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Advocating Dvorak
zeroweb writes "A group of three faithful Dvorak promoters have launched new website at DvZine.org. The big thing here is a Comic (available in print, pdf and html) describing the history of QWERTY and Dvorak, how and why one should make the switch, and real-life stories of the converted.
If you are thinking about making the switch, this could push you over the edge. My favorite line: "It could be the difference between working in your garden at 70 or wearing wrist braces at 40." As someone who started wearing wrist braces at 23, I couldn't agree more - I read this comic, changed my keyboard layout and have been happier ever since."
I had to wear wrist braces because of my QWERTY keyboard as well. Sincerly, Kevin Mitnick
At first, I thought this was about that horrible Internet Troll who calls himself a journalist.
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Dvorak is an awesomekeyboard layout. I changed from QWERTY about 6 months ago, and have never looked back. Once you swap, you can see that the only things QWERTY is good for is: 1) typing QWERTY really quickly; 2) typing the word "typewriter" (all in the top row). But seriously, DVORAK is _so_ much more efficient, and typing actually becomes a pleasure. The world's fastest typist uses it as well. All it takes is one quick switch of your keycaps using a paddlepop stick, and you're away. _Every_ major operating system, be it Linuses, Windows, OS X, BSD or et cetera., includes drivers. I recommend the change- the week or so of painfully slow typing is absolutely worth it!
Bottom line is the last thing I need at work is to not be able to use anyone else's computer because I'm use to a non-standard keyboard layout. I refuse to use shortcut keys on non-standard keyboards for the same reasons.
I've been working in IT for a good number of years now without needing wrist braces, all the while using QWERTY. I know a lot of other people who haven't suffered this fate. I'm not saying no one has ever had this problem but when you exaggerate risks like this its called FUD/scaremongering.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's not really funny...but it is interesting. And it makes some good points. The one thing I have to recommend to the /. crowd is taking a flathead screwdriver and popping the keys off your keyboard instead of glancing up at a propped-up layout. For me, it made things much more straightforward.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Is there any scientifc proof that QWERTY or Dvorak have any advantages over each other?
I don't think so.
I'va nver bnee hpaiper in my lfie! Dovark hsa cahgned my tpyign seped imenmsly!
Underholdning.info
And no, he didn't invent the layout either.
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
I find it easier just to use the on-screen keyboard. No messing up because I can't see the keys. And just look: no ttypos!1
I stay away from such keyboards as Dvorak and "Natural". Not because they are a bad idea. Rather, it is because I only want to be able to have to know one keyboard. If I learn Dvorak, I'd still have to frequently use QWERTY due to the other keyboards I have to use that are still QWERTY this. Is it easy to be proficient at both and switch back-and-forth at ease, or does the confusion result in rmmre o erf rree rkjdkc yt wpodcxs?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
By tell him, I mean tell him that the Qwerty being designed to slow down your typing is nothing more than a myth?. The layout is actually designed to between your two hands.
I haven't RTFA yet (it's printing now), but I can tell you as a longtime Dvorak user that we're viewed as crackpots and we have little credibility with the QWERTY types. So I hope that if these guys are making medical claims that they have some real medical evidence to back up their claims, and not just the kind of anecdote mentioned in the Slashdot teaser. I've used Dvorak for 13 years and I can type faster than I could in QWERTY and the keyboard feels more comfortable. But that doesn't mean that it will be so for everybody, and it certainly doesn't mean that Dvorak will reduce anybody's likelihood of damaging their wrists. Caveat emptor.
Right, i've seen a load of these articles and thought "Why not give it a try". I experimented with the letterless keyboard idea when it came up, so i have a keyboard without any letters on it.
Can i get a nice little program to re-map my keys for me, and all that i need to do is put the "letter-caps" back on the keys in the Dvorak layout?
Note to self: A keyless keyboard would be useless, perhaps letterless makes more sense.
Anyone know if the dvorak layout is best suited for english? Or is the difference between character layouts as long as your language use the latin alphabet neglible? I figure the dvorak layout is based on statistics on how often letters are used in some language? And wonder if that difference is noticeable or not if you compare english to e.g. danish. Yes, one language will have some more letters occasionaly used, but besides that part.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The sad thing is that Qwerty is rather embedded into our "culture" (so to speak) ... it'd be incredibly hard to make changes to a keyboard layout that EVERYONE knows how to use, and unless Dvorak becomes the standard, it's rather a good idea, perhaps, healthwise, but a bad idea business-wise.
... just my two cents on it...
The best way to make a change is to start teaching Dvorak typing systems in typing classes, making as slow change, it avoids culture shock and will allow IT to make a slower change (so it avoids IT shock, as well)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
TypingTest.com
I just tried it and got 75 WPM on a Qwerty keyboard.
I've thought of DVORAK once or twice, but I've seen a couple of studies suggesting that if you're already a reasonably good typer (60-70 WPM or above) DVORAK's benefits are small.
I think that the best keyboard for many slashdotters is probably a one-handed keyboard. It just so happens that ThinkGeek has one here.
...For all those special one-handed moments.
By the way, if anybody can figure out why it is called the FrogPad please enlighten us.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
Exactly where are Å, Ä and Ö placed on a Dvorak keyboard?
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Work out, specifically with weights, as jogging is not going to work your wrists ;) Ya I know we all have our favourite wrist exercise but it's not enough. :)
I've been typing since I was using my c64 as a kid. I can type about 60 wpm. I always exercised in my youth but then stopped for a while in my twenties. A year or two in, my wrists started killing me. I'd take breaks and stretch my wrists but it would just limit the pain. I started using weights again and I haven't felt pain in years. I can pretty much type as long as I want without any strain or even the slightest feeling of pain/discomfort.
Besides people who are into playing sports, most people's physical activity stops after the mandatory grade 9 gym. This goes double for us geeks. So hit the weights and your wrists will thank you, not to mention all the other benefits.
On a side note, Some of my friends never used a computer before the late 90's never mind actually typing. That was in 98 and still none of them can type.
Is typing something similar to learning a new language, or learning guitar or piano as far as the brain is concerned. As adults, we can still learn new complex things, but can we still 'memory map' like the youngins do? Maybe it's incorrect to lump typing in the same category as playing the piano, but I believe it's a matter of 'hard wiring' this information. I wonder how quick I could actually adapt dvorak at my age in my 30's vs someone say in their teens. Would it screw up my traditional typing?
I'm sure Dvorak is great and everything and I hope it helps people with CTS and whatever other wrist problems they might develop.
I already type about as fast I need to and when typing text (like this), I'm held up more by thinking about what I want to say than the keyboard.
