Ahhh that makes sense! And sounds a lot less convoluted than either of the methods I envisioned :P

> The one that sometimes comes between two spaces is I

A convenient theory but not a fact.

Why does it need to be perfectly accurate? These are examples intended to communicate the principle, not instructions on how to do frequency analysis. This description may be incomplete, but it does make it pretty clear how frequency analysis works in general terms. This criticism seems misplaced to me.

> These are examples intended to communicate the principle, not instructions on how to do…

Thank you. A lot of people don’t get these are two different things. I’m not going for perfect, I’m going for “oh I get it.”

I believe this approach in general is known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_analysis

It would be trickier however if looking at raw keystrokes, as one has to consider several confounding factors:

* The caret can be moved both by keystrokes and mouse * You don't know what is being typed. If someone is typing people's names all day, or writing software then the analysis of letter/key frequency will be shifted

Not impossible, but makes the process harder.

Yeah, lots of different uses for a keyboard with wildly different frequency distributions. Writing an English letter != text chat in Spanish != data entry != league of legends. It's also not quite a substitution cipher due to modifiers (shift), toggles (caps lock), non-printable characters (escape, volume up/down), and deletion (backspace/delete).

It's an interesting problem you'd probably try to solve with Markov chains back in the day, but now you'd just throw machine learning at.