : 11,603
11,026 : O
What's notable here is not that Space is in first (I'll get to that in a moment) but rather that the difference between E and T is over 10,000, which is hardly "beating by a nose".
Space is not a letter, so it doesn't really count.
Also if this was strictly typing letters, docs, etc., I could see that E would be promanent. And possibly that's what you do and most others do. But for me, most of my typing is done here at CH. And copying "Quotes" ,deleting areas of those quotes, adding, subtracting, underlining, capitalizing etc.,etc. I was a little surprised to see that E was even at the top of my list.
Actually, most of my "typing" is done into either VB6 or Visual Studio 2008; a small snippet of something I was working on recently:
private Object HandleFunction(String funcname, CParser[] parameters)
{
//step one: convert parameters into their executed results; pretty simple with lambda expressions.
Object[] paramresults = new Object[parameters.Length];
for(int i=0;i<parameters.Length-1;i++)
paramresults[i] = parameters[i].Execute();
//now, we look through all our evaluation plugins, and find one that implements this function:
IEvalPlugin foundPlug = EvalPlugins.FirstOrDefault((a) => a.CanHandleFunction(funcname));
if (foundPlug != null)
return foundPlug.HandleFunction(funcname, new List<object>(paramresults));
return null;
}
Note that the curly brackets are <EVERYWHERE> (which is not really shown well in the snippet, oh well) so somebody might expect them to be "prominent" but they are not- I only have 256 or so recorded since I installed whatpulse, which was nearly a year ago, I think.
Most of the key frequencies, aside from a few significant operations and characters that wouldn't be used as often, are about the same frequency, and trust me, I do a <lot> of editing of stuff to get things working sometimes, deleting blocks, moving blocks, etc. pretty much the same thing we both to to reorganize quotes. This can be evidenced by the curious popularity of the backspace key, which has certainly risen up in the ranks since I started working more extensively with C#. But, the fact remains that all the typing I do for various things- blog posts, forum posts, whatever, is predominantly the actual typing, not the editing. (and like I said, I do a lot of editing). One can only surmise this is the case for most people- they may think they edited a lot, but really editing doesn't take nearly enough keystrokes to "override" those keystrokes used to create the content in the first place. moving and editing a few quotes created using the "quote" button might take 6 keys or so keys, but typing the response will always take more.
Actually, the windows key is in tenth place, which is higher then I would have expected. turns out I now use the search bar without realizing it to open everything, instead of using the "run" dialog like I used to.
Demographic is at least as important as anything else- Fleexy, to my understanding, is the youngest member on the board (11 if I remember) and while this certainly is a generalization, I don't know any touch typists that are 11 year's old (I was hunting and pecking when I was 16, for example... probably because I didn't have a computer until much later, though). Also, you'll note that there are arrow keys present, as well. This makes me believe that much if the time, Fleexy is playing a game or other program of some sort that uses the arrow keys- perhaps A and D are both "function" keys that do something in that game/program? I don't know.
Fair enough, but the spacebar almost beat out E. And E is 13th.