I've been programming for 26 years (and obviously typing that long) and I've never had any wrist problems. I think part of that is because I never learned to type "correctly." I don't hold my hands in awkward positions and make sure they stay centered properly. I don't use certain fingers for certain keys. Whichever finger can get to the key most comfortable is the one that goes. For example, right now, I'm noticing that my right middle finger is doing more typing than any other (except the right thumb which is hitting the space bar), but when I shift my position or rotate my chair a bit, that'll all change.
I think what we need to advocate is that people stop taking typing classes and learning to put their hands in completely unnatural positions. Then it won't matter if you're using QWERTY, Dvorak, or whatever.
Someone made a key maping program that will let me switch keyboard layout as easy as a click of a button. Maybe something of a hardware switch on the keyboard, or in between the keyboard and the computer like an extension cord. OR better yet, make a residant program translates key stroke in real time so every login to window/linux can be using a different keyboard layout without physcial change. (I peronsally don't care if the printing on the keys are wrong. I never look at the keyboard anyway.) but until those thing are available I simply can't just swithc. I need to use my computer at friends, at work, and at home. It would be difficult to change back and forth... and force people who use one of my computer to switch back and forth.
Better yet, have a website that I can visit that will immediatley translate keyboard layout. This is probably impossible but I can always dream!
Until those thing happens I can not see Dvorak going anywhere.
Someone should do a study of how fsck, dir, cd, ifconfig and other "stuff" works into dvorak.
;) I type a _lot_ of semi-colons. Bash scripting, PERL coding, you name it.
These words often have none or few vowels.
One key line in the comic:
"Come on! How often do you type a semi-colon??? It's a wasted key! On the home row no less!"
Guess what
Honestly, it would be amusing to see how DVORAK stacks up, when programming and sysadmin tasks are taken into account. DVORAK could be a detrement in these cases...
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Theres one of two things wrong with you:
You're not using your keyboard correctly. It can be any damn layout in the world, you just don't know how to position your hands, etc. I've been using a keyboard for 8 hours a day for 14 years. Its always been qwerty or qwertz. I've never had -any- problems. No carpal, no need for wrist braces, etc.
The other possibility is that you're, eh, doing something else while at the computer. Bet its slower to cyber on a dvorak keyboard, eh?
But it breaks vi! What's the point??????
.. into believing everything you say...
Why does this feel so much like Jack Chick had a hand in this?
As someone who does a lot of typing and is willing to spend a lot of time and money on ergonomic stuff (because I'm lazy and stupid), I have typed on a lot of strange things over the years to a pretty high rate of wpm. My findings have been:
1 -- The shift from Dvorak to Qwerty did not greatly increase my speed or accuracy. It made me a bit more comfortable, but learning it was total torture for about 2 months.
2 -- Learning Dvorak does not mean you forget Qwerty. I can flip between them now -- in fact, the varying placement of the shift key gives me more trouble.
3 -- None of these layouts is designed for programming in curly-brace languages
4 -- The difference in using a well-shaped keyboard (KINESIS!) is much greater than that between different letter key layouts.
5 -- Much of the hand strain I have suffered has to do with reaching for nonletter keys (cursor keys, and the backspace key) -- fixed by a Kinesis, but not by Dvorak.
6 -- Habits and posture (not resting hand on the keyboard etc) count for about as much as the ergonomics of the actual keyboard.
My suggestion therefore is: first fix your posture and find a way to stop reaching around for the backspace and arrow keys. If you crave more efficiency, get a kinesis. If you STILL demand utter total perfection, try Dvorak, but by that point you will be putting in a fair bit of work for what you gain.
Other people's mileage may, of course, vary. There's no doubt that Dvorak is more efficient and comfy -- but there's a serious cost/benefit calculation to be made.
P.S. Yay for Kinesis.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I use Dvorak on my computer at home, but use QWERTY on the laptop we have since my wife uses it. With Windows you can have a little tray icon to switch and I have that also so my wife can easily use my machine if she needs to.
Also, if you know QWERTY now then its pretty easy to switch between them once you learn Dvorak.
I don't know, though, I have sort of developed (through time and natural, unconscious adaptation i.e. "practice", I suppose) ... a rather high typing rate.
I type about 120 words per minute right now, what I'd like to know from Qwerty turned Dvorak typists is...
How long does it take to get back up to your old speed?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Oh crap!
The Java Crapplet wouldn't load.
First, allow me to admonish your hasty conclusion.
On this page http://www.koniaris.com/dvorak/ there is a discussion about distance of finger movement. The test document was the Unabomber's Mannifesto. The results:
* Typing the Unabomber Manifesto in QWERTY costs about 5.7km (XY).
* Typing the Unabomber Manifesto in Dvorak costs about 3.3km (XY).
In terms of planar movement Dvorak is more efficient. Then, for the pain standpoint, one must decide for themselves if moving up a row (above home row) is more comfortable, or would one rather move down a row. Personally I hate that bottom row - it compounds what rock climbing does to my wrists. I am much more pain-free on Dvoark, and I still have the ability to switch mid-sentance back to qwerty and not think about it, making other peoples' computers easy.
There are a ton of studies of varying levels of scientific valitidy. This was my first decent result of quick google search. The bottom line is it's thought out, and thus better, but people don't want to re-learn 'till QWERTY hurts them.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
Serviously, if you want people to use a method or product, give them a name they can pronounce. At least you can say QWERTY. Dvorak, how the heck do you say that if you're not from Russia?
I read the comic, and they actually address this very issue, and say that it's impossible for that to be true, because there were no typists to slow down (after all, how can there be typists before the typewriter was invented?)
Perhaps you should have read the article?
I switched to the Dvorak layout back in 1998. A lot of the documentation I read on it back then touted that it was faster and more comfortable.
I never noticed a speed gain in my typing, but I think that is because I think at the same rate as before. If I were typing documents that other people had written (as a secretary would) then I think I could be much faster.
As far as comfort goes, Dvorak is much more comfortable for me than QWERTY is. QWERTY makes my wrists hurt, but Dvorak doesn't. That alone was worth the switch.
The only real drawback to Dvorak is you can't type the word QWERTY with a simple roll of the left fingers anymore.
It obviously depends what operating system you are running under. If it is Windows XP you just need to go to the Control Panel -> Regional And Language Settings -> Languages -> Details This panel will let you add a new keyboard layout, set the shortcut keys to swap between the two, and set the default. If you use Some Unix distribution, you can usually find it under "Keyboard Layout" in the equivalent of the Control Panel. If you use Mac, well, I'm still waiting around for that torrent that was mentioned the other day here, and I'm too lazy to fire up pearPC to check it up, and too broke to own a Mac, but I remember changing it once... its somewhere in the Settings... I personally don't have keyboards where the keys are rearranged anymore because of that damned angled key problem, but wherever I go I remap the keys anyways, so I might as well have a letterless keyboard... lol, its actually worse/better than a letterless keyboard, because if I look at the keys, I have to ignore what I see written on them otherwise it will mess me up. If I were you, I'd use the letterless keyboard, and just pop up the onscreen keyboard to have a visual reference for you, and then once you get the hang of it you'll never go back :)
If you really want to get a program to do it, I could probably write you a quick little script for Windows, just let me know.
