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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."
is this one
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The problem with new keyboards is the pervasiveness of the QWERTY system. One has to run a cost/benefit analysis of replacing QWERTY keyboards - be it with the DVORAK or this new alphabetical version. Many computer users are experts with the QWERTY layout, and can have a high amount of wpm (words per minute). Perhaps, if one switches, the benefit will result in a higher wpm achieved - but there will be quite the learning curve.
You'd have to institute it with people starting to use computers, because it'd be organizational suicide to replace QWERTY w/ DVORAK/alphabetical due to the steep learning curve and the resistance to change.
Personally, I'm great with a QWERTY keyboard, even knowing that it is designed to be an inefficient system and would never change to an alphanumerical keyboard, despite the ultimate benefits. Shortsighted perhaps, but I don't see the benefit to the steep learning curve. I'm willing to bet that many organizations won't be willing to make that step either.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
There is only one "standard" keyboard (QWERTY) and everything else.
And until there is something that is easy enough to learn without any practice, I doubt that anything will replace QWERTY.
Current keyboards do have problems, but this *ahem* example just throws out the baby with the bathwater.
.
One of the biggest problems with the current AT-keyboard layout is the ordering
of digits on the numeric keypad.
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).
But for some unfathomable reason the AT keyboard standard has transposed the top and bottom rows, so you get 1 at the bottom left and 9 at the top right, making it much more difficult to master data entry.
Which of these looks more familiar:
1 2 3 7 8 9
4 5 6 4 5 6
7 8 9 1 2 3
0 . 0
I'm betting most will pick the former, since the pattern in the latter is much less recognizable if it's not shown in the context of a computer keyboard.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
For many, including me, having to use a keyboard with fewer keys would actually be a step backwards. I like to have a lot of extra keys that I can map to do interesting things and special function keys, these are great timesavers. I often look for keyboards that have more keys, not less, Ive had a keyboard from Gateway 2000 from years ago which allowed you to remap the keys on the keyboard and had several extra keys which I found quite useful. Often it is nice to be able to map macros to certian keys so when they are pressed they can reproduce several characters These can actually save time.
No, it's just a half-truth. The keys were placed such that the hammers were statistically less likely to jam, even if the monks typed at the same speed.
Nobody really denies that Qwerty is an inefficient layout. At least nobody who has done their homework. There are many studies comparing wpm speeds of people proficient in both Qwerty and Dvorak that show the clear advantage of the latter. I'll leave finding them as an exercise to the reader (read: I'm too lazy to look them up right now).
So let's use a keyboard designed for people, not machines, shall we?
(by that I mean Dvorak, not the monstrosity cited in this article)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
Yes it does.
That would be its primary problem.
There is nothing like trying to get people out of a local opitma, even if it is sending them towards disaster. It's like trying to quit smoking; you know it will lead to a better life, but the current cost of a cigarette is so minimal, and the current pleasure of it so high.
QWERTY won't kill your hand in ten minutes or ten days. More like ten years. For some people, maybe even never. But for others, much sooner. I for one would prefer to never get RSI, and I decided after I experienced what turned out to be a false alarm that I never wanted to experience the real thing. Unfortunately, no science has been done in this domain to my knowledge so we are on our own with anecdotes. I note, however, that while I have heard many "I switched from QWERTY to DVORAK and my pain got better" stories, I have never heard an "I switched to DVORAK and my pain got worse until I went back to QWERTY". (People with that story are invited to comment and tell it, please!)
DVORAK probably isn't an answer to all the problems, but it helps a lot. You really do move your hands a lot less. As a secondary result, you will also find yourself actually touchtyping; all my life my hands were always wandering with QWERTY, now they don't, because they don't have to; wandering hands always "wander" into sub-optimal positions, which if you think about it ought to be a characteristic of a properly designed keyboard layout.
It's also about the only ergonomic thing you can do to a laptop.
For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.
