Technology

I don't really mind the alphabetical order. As others have already mentioned not everyone knows QWERTY, but most people know the alphabet.

The worst layout I've seen is where all the letters are in a single row. I think AppleTV is like this and I feel like I've seen it with at least one or two other services. But at least with AppleTV I can usually use my phone as a keyboard if I'm typing more than a couple characters.

It would be nice if there was a consistent layout that all the apps would use.

I would go as far to say don't use on screen keyboards at all. Use an app. I know they have to have something for those who don't have smart phones but Chromecast is a breeze to use compared to every other smart TV I've had to deal with.

As a full time colemak user, QWERTY really does my head in these days. I regress to a one-finger typist every time!

Interesting blog post. Yea, those a-z layouts are really weird. They remind me of the text input the old Pokémon games had. On Smart TV's I always try to avoid using the keyboard if it is possible to type the input on my phone.

As much as I agree with the argument for QWERTY agaist Dvorak or Colemark as a default, alphabetical ordering seems more generally standard than even QWERTY. And in any case, when typing something on the TV the remote seems to be the real bottleneck.

As a colemak user, I would prefer abc instead of qwerty

This has never bothered me before but it has now, thanks

As a Dvorak user, Dvorak is pretty terrible for single-finger typing since the focus is on hand-alternation. If I had the choice I'd probably choose this.

There have been layouts developed for single or limited-finger use and I think it's a shame they never caught on.

Have to respectfully disagree on this. For typing purposes, QWERY is indeed better, but if you're using a remote's up-down-left-right buttons, I feel a-z feels more familiar.

Yeah those keyboard layouts are TERRIBLE! Takes forever to type anything and I usually make mistakes too. Now I use AppleTVs and as soon as I open a search field my iPhone pops up a keyboard to type instead of using the remote, or I can use the Siri Remote to dictate the phrase. Still would prefer a QWERTY layout though.

I'm surprised I never really noticed this, but it explains why my brain freezes up for a moment every time I go to search for something in a streaming service, haha. Very odd, very unintuitive!

What about Youtube and HBO Max?

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QWERTY should've been retired with the typewriter. It makes zero logical sense to use on touch screen let alone remote. Familiarity isn't a good enough reason.

I really like how Kodi let's you send text to the media centre from your phone keyboard using an app.

Quite incredible that so many modern streaming interfaces are still using the horrid arrow keys to punch in letters like its a 1990s game console.

It really is a nightmare, and even worse when you have to log into a service that doesn't have a "sign in on another device by entering this one time code" offering, and worse still when you use a password manager and your password is a long string of random characters. In this scenario, I've gone so far as to ADB into my device and use adb shell input "whatever I would have had to type on the TV", which somehow feels faster.

My last two devices, the fancy new Chromecast 4K, and then an Nvidia Shield, both use Google's regular keyboard when it can and is nicer in comparison. Still many streaming apps force you to use the built-in alphabetic keyboards instead of using the one provided by the OS.

An interesting problem here is the usage of a joystick ecosystem. When you don't have multiple inputs like your fingers, there's no "right" way to organize this information. There's also considerations of the tech illiterate and normalizing things to the least common denominator. Everyone that speaks english knows the order of the alphabet but not everyone has learned the order of keys of qwerty (try explaining why the character that follows R is T to the elderly that don't use computers often).

That said, I prefer a split qwerty, or the alphabetical block style that uses 6 characters per row) as it easy to skim quickly when trying to write.

Voice wins by a mile here