Gravity Sucks
I thought it was about that composer guy.
In which case I advocate "From the New World".
Have a mirror.
Very informative comic though.
I use Dvorak exclusively for my personal PC and servers, at home and at work. One difficulty I have had is getting the login screen to default to a Dvorak layout. Any suggestions? When I enter KDE, then Dvorak starts nicely.
If I have a problem with anything, it's that scrolly wheel on mice. It's less than comfortable to use that thing with my index finger. Sometimes I stand the mouse on its left side and use my thumb if I'm going to be doing nothing but scrolling for a minute or two. It would be great if it were under my thumb to begin with, but then maybe that might cause problems with just gripping the mouse. So it goes.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
A question for gamers: Does Dvorak (or any other sort of alternative keyboard configuration) affect the mapping of game controls to letter keys?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Dvorak is that like this Metric thing I keep hearing about? Darn kids these days. ;)
-Xen
Putting claims like "MUCH BETTER"! in all caps in an article, or this case, front page, immediately turns on my 'beware - zealots' device.
If you want to be taken seriously by nerds, you'd better try to keep it professional instead of throwing things like "but, Qwerty is like 150 years old, how good can it be!" around.
Endless discussions about what's better, QWERTY or DVORAK, have never turned up anything significant. It's as pointless as ranting about VI vs EMACS.
Seriously, I strayed from qwerty for 2 years, then I realized one day that every single command I use was designed to be quick and lazy on a qwerty keyboard. That, and it took me 6 weeks to regrow my pinkies after they fell off in a 24 hour scripting binge. It doesn't matter what you use, perl, php, c, bash, ksh, pascal, java, etc. They all will cause your pinkies to wear out. Not to mention basic vi navigation. What a PITA. Besides, with anything over 60WPM, I don't really see a point in typing faster than I can maintain the code in my head. Keeping all of those tabs, spaces, brackets, and other special characters in order takes some work. It isn't all straight text here...
You'll absolutely detest it for 3 days, after that you're addicted like crack baby. Guaranteed.
Thank God I made the switch.
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This comparison is as close as you're going to get. It shows the various distances travelled by your fingers when typing on the Dvorak, Qwerty and Arensito layouts.
Dvorak (and Arensito) are layouts designed to minimize finger movement. At the end of the day, my hands and wrists are not tired since I use a modifed Dvorak layout. The layouts here are more convienient for programmers and are the ones I use.
Good point. It's not the letters that slow me slow me down, but all the :;{}()*&$"'_=+- etc etc that I need to type when programming. I can understand that Dvorak speeds up regular typing, but I'm highly suspect it also speeds up typing C++ code.
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...is that I want to crush my machines every time I swap between those that have Ctrl-Fn-Win-Alt and Fn-Ctrl-Win-Alt (and at home Ctrl-Alt, IBM(tm) :). Cut, copy & paste? oh no, you just wrote x,c,v somewhere. Annoying at best.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't know jack about Dvorak, but I'm wondering how effective different keyboard layouts are when you figure in things like keystrokes (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, etc.) and also when considering the h-j-k-l cursor movement keys in vi and others.
Does it become optimal to reassign such keys in these applications? Does anyone have experience or opinions on this?
I am a firm believer that other indemic flaws in a persons physical makeup are the causes of "CPS" and other WRIST Ailments.
Myself I have been behind a keyboard for nearly 25 years, my Mother 45 years, and my Father some 40 years.
NONE Have any wrist issues, I have even broken mine in both motorcycle and surfing accidents (no no at the same time) so one would THINK that would make me more suceptible ?
I have spoken with 3 doctors about just this issue aws my one son has a genetic and severe bone disease, he is at age 13 suffering osteopenia and rickets and his wrists suffer the worst.
The answer in people who DO NOT have defects like my son ? Its how your wrists are slept on, do you curl your wrists up under your head when you sleep (a question to rep motion sufferers) If you do I would seriously consider not, a coworker compalined about these issues and I told them what doctors had told me , guess what 3 weeks later he thanked me and said his wrists never felt better
Its not from typing its from SLEEPING
Look, no wrist braces.
And if those bastards try to make me take up gardening, I'll kill 'em.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I assume dvorak is optimally layed out for the english language?
If regularly typing in other languages where other letters are more prominent (see Scrabble), I suppose having either dvorak or qwerty wouldn't make any difference.
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
Not because it was made with usage of characters in ENGLISH on mind. Okay, that is a problem, say, if you are a Finn and the vovels + k make up 80% of your language. But in many countries the frequency is at least similar to English.
The problem is support. Keymaps with "native" characters. On install you see a whole list of keymaps for different countries, but all of them are variants of QWERTY, be it QWERTZ, AZERTY or similar. A non-US Dvorak is a rare. At one time I thought about switching. In Polish we have a bunch of extra characters that are laid out in pretty obvious manner - all are derivatives of some english characters and pressing the alt+original character produces the extra one, alt+o=ó etc. Pretty simple? Yes, and could be easily ported to Dvorak. But it wasn't. I'm left out in the cold, no Dvorak-PL for me.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I am much more pain-free on Dvoark
:-)
Not to engage in something as base as spelling flames, but it would help if the Dvorak advocates were to spell it correctly, including in the title of http://dvzine.org/type/index.html.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
There are two separate Dvorak layouts, one of which maintains the command key shortcuts. So I can "command-j" ("command-c" in Qwerty) to copy, and do similarly to paste.
Also, I still use Qwerty keyboards fine in the labs here. It's not true that Dvorak typists lose every ability to type with Qwerty, as shown by the fact that many of us do both. Typing on multiple keyboard layouts is as feasible as speaking multiple languages, or learning multiple operating systems.
http://www.cato.org/cgi-bin/scripts/printtech.cgi/ pubs/pas/pa324b.pdf
Starting at page 8:
The QWERTY design is reputed to be far inferior to the "scientifically" designed Dvorak keyboard, which allegedly offered a 40 percent increase in typing speed. Supposedly, the Navy conducted experiments during World War II demonstrating that the costs of retraining typists on the new keyboard could be fully recovered within 10 days. The story is claimed to validate path dependence: no typists learn Dvorak because too many others use QWERTY, which increases the value of QWERTY all the more.
That is an ideal example because the number of dimensions of performance is small, and in those dimensions, the Dvorak keyboard appears overwhelmingly superior. Yet upon investigation, the story appears to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking and a shoddy reading of the history of the typewriter keyboard. The QWERTY keyboard, it turns out, is about as good a design as the Dvorak keyboard and was better than most competing designs that existed in the late 1800s when there were many keyboard designs maneuvering for a place in the market.
