You can also locally keep track of which keyboard keys you press the most. Because of reinstallations I only have the last ~1.3 million presses. It's still interesting though to look at the frequencies and think about why they are the way they are. WhatPulse can generate a "heatmap" of your keyboard to get a quick overview of your keypresses.
The letters are probably what you would expect. The order being eoatsinrlchmdupgwfybvkzjq. Although it varies, according to some analysis English letter frequency is etaonrishdlfcmugypwbvkxjqz. Apparently the top eight letters make up about 65% of total usage. Although in a different order, my top eight letters are the same as on average, with differences starting to occur the farther down you go. The order for numbers is 0129365478. Not sure what to make of that.
The order for the F keys is 9,5,2,4,6,10,7,8,12,1,11,3. However looking at the numbers F9 is pressed 18.5 times more than F5, the second most frequent one! F5 is pressed about 3 more times than the next highest, F2, with the remaining F keys, including 2, being about the same. It turns out that in the BlackBerry simulators F9 selects things, so when I'm testing an app I'm pressing that key a lot. I could probably rebind it to something easier to press, but over time I've just gotten used to it. F5 is probably higher than the others because of the refresh shortcut.
You can see that I never touch my number pad which suggests I'm probably using a laptop. You can also see something about the frequencies of the buttons that are on the right and left sides of the keyboard. It looks like right shift, control and alt are pressed much more frequently than their left counterparts. You might take this to suggest that I'm left handed, however it turns out that it is a combination of an error in the key detector and something a bit random.
According to the data I've pressed left shift a grand total of 7 times while pressing right shift 36,231 times! I know for a fact this is not the case as I almost always use left shift. So it appears the key detector has switched these two. Similarly for right and left alt. I rarely if ever use right alt and it seems the frequencies have been switched. Control is actually a bit of a different story. A little while ago I was having some problems with my left control key and in an attempt to remove the key cap I accidentally snapped it off! I wasn't able to reattach it and over time I grew accustomed to using right control. Unfortunately I often would use left control while programming, so now I either use right control or if I place my finger precisely in the middle of the phantom key I can use left control. I'm not sure why these two keys were detected correctly!
If you try out WhatPulse your keyboard can have a story as well.
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