If you pick the Dvorak keyboard layout on Mac OS X, there's an option to preserve QWERTY keyboard shortcuts. Basically the effect is as if your Mac temporarily switched back to QWERTY for as long as you hold down the Command key.
(BTW, it's called a "Mac.")
Two years ago I became interested enough in DVORAK to actually learn the layout. It would have been very frustrating to have to relearn command key placements like you say, but at least in Mac OS X, the system I was using, there is a keyboard layout called "Dvorak - Qwerty Command". This feature implements the Dvorak keyboard layout, but when the command key is pressed it reverts to the Qwerty layout so that all the command keys are the same as you are used to in Qwerty.
After using this layout for several months, the only programs that didn't accept it were Microsoft applications, which seemed to randomly decide if they would follow the Qwerty or Dvorak layout for command keys. If you are on Mac OS X there really isn't a lot of disadvantages to trying Dvorak out if you are free from MS applications (I haven't tried Mac Office 2004 to see if this problem persists).
The only bad thing about learning Dvorak is that when you go back to a regular keyboard you are basically back to hunt and peck. I found it really difficult to be able to switch between the two and maintain typing speed; I can type at over 100 wpm on either layout after sufficient time is given for me to adjust. That said I would way rather use Dvorak it just feels nicer on your hands, you can type faster, and I found I made less typos.
I think that it is simply unclear how they projected it. It was the nineteenth century after all, and some weird ideas were followed: eg, you can type typewriter with just keys on the top row (I read this was intended, for what reasons I'm not sure). Probably it was some trial and error, and they came with an half-baked design.
Oh, the exercise to the reader, yes: here is a Guinness record.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Actually, you know, I got used to the older shortcuts, which is to say CTRL-INS, SHIFT-INS and CTRL-DEL. And ALT-BACKSPACE for undo. They work just as well, if that's what you're used to. (Incidentally, they'd also be in the same position on a Dvorak keyboard)
Or I pretty much grew up on WordStar. To do the equivalent of the CTRL-C CTRL-V you mention, you'd have to use block commands, which were prefixed with CTRL-K. But an even more fun command group were those starting with CTRL-O. Don't even try doing that with the left hand only, it's not comfortable. Again, it worked well enough and people were typing whole books in WordStar. (And I stuck to Borland IDEs for programming until 2001 or so, because they let me use the WordStar key mappings.)
Or here's an bit of fun about German keyboards. The CUA Undo is CTRL-Z, and German keyboards are QWERTZ. I.e., CTRL-Z is where CTRL-Y would be on the USA keyboards. People use it with no problem, though. More fun for programming is that the square brackets have been moved on RIGHT_ALT-8 and RIGHT_ALT-9, instead of being a single keystroke, to make way for the national characters. And "@" (as used in emails) is RIGHT_ALT+Q. Again, seems to work OK, if that's what you got used to.
Basically as was said, _any_ keyboard arrangement works just as well, if that's what you're used to. Including, I'd add, any arrangement of the shortcuts on the keyboard.
However, the reverse is also true. Switching to a new arrangement just brings a long learning curve before you get back to speed. So buying Dvorak keyboards for the whole company to "improve their productivity" might have the opposite effect, as well as needlessly annoying everyone.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You can actually buy foot pedals for certain keyboards. My Kinesis Contour keyboard has 1- to 3-button foot pedals. I have the older 2-pedal variant, and being an Emacs user, I had them mapped to "control" and "meta". Was interesting, but my wrists aren't bad enough to put up with the learning curve of training my feet...
I use both vi and emacs extensively. I originally coded entirely in ed (I'm actually not kidding), and I still enjoy it. Then I started using vi (I was already using emacs at this time for most development work) for lots of short edits -- it was more convenient for remote sessions and sus and loaded faster, making it ideal for mutt.
I always hated vim, because it took what I perceived to be vi's primary selling point -- its light weight -- and perverted it beyong recognition. Check this out:
vim is a full fourth of the size of emacs! Keep in mind that emacs includes X11 support, and my vim doesn't have X11 support compiled in. I don't actually have nvi or better, Bill Joy's original vi installed on this system, but compared to how light-weight vi used to be, I always considered vim to be an evil editor, installing nvi on all of my machines instead.