Ignored in the stories of Dvorak's superiority is a carefully controlled experiment conducted under the auspices of the General Services Administration in the 1950s comparing QWERTY with Dvorak. That experiment contradicted the claims made by advocates of Dvorak and concluded that retraining typists on the Dvorak keyboard made no sense. Modern research in ergonomics also finds little advantage in the Dvorak keyboard layout, confirming the results of the GSA study.
So on what bases were the claims of Dvorak's superiority made? Critical examination shows that most, if not all, of the claims of Dvorak's superiority can be traced to the patent owner, August Dvorak. His book on the relative merits of QWERTY and his own keyboard is about as objective as a television infomercial. The wartime Navy study turns out to have been conducted under the auspices of the Navy's chief expert in time-motion studies--Lt. Comdr. August Dvorak--and the results of that study were clearly fudged. There is far more to the story, but it all leads to the conclusion that the QWERTY story qualifies as no better than a convenient myth.
---
Footnote 11 from the above excerpt:
For a full debunking of the QWERTY myth, see S. J. Liebowitz and S. E. Margolis, "Fable of the Keys," Journal of Law and Economics 33 (1990): 1-25.
People who want to do something about it need to find an angle that makes it commercially viable. Nothing will change while every keyboard at CompUSA and every machine by Dell, HP and Sony are all "QWERTY" in nature.
These keyboards need to be sold at healthfood stores, fitness clubs and places that sell ergonomic furniture. We need to see pictures of happy healthy people with bulging muscles smiling while they are typing on their "healthy" keyboards.
I'm in no danger personally. I kinda-sorta touch type, but not really -- I look sometimes and more importantly, I keep a variety of postures and I'm not actually stuck behind a keyboard all day. I don't have any motivation to change in the least but I can see where motivation to change could be fostered.
Ultimately, I think the only thing that could change the QWERTY keyboard standard is government support. Get the surgeon general to say a few words on the subject and that'll help get things moving. (How successful are those messages on the sides of cigarette packages anyway?) Get health insurance benefits reduced and there's another bump in the right direction as well. There's a lot of campaigning to do in order to make that change happen. I'm having trouble imagining it.
I have never tried this layout, so perhaps someone can answer this question. How does Dvorak handle keyboard shortcuts, particularly copy/cut/paste? They are extra accessible with one hand on QWERTY, but look less so in Dvorak. Anyone have any first hand experience in terms of a solution?
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
I agree, I was thinking "almost once per line"
and vi... don't forget vi - that was almost as much work to learn as learning touch typing - and now it's just as indispensible a tool as touch typing - I can not do without them. I guess it's not a programmer's tool.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
If by "Natural" you mean the funny Microsoft "broke in half" keyboard, I'd recommend you try it. I got one, and IMHO it's the only good thing Microsoft ever made. You don't need to learn anything, as the layout is still QWERTY. If you know how to type properly it's a no-brainer. If you've got some bad habbits like typing "Y" with the wrong hand, you'll be forced to fix that. It annoyed my wife, but didn't slow her down and she's a writer. I prefer the improved wrist position. YMMV but I'd recommend at least trying the thing for a week.
A possible solution to getting more people to adopt Dvorak is to make a standard key sequence to enables switching between the two layouts.
I was thinking about this when I learned to type on a Thai keyboard layout recently. There are two standards and they are just like Dvorak and Qwerty. You can guess which one is widely used. But even for a foreigner learning to type, it is better to learn the inferior standard layout in case one has to use a computer in the country.
The absurdity here is that everyone using a Thai keyboard can switch to the English Qwerty layout for typing in English, but there's no standard to switch between the two Thai layouts.
Contrast this with Japanese. There is a special faster layout that can be used for typing one kana at a time with symbols on each key, including the numbers. Most people prefer to type using Roman letters, which is slower. However there's no downside to learning the faster method, because all Japanese computers have standard keys to switch between the input methods.
If Dvorak/Qwerty switching worked in a similar standard way on all computers, it would solve the problem of using other people's computers and making learning Dvorak worthwhile.
i've been programming in dvorak for a while (c++, python, perl), and i think it's quite a bit more comfortable than qwerty. the number keys are all the same, so that doesn't matter much. the placement of period, comma, and quote are the main factors, i think, as i use those at least as often, if not moreso, than ().
that's not to say that vi isn't a little weird in dvorak, but you can get used to it.
I've been typing for 20 years, and I have no trouble with my wrists. One thing I've observed is that I've developed my own typing system, with the hands placed in a natural angle - index fingers on J and F, middle fingers on E and I, which I believe is unlike "proper" 10 finger typing where the hands are more straight. I wonder if that could be a factor that makes people develop wrist problems - can anyone who has wrist problems comment on his typing position?
--
I do not like the men on this space ship!I changed to Dvorak 3/4 years ago. There seem to be a lot of posters saying they would not switch because they would not be able to use others' keyboards. I can still type pretty fast on Qwerty. The problem is mainly that others can't use my keyboard, which isn't a very big problem in my work environment. YMMV.
It's not worth switching to Dvorak for a gain in speed - I probably type only marginally faster on Dvorak than I did on Qwerty. The main advantage is that it is more comfortable. I enjoy typing a lot more now than I used to. This holds more for typing English than typing code. Typing code is alright, depending on the language and the punctuation marks it uses.
I wouldn't specifically recommend it, or recommend against it. It takes some time to learn and offers some advantages - I'm sure people can and will make up their own minds, and militant recommendations will not help. I try to remember the same about operating systems, programming languages etc, with less success ;)
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Google "xmodmap dvorak" and then insert the appropriate command line into an rc script. It's worked quite well for me.
There does exist a subtle comfort benefit in Dvorak. If you dont have access to ergonomic keyboards or are just too stingey then I'm willing to bet that Dvorak would be quite nice. It's really difficult to pinpoint what it is about it, but when you have to go back to Qwerty you find yourself thinking 'Sweet Jesus this is an awkward layout'.
"garden at 70, or wrist braces at 40"?
Why don't you kiddies talk to your mothers or grandmothers, who were secretaries, and typed their whole lives. I, personally, have been hitting the keyboard in front of the monitor for 25 years, and the only problem I've ever had is from the damn *MOUSE*.
I suggest that a) you complain too easily, or b) you're under such stress that the tension is showing up in your hands and wrists.
But noooo, we don't need no union, we *love* 60-80 hour weeks, with no overtime, and no time with our families, we *live* to work for the boss, we don't work to live....
mark "does not bite nose to spite face"
- Using the semicolon is very common for programming C, C++, C#, Java, PERL, etc. and it's placed on the bottom row in arguably the most out-of-the-way location (where the 'z' is located on the QWERTY keyboard).
- I have a major gripe with separating important puncuation, so that semi-colon at bottom left and period and comma at top left seem like a horrible design.
