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New Standard Keyboard
An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."
Stop perpetuating myths.
Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?
This story needs some more details. The website is a re-hash of the press release and appears to be a naked grab to get some adsense revenue. Not to mention that details on the product itself is scarce, and it takes a lot of digging to figure out that this keyboard doesn't even have dedicated number keys. Nice idea, no story yet.
Here's a close-up picture.
From http://www.chicagologic.com/QWERTYrumor.htm --
A long-lived rumor is that typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to slow down the typist.
If this were true, he would have located popular letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.
What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh", "ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.
This design change actually had the bonus effect of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.
A 1953 U.S. General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the two keyboards. Fingers travel less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".
http://almostsmart.com
Original press release
Engadget reivew
From the CES show
My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.
Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
the PLUM keyboard (similar idea).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Maybe because it is.
Short version. The two authors are economists who don't know crap about typing. Dvorak wrote a 500 page book about just typing of which only a small part was about his alternative keyboard. So, believe the suits or believe somebody who actually knows what he's talking about.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Speaking of which, y'all should check out my new IOCATB keyboard layout. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, it feels faster than anything else.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
No; Windows 2000 allows you to change the layout without a system disk. I don't know about 9x though.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
I mean, damn near every other keypad in existance begins with 1 at the top left and works its way down to 9 at the bottom right (think telephone, ATM, eftpos terminal, security keypad).
What it comes down to is that there are two original progenitors of keypad layouts. The ones you list all go back to Bell Labs design for the Touch-Tone(tm) phone keypad. They even spent a fairly good chunk of change testing for which was more efficient. The results were that for dialing phone numbers, the "123" pad was faster, even for people who were experienced 10-key ("789" keypad) users. The reason is actually quite simple. 10-key is generally used for financial data entry, so the most commonly entered digits (0 and 1) are placed close together where they are easier to hit without looking (some proprioception issue there-- the exact explaination why eludes me). As the 0 is under the thumb, that means the 1 has to be in the bottom row to be close to it. Thus the bottom-up layout.
Dialing telephone numbers, however, isn't something that's done repeatedly. Almost nobody dials a phone by touch*; rather, they look at the dial pad to guide their fingers. The "123" layout is better suited to visual navigation because we're already trained to read from left to right, top to bottom.
Computer keyboards still use the 10-key style layout because the primary use for the keypad is still the same as its ancestors, the calculator and adding machine. Changing it to the telephone-style layout makes no sense as there's already an even easier to use "visual navigation" set of number keys above the letters.
* after 10 years of programming names and numbers into phone systems via the keypad, I actually no longer look at the phone keypad as I use it; but I've only ever noticed that skill in phone techs who install systems.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
A BIG problem with switching to Dvorak is most common keyboard shortcuts aren't convenient. Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V
You've never used Emacs have you?
Alt-W, Ctrl-Y
yes, that's easy to reach. Undo? Why that's simply Ctrl-Shift-minus. Oddly however, once you get used to using the modifier keys these shortcuts seem natural rather than hard to reach. Any keyboard layout is good if you get used to it.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I've slowed down since and now average about 80wpm and have learned not to strike the keys quite so hard. My hands don't ache as much and I've considered going with one of those whiz-bang carpal-friendly keyboards before I come down with CTS. Coding can be tough on the hands.
Anyway, one semester my room-mate and I believed the Dvorak myth and decided to try out switching. We bought new keyboards that supported both standards and came with two sets of keycaps, then made the switch.
It took us about a month to re-learn touch typing and it was a bitch. Neither one of us caught up to our previous speeds - we even played typing games to help - we got to maybe 2/3-3/4 of our previous typing speeds.
While we were okay on our computers we both found it very frustrating to use others. Being geeks, we frequently needed to work on other machines and lugging a keyboard around wasn't really a solution. We decided to abandon Dvorak and went back to QWERTY. In a week or two we were back to ballpark of our old typing speeds, though it was a frustrating transition.
The moral of the story is an old one: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What we really need are alternatives to traditional typing -- ways to communicate with the computer in a more efficent manner.
I'm personally waiting for the wireless implant in my head so I can just "think" the words onto the screen
In the meantime, I've tried out the Twiddler2 chorded keyboard, which is a combination key entry and mouse device. Although a bit slower, it is FAR more comfortable surfing and chording with it than using the traditional keyboard and mouse (though you can forget programming). And it plays nice with OS X and Windows.
