Thumb-shift keyboard
[1][2] It is popular among people who input large quantities of Japanese sentences, such as writers, playwrights, lawyers and so on, because of its ease of use and speed.
[citation needed] In the JIS kana system, as has been mentioned earlier, some characters are placed far up in the numbers row, making the possibility of typing error higher.
On average, the number of characters required to transliterate Japanese sentences using romaji is roughly 1.7 times that of kana.
Fujitsu's first Japanese word processor, named OASYS, with thumb-shift keyboard was launched in 1979 and became a big hit.
Thumb action of the opposite hand (known as cross-shifting) is used to type the characters representing a voiced sound, written in hiragana by adding a diacritic mark (dakuten) on the corresponding voiceless sound characters.
For example, take the home position of the right index finger (letter 'j' in QWERTY).
The second is shown in an experiment conducted by beginning typists, in which thumb-shift users consistently outpace those of JIS kana and romaji-kana.
The third is shown by the fact that many of the top typists in word processor speed contests use this system.
[6] The major drawback of the method is that it requires special hardware with two thumb-shift keys at the center bottom.
A small user base of this system means that the availability of dedicated hardware is limited and that its cost is high.
Despite the drawbacks, thumb-shift is popular among people who write a large amount of sentences, including writers, playwrights and lawyers.
One author puts it this way: "Thumb-shift keyboard enables you to not only move your brain and fingers in sync with the proper rhythm of the Japanese language but also type fast.
Input method editor Japanist 2003 by Fujitsu offers the function of thumb-shift together with kana-kanji transformation.
Other programs, called thumb-shift emulators, can be used in conjunction with other input method editor of choice.
Input method editors scim-anthy and ibus-anthy, which are included in major distributions of linux, offer thumb-shift functionality.