- I disagree that it is easier to type alternating hands each time. There are some combinations like "der" and "ead" that are all on the same hand but can be typed much faster once you gain some experience than if separately.
- For me, having the 'e' correspond to my middle finger on my left hand seems like a very poor choice since it is most commonly pressed. I'd say assigning the 'e' to the pointer finger on either hand would make much more sense.
- putting the forward slash very near the back slash (both on upper right) can cause a lot of confusion, even to those who use the keyboard frequently...
So I say stick to the QWERTY, but get a gel wrist rest or elevate your arms to the height of the keyboard and you should be fine. Also, bring a stress ball and exercise your hand sometimes with it as well...This sig donated to Pater. Long live
You can get just such a thing at dvortyboards.com. There's a hardware switch in the corner, and both layouts are printed on the keys.
www.dvortyboards.com
You get geek points just for having one on your desk.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Actually, you don't need scientific proof. It's just common sense:
QWERTY was invented in order to help typewriters not jam up. Typewriters jam up when those little letter hammer heads crash into each other and get stuck. This happens with letters that have hammers that are close togehter. QWERTY was optimized to minimize the closeness of these hammers when typing words in the english language.
DVORAK was invented along with electronic typing (when those little hammers were gone). It was optimized to have all the letters as close to each other as possible when typing words in the english language. This basically gives you more letters typed per finger displacement distance.
So you see, it's just by design that these two layouts work the way they do.
If you're typing fsck often enough to worry over speed, you've got bigger problems than your key layout.
While I did start programming at an early age, I only really got good at it in college while using a DEC VT 4x0. Man did I love those keyboards. The picture linked is a little different from the one I used, though --- the ESC key was where F11 is. That made vi awesome to use as both hands were very useful. Plus, the fact that the CTRL and SHIFT keys were farther to the left really reduced stress on the left hand.
I bought a VT for $20 at an acution and loved using it for programming. When the monitor ate itself, I held a funeral for my VT. *sniff*.
...it is not completely obvious if you're joking or not ;). I have met people from both US and Britain (probably Aussies too if I met them) which seem to be of the opinion that they speak the most important language, and everyone else should take the "burden" of learning a second language.
Personally I speak three, and feel that is enough since I only get to maintain two on a regular basis. I'd rather do a refresher course in my third language than go for a fourth, to put it that way.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1) Find a spare Dell QuietType keyboard
2) Turn over, remove all screws from bottom
3) Flip back over, lift out keyboard assembly
4) Keys easily and cleanly removed by turning over leyboard assembly and using two small screwdrivers to gently press the two plastic tabs on each side of each key.
5) Out comes key!
6) Take out all the keys that change, put back in appropriate order, put keyboard back together but don't screw everything together yet... convert to DVORAK layout in appropriate OS, test every key in a text editor, THEN reapply screws.
Hope this helps.
The one that really bugs me is ls (which would be like typing 'p;' on a QWERTY board). Everything else, Dvorak is better for, but for typing ls over and over QWERTY winds hands down.
Ever since windows XP, I have been using the built in speech recognition software that comes with it. I have not used a keyboard since. I still use the mouse.
The Study: The Fable of the Keys, By S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis
Some Commentary: Typing Errors, By Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis
I switched several years ago when I had a slow month at work. Since I was a half sysadmin half developer at the time, I had to constantly switch between QWERTY and Dvorak. The first week was pure hell -- makes you remember how difficult it is to use a computer when you don't know how to type.
:)
After a week or so, I could get actual work done without spending 90% of my brainpower remembering where the keys were, but it was still rough. I would say it was a full month before I was typing relatively fluently, but I hear it shouldn't take that long if you switch to the Dvorak layout cold turkey.
Even after the first few weeks, I immediately noticed how much more comfortable typing on Dvorak feels. This is something you can't know unless you give Dvorak a shot -- typing on Dvorak feels smooth and efficient. Typing on QWERTY feels like I'm trying to tie my fingers in knots.
My WPM (around 100 average, around 150 if I try) is a bit better than my QWERTY result, but my accuracy is much better. I don't have hard numbers for that, but with QWERTY, I'm often reaching for the backspace, with Dvorak, rarely. I also noticed after the switch my hands would be significantly less tired at the end of an intense coding day.
I didn't lose my ability to type on QWERTY. I'm now ambi-keyboard, where with a few seconds of thought, you can rewire your hands to type the correct layout. But given the choice, I type Dvorak.
Give it a shot, if only to remind yourself how much trouble people who can't type have using computers.
Do you use the ; more than e or t? Look where they are.
See, I never took a typing class. I learned keyboard layout from years of copying programs from books and magazines into my C64.
Therefore, I was never trained to hold my hands at some unnatural angle. Most of my typing is done with my middle 3 fingers of each hand. The pinky and thumb tend to be reserved for the space, shift, and enter keys.
I don't live by the home row. Resting my hands on my QWERTY, my home keys are in a V shape like like: WEFBNJO[
Put the Dvorak studied home keys in a V shape, but don't futz around with lame ergonomic designs. That's a keyboard for the ages!
Of course, my typing is much slower on this post because now I'm all self conscious of what fingers hit what keys.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
There's your proof. Dvorak was designed sensibly, reducing finger movement distance and frequency. Typing feels like drumming your fingers, and is incredibly rapid and comfortable.
c hgoy nrk. yflcbi rb ekrpat t.fxrapeov cyo or .aof yr erv
stilgs leansting hoaww to sytpe wioath dvorak. istw mustch betteh.
How is dvorak for programming? Programmers use a lot of less frequently used keys, how are those positioned on dvorak?
Maybe someone should do the same distance test with linux source code.
"It could be the difference between working in your garden at 70 or wearing wrist braces at 40."
Saying things like this is just creating unnecessary fear. After having my own experience (1.5 years of not being able to work due to the pain which I thought was "RSI"), I discovered that RSI is basically a psychosomatic disorder that can be cured by addressing psychological issues. Read this summary for more info. You can also do a search with the terms "sarno" and "tms" and you should find other pages including other peoples' experiences. If you are in pain right now, its very important you take a look at these ideas, but also important if you aren't in pain because it may save you from worrying about it.
It only took me a few weeks to fully recover and now I use my hands all day long. I work as a software developer, play guitar, bass, and drums; and I have had no pain in the last 2 years thanks to learning it was a psychosomatic disorder. I don't do anything special ergonomically. I don't use dvorak or any special keyboards, I don't worry about taking breaks, I sit in awkward positions sometimes which some people might call "bad posture", I just don't worry at all (that is the most important part).
While I sympathize with the people who develop carpal tunnel and related conditions, I honestly think this is silly.
Yes, hundreds if not thousands of people suffer from these maladies. Out of how many tens or hundreds of millions of people who pound away at computer keyboards pretty much all day?
