keyboard distance

plural keyboard distances

1. The shortest path between two keys in a keyboard layout in terms of the number of intermediate keys.

   1 more example

   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.

   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, Keyboard distance., pages 1055–1058

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