keyboard distance

English

Noun

keyboard distance (plural keyboard distances)

1. The shortest path between two keys in a keyboard layout in terms of the number of intermediate keys.
   • 2014, Bhaskar Mitra, Milad Shokouhi, Filip Radlinski, Katja Hofmann, “On user interactions with query auto-completion”, in Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval‎^[1], Keyboard distance., pages 1055–1058:

     We then computed a keyboard distance between any two given keys
     based on the minimum number of adjacent keys that the finger
     must travel over to reach one from the other assuming a QWERTY
     keyboard layout. For example the keyboard distance for the {a,s}
     pair is 1 and {a,c} is 3 (based on the path a→s→d→c) by this
     definition.

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see keyboard,‎ distance.