If you like a Dvorak keyboard, great. Personally, I'm a touch typist and can't even stand the "ergo" keyboards for more than a few minutes.
Like atheists, body artists, and lesbians: I don't really understand why these people are so freaking evangelical about their beliefs. Can't they just do what they find works better for them and STFU about it?
-Styopa
If you go to the Type Dvorak Now page you can see it's titled "TYPE DVOARK NOW!" I'm a fan of Dvorak, but on an advocacy page for a method of typing which is supposedly faster and more Accurate, having obvious misspellings is funny. Cute 'Zine though. ~elmlish~
been qwerty coding for 20+ years now and i second all the comments about braces etc. having to press shift for () and {} is a major pain, at least i get the ; luxury. however since getting bad wrist strain a few years back i now sit up straighter, have the keyboard at a shallow angle and rest my fore-arms on a long foam pad about 1.5cm thick, with a 10cm gap to the keyboard in which my wrists float about, needs a fair amount of desk-depth but works a treat!
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I was wearing wrist braces and taking anti-inflamitories until I switched to Dvorak Layout. I have since switched over to Kinesis Dvorak Keyboard and Logitech Thumbball mouse allowing me to throw away the braces and drugs. I also type easily twice as fast as I used too. Can I get an AMEN!!! my brother??? Chi
alias is your friend :)
Dvorak has rescued me from wrist braces and anti-inflamatory drugs. I have since become such a fan boy that I bought the 290 dollar Kinesis Contour Dvorak Keyboard. Its saved my job and discomfort. I no longer need the braces or drugs for the past 5 years Chi
that's also something I'm really interested in. :?>,.'{}[]!@#$ etc.
My background : Here in France we have some Azerty keyboards where letters are shuffled a bit. Not a big deal IMHO. But where I have a hard time is with the special meaning keys like
I do quite a lot of programming stuff and one day I discovered that a american layout made much more sense and was waayyy more handy in my everyday typing life. Command line stuff and emacs keybindings (vi too to some extend) are MADE to be used with an american keyboard. Up to the point where I'm typing this message on a qwerty keyboard and use many strange key combo to type all the acccents needed to type proper French. I prefer that way.
I have the same concern about you about real life (sysadmin and programming stuff) typing with a dvorak keyboard. I do type some french and english texts but I also type some weird characters all day long. I'm not sure a dvorak keyboard will help me with that.
Without addressing the claims of the Dvorak boosters, I just wanted to let people know that there are other options for mitigating repetitive strain injuries.
:)
I've had recurring mild pain in my wrists and forearms for the last seven years or so, and have tried a fair number of remedies, including cold compresses, wrist braces, tablet based input (to replace a mouse, not tablet PCs), and ergonomic keyboards.
So far, the only thing that has consistently brought me relief is regularly following a joint mobility program. I've had a lot of success with Scott Sonnon's "Warrior Wellness" program, although I also hear excellent things about Steve Maxwell's program. Sonnon is an Sambo wrestler and trainer with multiple championchips under his belt, and Maxwell is a multiple-time BJJ world champion and trainer of same, so their mobility concerns are a bit more rareified than yours and mine. But definitely worth checking out.
Two warnings. 1) I believe a couple of Maxwell's drills require the use of a kettlebell. 2) You will feel like a complete idiot doing Sonnon's drills. They're seriously funny-lookin'. But they work.
which model of the KINESIS are you refering to?
- - - - - .
It wasn't til years later I found out what he was talking about. If you're hurting look at your wrist posture. If they bend backwards while you type, straightening them out may be sufficient. If your posture's wrong, Dvorak probably won't cure the pain.
To help keep my wrists straight when I'm just resting my hands, I stacked three gel wrist pads, stacked one on top of the other. That helped but not enough because I kept bending my wrists. I didn't want a brace because I had heard that they can cause other problems so I cobbled together a velcro strap and sharp pencil onto the back of each wrist. The idea of the pencils was if a wrist bent back at all, the pencil point would poke the back of my hand and remind me to straighten them. Within a couple of days, the carpal had completely disappeared. Once the posture became natural, I was able to discard the pencil straps.
As in "What do you mean that _was_ the backup tape? Fsck! Fsck! Fsck fsck fsck fsck!"
Are Dvorak users all sick like that? I've never seen so much coughing in a comic! I'd be afraid to use Dvorak for fear I'll catch that terrible Dvorak Hack.
[Dvorak User]
I cannot believe I just typed "championchips."
That is all.
If I swapped to Dvorak layout none of the vi key stokes would make sense in the new layout (jklh...)
180 WPM? ppfffft
I, like every real men use only astenographer to write, and I get 300 WPM... everything else is just slow....
Man, I think I can write at 2.6 GHz!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I've noticed that a disproportionate amount of those (most of the punctuation, Enter, arrow keys, backspace, home/end/pgup/pgdn, right-ctl) involve reaching with the weak fingers of the right hand. This constant bending and reaching is what bothers me the most. I can type English text all day long without any problems, but a few hours of heavy coding can start to bug me. (Vim does help with this by eliminating the need to use arrow and other dedicated movement keys)
To combat this, I've made dozens of key mappings in vim to take care of the most common punctuation sequences, such as ", ", " + " and inserting balanced brackets, parentheses and quotes. Since vim leaves all Alt-* combos available by default, I map these to keys under stronger fingers. I've also remapped many frequently used commands that use weak fingers to stronger fingers (like moving the find-previous-match command from ^P to ^K, and mapping Escape to Alt+G). This seems to help me much more than remapping the letters on the keyboard.
Utilities
Dvorak Assistant - Lets you change the Windows keyboard layout without administrator access. Useful for school lab computers.
Free Dvorak Tutor Software
KP Typing Tutor (Windows)
GNU Typist (*nix)
Online Dvorak Tutorials
A Basic Course in Dvorak - No frills tutorial, just make sure you repeat the lessons until you're actually proficient. You won't learn anything drilling through them only once.
dvorak.nl tutorial - Very slick, remaps the keys for you if you want (convenient if you can't use Dvorak Assistant). Non-english languages available. Works better for experienced Dvorak typists.
So, I drank the coolaid and thought I might give it a shot.
Then, I looked at all the keyboard shortcuts I depend on in my work ( graphic designer, working on a mac ). I, like a lot of people, value my muscle memory for tool switching in photoshop and illustrator and flash, and so on highly, and I think, somewhat interestingly, that it'd be *easier* for me to relearn typing than for me to relearn illustrator et al with new keyboard layout.
I mean, it may be a mac thing, but you can do *so* much with your right hand on the mouse and your left in the lower left hand side of the keyboard, just for copy/paste, closing windows, etc.
Copy/cut/paste select-all,select-none, save, save-as, close-window, quit, and so on ( this is a short list, there's more I'm not thinking of ), don't require me to move my left hand. Interestingly, this is why Mac apologist argue we don't need a 2 button mouse. Fooey -- I like my MS scrollwheel.