If you're interested, there are many other chorded "keyboards" as well as many more ergonomic variations to the standard keyboard. A useful resource is the exhaustive Alternative Keyboard FAQ and this alternative keyboard gallery.
Not to mention that some shortcuts are all-too-easy to hit. After one too many accidental exits, I rebound the "quit" command to "C-c f10". (for unbelievers: the default is C-x C-c; for comparison, "save" is C-x C-s and "load" is C-x C-f)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Let's see. In this post I have used the letter 'e' at least 10 times so far. I have used CTRL+C zero times (hey look more 'e's).
:) It has a sorta teeter totter effect.
By the way, I'm typing in Dvorak. I don't find the odd shortcuts to be a problem. I just got use to their position and I can hit those shortcut keys just as fast. I think the benifits of not having to reach for keys outweighs the shock of having to relearn where all the shortcuts are. In fact, I find it easier to reach my middle right finger up for CTRL+C and my ring right finger for CTRL+V. Try it!
I can also type in qwerty. I have to at work. I don't get confused when I switch back and forth. It just takes practice. Kinda like when we all switched over from Windows to Linux. It wasn't as easy at first, but the benefits motivated us.
That's a much repeated falsehood.
Besides, everyone knows that all real geeks chord.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
You've never used vim, have you?
y, p
yes that's easy to reach. Undo? Why, that's simply u. Oddly however, once you get used not using the modifier keys these shortcuts seem natural rather than hard to reach.
I'm not sure if you can do this in windows or linux, but in OSX you can have your keyboard mapped to dvorak-qwerty where if you hold ctrl or alt, the keyboard reverts back to qwerty for just that reason.
I would tend to be suspicious of studies comparing qwerty to dvorak, since most people who learn dvorak learned qwerty first, whereas most qwerty users know only qwerty. Because of qwerty's ubiquity, it's very difficult to make an objective comparison.
I use qwerty and dvorak interchangeably, and am probably slower in both than if I had stuck with qwerty alone, but I find dvorak much more comfortable (and that's something that's much harder to quantify).
According to a quick google search, Barbara Blackburn is the fastest typist in the world and she uses dvorak. That carries more weight than questionable studies in my book, though I would prefer a better reference than a random web link.
Does anyone have data comparing the fastest known dvorak typists to the fastest known qwerty typists?
Such things exist, and people are using them as well:
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/foot.htm
Remove the foot.htm bit for the whole site, it uses frames.
.: Max Romantschuk
So this Dvorak Debunking lies in two people's research.
The only support that Liebowitz and Margolis provide as evidence that there is no speed difference between the two layouts is the research of Dr. Earl Strong in the 1950's.
So the Debunking actually boils down to the research of one person. Done in 1956. And he didn't want Dvorak to win. Oh, and he destroyed his data before anyone else could look at it, so all we know is what he said it said.
The truth isn't out there. Nobody has done a good study.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I've had worse than just quitting emacs... the shortcut for auto-indenting a block of code is CTRL-ALT-\ (backslash). The backslash on my keyboard is right under backspace; CTRL-ALT-backspace kills the X server.
Been there. Done that. More than once. :-(
Back to the original story: see that line about there being two keyboard standards today (QWERTY and Dvorak)? That's bollocks! Germans, for example, have a QWERTZ keyboard which includes the umlaut characters. Other countries have other weird and wonderful layouts, some of which look nothing like the QWERTY layout.
-- Steve
I use vim almost exclusively. Most people use either vim or elvis symlinked from vi and don't know it, although vi is its own program. I can come up with 26 letters [a-z], 10 numbers [0-9], shift (gotta hit that "!" you know), escape and colon. Then we can't forget / for the searches and replaces, \ to be able to match special characters, and newbies will want the arrow keys instead of h, j, k and i.
Your humor isn't lost on me, but a seasoned vi user will use at least 41 keys, 45 for the inexperienced. The other 8 must be for Emacs.