Recently, though, I've been using vim much more, because it has good unicode support (nvi doesn't, at all) and I currently operate in a completely unicode environment. In the past, emacs kicked the crap out of vi in terms of internationalization -- it could do unicode-style editing before unicode existed. But emacs 21 has some random wackiness where utf-8 isn't considered a valid encoding for CJK, and since I work in China, that's a bit of a deal breaker. Emacs 22 is a unicode-based rewrite that aims to fix this, but you know how GNU is ... release Real Soon Now[tm].
So I installed vim. Now here's the point I'm getting around to: the mode key.
A lot of emacs users think the mode key in vi sucks donkey nuts. Similarly, every vi user makes jokes about the cryptic control character sequences used by emacs users. Personally, I'd never found either to be at all annoying. Until I started having to type Chinese in vi.
Up until then, I'd only ever used emacs for internationalized editing. Emacs rules in this respect. It has very nice input methods built into the editor -- by which I mean of course that they're written in elisp -- meaning that I don't have to rely on XIM or anything similar and can be sure that inputing stuff won't interfere with emacs' default user interface paradigm.
In vi, here's an example session:
Now, if I forget to exit the XIM, ESC typically does nothing (or sometimes, depending on the input method in question, will transparently be passed to the application) and then my vi editing keys go to the input method and not to vi! ARGH!
See, one mode is no problem -- but two, nested modes definitely are. I have to enter insert mode, then enter chinese input mode, then type, then exit chinese input mode, then exit insert mode, then type commands. Do you see how these two levels suck penis?
This is where the non-extensibility of an editor like vi really bites it in the butt. It would be cool if I could have one key that puts me into insert mode, and turns on the Chinese input method. Not possible to do, not the least because vi already uses pretty much every key.
In emacs, for comparison, I put myself in Chinese mode at the beginning, and because the characters I type that get inserted into the buffer (or in this case, fed to the input method system) are never interpreted as commands, I don't ever have the problem of emacs thinking that some characters I want to type are actually commands. When you don't need an IME, this isn't a problem -- but when you do, it's a pain in the butt.
That having been said, I'm quite fond of the modal system, most of the time. And I do use vi a lot (more than any other editor, nowadays, because it allows me to edit CJK-having utf-8 files). But this one thing about it is just infuriating.
And unfortunately, I don't see any way to really fix this, without completely destroying vi's input paradigm.
Liebowitz and Margolis's articles mention other studies (by Western Electric and Oregon State University) that are in line with Strong's results but not with Dvorak's results. They mention a study by two people at the IBM Research Laboratory (and several other unidentified studies) that found no keyboard with clear advantage over QWERTY. The named studies do not appear to be online.
The reports that Strong was biased and refused to provide his raw data come from another Dvorak disciple (Hisao Yamada), who later published other defenses of the Dvorak layout and was not above using odd analyses to interpret data as being in Dvorak's favor. Not exactly a sterling source.
Complaining that Windows (or QWERTY) won the market instead of your favorite is petty: free markets are pretty efficient, and if the benefits were as significant as you seem to think, somebody would have switched and saved a bundle in the long run.
I say:
I switched because less finger travel made my hands less tired at the same typing speed. I still use both layouts, but if I am typing a lot, I will use dvorak.
When I first thought about switching, I created an Excel macro to count finger reaches in QWERTY phrases and one for Dvorak. I also started making a list of common words that can be typed on the home row in each. In both of these endeavors, Dvorak won. roughly 25-30% less finger travel, more in some phrases. Many more common words on the home row.
Here http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ is a company that makes ergo keyboards with vertical rows, QWERTY, Dvorak, or both.
History says:
The slant of the columns on the keyboard is an artifact left over from mechanical typewriters.
For those not acquainted with the story of the keyboards, here's a short version:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/jcb/Dvorak/
I have nothing witty to fill this space with yet.