What a strange situation -- I really would like to learn Dvorak, since when I'm not at work, I write code and it might make things easier for me. But I'm not certain I'm willing to unlearn muscle-memory for keyboard shortcuts.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I have the same problem with the layout here in Finland. When I lived in Britain a few years ago, I got used to the UK layout which is almost the same as the US version, and I still use it for most of my typing.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
What we need is a new keymap for unix that sticks c h l s / ; w q ! $ and the like on the home row... I was actually hoping that joke about the gentoo keymap was serious for a minute there....
That's all that really matters.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
The first thing I noticed is that the vowels and punctuation are on the left side of the keyboard. It made be think: Does Dvorak help or hinder typists who are left handed, especially those who also mouse with their left hand.
This is a boring sig
Switched back to QWERTY, it does load balancing between the hands better than DVORAK.
You can tell the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I can't go to a Dvorak layout! Do you know HOW MANY YEARS it took me to learn all those key sequences in EMACS?! If I went Dvorak the only option would be management! The dark side!
... we just ate their 10GB june allocation.
I've been using a keyboard for over 24 years, and have never learned to type properly. Recently slashdot had an article about Das Keyboard where the keycaps were all blank.
I think the keyboard is way overpriced, but it gave me the idea of cutting up some labels and putting them over a couple of keys to force myself not to look at the keys. After a couple of days I ended up blanking all the keys on my keyboard. What surprised me was I hit the same keys with different fingers depending what words I'm typing. My accuracy tanked immediately, but after spending a short time with a typing tutor my typing is back up to speed, and a lot more comfortable.
I wonder now if my brain can learn more than one layout? The most interesting read I've seen about typing is this guy who developed the Arensito layout, as well as his article on Optimal Keyboard Layout. Maybe it's possible to know a layout for typing text fast (eg. DVORAK), a layout for most computers (eg. QWERTY), and a layout for programming (eg. ARENSITO or MYOWN:-) )
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I learned how to use QWERTY in 8th grade and I've been using computers for over 20 years at work and home. I have had no wrist problems at all. In fact, I usually become more fatigued from using a mouse than my QWERTY keyboard.
As DVORAK is optimized for commonly used letters in the english language, it makes it less than ideal for use by multi-ligual typists. I commonly use both US english and Canadian French keyboard layouts (both QWERTY layout). Switching to DVORAK would mean learning a new layout for general typing, which would not be any more optimized for use in french than my current QUERTY based keyboard layout. There are some modified DVORAK layouts optimized for use by french writers, but that would mean learning an additional keyboard layout!
I think I'll stick with QWERTY for now, with my much beloved USB MS Natural keyboard without the stupid F-lock junk. Most of my RSI problems seem to come from using the mouse anyway. I would love a good MS Natural keyboard with a detachable numeric keypad to bring the mouse a little close. Pair that up with a good trackball or other more ergonomic mouse and I'd be all good.
On a side note, how's DVORAK perform for programming, braces, markup tags, etc?
So, how is it actually pronounced? Crazy old-school Czech "Dvorák" thing, or is it Americanized?
I'd been typing qwerty for 4 years when I tried Dvorak. When I learned qwerty originally it took me about a year to reach 40 words a minute. It took me only two weeks of learning Dvorak layout to pass my original speed of 40 wpm, in addition my hands would get tired when typing for longer than an hour, with Dvorak they never do. In 3 years of using dvorak I'm now up to 60wpm. And for all the naysayers, yes I type 45wpm in qwerty, it's just like speaking a second language.
Sorry folks, it takes so much more than common sense for a good idea to be adopted. Metric system is, on paper, a US standard for measuring. bought a liter of gas lately? how many KM did you drive getting to work today?
:D
Sorry, I found your comment really funny. Work is only about 1 km away (km should be lowercase), and because of that I haven't bought gasoline for a while. I have heard, however, that it's sitting at about 93 cents(CDN)/litre right now.
I think your analogy is a tad flawed. You state that "there are 3 people who are serious about promoting a qwerty alternative". As far as metric goes, it's the REST OF THE WORLD supporting it.
And it's the Right Way to measure things
I'd like to give the Dvorak keyboard a go, but sadly, I can't seem to find a UK version of the Dvorak keyboard. Does anyone know *if* one is available and where I could get one from?
Dvorak didn't help keep the site from getting /.'ed - now we're seeing:
There is no website configured at this address.
You are seeing this page because there is nothing configured for the site you have requested. If you think you are seeing this page in error, please contact the site administrator or datacenter responsible for this site.
Maybe they need a third new layout?
Neurowiz
It is foolish to take offense when none is intended.
It is more foolish to take offense when it is intended.
-near quote, I don't know who thought of it first
I'm a developer and I spend my whole life in front of a keyboard and I can't touch type.
I've tried DVORAK and QWERTY. Both times I said I'd go two weeks with nothing but touch typing. Both times at the end of the trial period I was still slower than tapping. What has suprised me is that now I'm working in a team of developers, nobody else touch types either. The only people that do are the secretaries.
Now I'm asking myself if its is worth the hassle - as even though I might be able to type faster with QWERTY touch typing I'll no doubt get RSI and have learn go back to tapping.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
vi works just fine -- i learned to use vi using dvorak.
you get used to the cursor keys being in one place instead
of another. the 'jk' keys end up being under the 'cv' keys
so they're still together for back-forth cursor movement,
and using the 'a' for add text, and 'i' for insert,
and 'x' for del still work fine. the key is to remember
the LETTER for the function and not the POSITION -- then,
muscle memory will get built around it.
j.
It's hard to describe the effortless feeling of typing on a Kinesis with a Dvorak layout once you get used to it. It's so smooth and natural that you hardly feel like you're typing at all. It does take some time to adapt - for me it was about a month for the Dvorak layout and a week or two for the Kinesis. It might be shorter if you try adapting to both at the same time, or it might just be more frustrating.
The Dvorak calculator compares dvorak with qwerty on any text. The fonts are a bit screwed up but it's still pretty cool.
Shocking.
You must be from someplace very uncultured to use such horrible language so casually.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I don't have CTS yet, but I have developed joint pain in the last knuckle in my little fingers from pressing the ctrl key all the time. Not so much from the shift key, because that I can press almost straight down, but the ctrl key on my particular keyboard is situated in such a place that when I depress it, my finger is exerting force sideways.
I suppose I should get a keyboard mapper and change the ctrl key to one that I don't use, like the windows start key or the windows menu key.
More music, fewer hits
Dvorak has been debunked, and if anything, QWERTY is probably better for me as a left-hander.