Very cool, and let me just say, I wasn't aware of the map feature. I'll stick that into my ever-increasingly large bag of vim tricks. Of course, this won't work here, because the Chinese input method is not part of vim -- it's a normal XIM (in this case SCIM, but I use XCIN as well sometimes). Therefore, even with a yummy feature like map, I can't tell vi to switch on my input method. Or switch it off. They're two different apps.
:)
I mean, while my criticism of vim in this respect is valid, let's not blow it out of proportion -- it's a pretty specific complaint, and it doesn't detract from the utility of vi as an editor. It's just one place where the modal paradigm can be something of a pain. But to quote a documentary on male models I saw recently, "Come on! The guy had to magically pull his underwear out of his butt just to beat you!"
Emacs would work better in this particular instance, but the emacs guys fail it, because they can't get unicode to work properly. So vi still gets a point. I wouldn't sweat it too much
I'll just use vim until emacs 22 comes out.
Typing "TYPEWRITER" fast was simply a sales gimmick, so the salesmen could tell clueless PHBs "see! It doesn't slow typists down! I can type TYPEWRITER quickly!" And unsurprisingly, clueless PHBs existed in 1870 just as well, long before computers, and corporate purchases were made based on some rigged non-representative demo.
But there were real mechanical considerations there too.
Typewriters used to be purely mechanical things. Hitting a key physically pressed a lever, which swung a small hammer at the paper. Actually, at the ink ribbon. And on the hammer a letter or digit was embossed. (Actually, two. SHIFT would physically raise the carriage, so the second letter on the hammer hit.)
Because it was purely mechanical and involved densely packed thin levers, it was jam-prone. If you hit two keys at the same time, two hammers would try to occupy the same space at the same time. If they were coming from opposite ends, not much would happen: 99% of the time one would just hit on top of the other. But if they were adjacent (or almost adjacent) levers, the machine would jam.
That was the problem they tried to solve: keeping the machine from jamming. Which involved moving the hammers for most common letter combinations further apart from each other. Which, since it was a purely mechanical contraption, involved moving the keys too. (It wasn't as simple as defining a new mapping table, like on computers.)
And whatever effect it had on typists and typing speed, was side-effect rather than considered in the design. Whether it sped them up or slowed them down, it still ended up faster if it didn't require unjamming twice a minute.
However, here's another fun fact: the typewriter for which that layout was designed was very different even from typewriters manufactured after 1900. After 1900 the hammers were arranged in an arc in front of the paper. Before that, they were arranged in a circle or bucket shape.
That bucket shape is what the QWERTY layout was designed for. Which meant that moving the hammers had some weirder effects on where the keys moved. E.g., near the middle of rows, two adjacent keys would swing hammers from opposite sides of the bucket. Hence the "TY" in "TYPEWRITER" would not jam that machine, which is why they're still near each other.
It would, however jam a post-1900 typewriter.
So basically the short story is: QWERTY was never supposed to be ergonomic, it was supposed to just prevent jams. And even that was a quick mechanical hack, which missed a lot of fairly commong combinations. _And_ even for the purpose of preventing jams it wasn't that useful any more, for any post-1900 typewriter.
Yet, more than 100 years even after the new typewriter design, and half a century after keyboards being used in computers (which don't jam) we're still stuck with the QWERTY idiocy.
Its saving grace, though, is that basically on a computer keyboard _any_ layout works just as well. Neither jams nor alternating hands (which made sense back when you had to hit the keys HARD on a typewriter) are relevant any more. You just type faster on whatever layout you're the most used to. For most people that means QWERTY.
Which means there's little real incentive to switch to a new layout.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The tables for mapping CJK onto Unicode are not present in 21.3, but they were posted to gnu.emacs.sources by Dave Love around April 2002, and are available somewhere on his FTP site. 21.4 will have the tables, and dynamically load them as needed, and that can be got from CVS now (and is reasonably stable, certainly more stable than the unicode branch).
Not being able to find a key to map to "enter insert mode and enter XIM" is a poor complaint. Do you really use every single default mapping?
If you wanted, you could just remap "i" to always enter XIM also, or alternatively remap "I" to do the same. (Do you really use the default binding of I: "Insert text before the first non-blank in the line [count] times."
I don't know anything about XIM mode, but I would be surprised if you couldn't map a key to press CTRL-SPACE and Esc in sequence.
Regarding wasting thumbs, check out Kinesis's contoured keyboard.