D0mt blame m3. I"n tgping dvora8 on an Apple Nevwton. I boughtt ix at %rewavbyt Plx4xww.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
there are dvorak layouts designed for typing with a single hand (left or right). it's supposed to be quite effective, almost as good as qwerty with both hands. while i'm aware that these were originally designed for the disabled, i've been considering learning the left-handed one so that i could type while doing something else with my right hand (holding a phone, eating drinking etc). has anybody tried using these? what are your experiences?
Why DVORAK? If you are going to switch, why not evolve your own tailored for your typing needs?
p df
Find a large body of text similar to what you type, come up with your own 2D keyboard mapping, and through it through a genetic algorithm.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~crb002/ie574final.
Source is available at:
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~crb002/ie574/code/
If anybody thinks this is usefull I can put a better user interface on it.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I've been thinking about DVORAK for a while, although I've never actually switched yet. I'm just curious on a slightly different subject though, does any one else type with their keyboard on their lap? The first thing I do when I sit at a different computer is to see if the keyboard cord length is long enough to set the keyboard on my lap. Although all the other computer geeks I know of just type with their keyboard on the desk... which is just REALLY uncomfortable (in my opinion).
I learned using Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. Excellent package, but the demo version ticked me off cos it doesn't explain before you start that you're only gonna learn 1/3 the alphabet for free. It's cheaper than Mavis (nice gal, but I think she only knows QWERTY, and she has an unseemly crush on Bill Gates), much easier than the free stuff (including dvorak7min with "nastiness", and the online Basic Course in Dvorak).
Other than having my fingers conditioned to find the home keys quickly, knowing QWERTY didn't help me learn Dvorak. It felt like I was learning typing over again, but I think I learned faster than were I a keyboard newb.
I found that if I didn't know where a key was, my finger gravitated toward the QWERTY location. However, once I'd hit the lesson for a particular key, the QWERTY reaching would stop even tho I didn't quite remember the Dvorak location. That was the full extent of the confusion for me.
Since all my typing is on computers, if I had to learn all over again, I'd just learn Dvorak.
Don't switch to a key layout that promises a modest speed improvement and makes it impossible for anyone else to use your system, like tech support. Get yourself a decent under-surface keyboard holder and make your desk surface 28 inches high. Get rid of the jelly bean shaped MS mouse and get the original MS Mouse II or something traditionally shaped. I had wrist troubles years ago but no longer since changing offices where they have real office furniture and keyboard holders.
signature pending slashdot approval
Never actually learning to touch type but using (QWERTY layout) keyboards for over 20 years, I found myself with good typing speed but very poor typing style. I really couldn't type without looking at the keyboard.
I decided to teach myself to touch type and figured that if I was going to devote time to it, I might as well learn DVORAK layout for the slightly improved comfort.
All modern OSes have the ability to quick switch between keyboard layouts. Without this, my typing on DVORAK would be problematic at best.
I first started by removing the keycaps from a QWERTY keyboard and rearranging it to DVORAK. I wouldn't recommend this route to anyone. By doing so, the F and J keycaps move around. Trying to find home row without them is not fun. It does give you a nice visual aid but nothing that printing off a keyboard layout could give you.
I then tried the typing excersises found here. These little excersises are really all that you need to learn the layout. Well, that and time.
Over the course of several months, I used DVORAK whenever possible. I do use several computers a day, some of which I have little control over and had to use QWERTY on. If you can stick to using DVORAK only, your learning time should be much shorter.
After 8 months, I find that I have a decent typing speed while using DVORAK layout. I still make mistakes but my typing speed is very acceptable. I found that my typing speed with QWERTY lowered while I was learning but it is back to what it was before. I did not lose anything, only gained a new layout and the ability to touch-type.
Not losing speed when switching back is fortunate. I still must use several non-DVORAK computers every day. I also find it annoying that World of Warcraft makes me switch back to the old layout. Oh well.
After learning how to touch-type, I was then able to do other things such as angling the front of the keyboard up and using split keyboards. These also help but YMMV.
You're probably joking... but if you are interested enough in ergonomics to consider Dvorak, you shouldn't be using emacs anyway.
Emacs relies on modifier keys (Escape Meta Alt Control Shift) for everything, which is tough on the hands, particularly now that some idiot moved the control key down next to the alt and shift. You have to keep pressure on a key, using your little finger--tough on muscles and tendons.
If you have any concern for your wrists, switch to vim. Much less use of modifier keys, movement keys on the home row, and so on. It's also easier to learn--whereas in emacs there's no mnemonic relationship between the command and the keystroke most of the time, in vi there's almost always a simple mnemonic, and the commands are built up systematically from verbs and selections.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
On the other hand, maybe using a DVORAK keyboard will help promote more understandable command names and (for programming) variable names...?
Does it bother any other Dvorak typers that when keyboards are shown in futuristic sci/fi movies (5th Element, Matrix), they are invariably QWERTY?
Don't put advice in your sig.
Okay, that is a problem, say, if you are a Finn and the vovels + k make up 80% of your language."
You're right, so someone created an alternative keyboard optimised for Finnish called the DAS Finnish Improved layout.
Step 1 - get a good gel wristpad, for your keyboard AND your mouse. I am amazed that people still don't use these things.
Step 2 - learn how to type. I am amazed that a lot of people still don't know how to type.
Step 3 - laptops suck for wrist support, stay away from them. My wrists always hurt after using one for any amount of time.
Oh, and as a side note, Aiki-jujutsu or any other martial art that employs wrist locks will teach you what real wrist pain is, and will turn your wrists to jelly after a few years. At that point, carpal tunnel is like a gnat.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I switched to Dvorak many years ago, not because it's so much easier, or better for my hands, or anything so noble as that, but because I'm a terrible typist. With QWERTY, I'm a head-down typist. I could never break myself from staring at the keys. So I switched to Dvorak and for a few months had a little cheat sheet above the keyboard. After a while my brain reinforced the appropriate neural pathways and I could type without looking at the keys, stare out the window a bit, glance at a book, hold a casual conversation while typing, etc. I still make plenty of mistakes, and I'm sure my speed is nowhere near 90 wpm, but as a sucky typist, I suck less when using Dvorak.
Switching to Dvorak also had the added benefit of keeping people from messing with my computer. I'm also left-handed and use a track ball. All those things added together make it nearly impossible for most people to use my machine. (I don't know why trackballs freak people out so much, but they do. And the buttons being switched causes massive confusion.) On the occasions when I do want someone else to use my machine a simple key combination switches between the different layouts.
Dvorak is also an interesting way to enter passwords. For my machine login, the keyboard defaults to QWERTY, I enter my password as if it were the Dvorak layout, presto, gibberish - even if my password is "password"(ra;;,soh)
Personally, I think the context switches required when I do use a QWERTY keyboard, a mouse or other pointing device, make me a better person (both in the sense of being superior and improving my capabilities). Much as being multi-lingual makes you aware of different ways to express things (I imagine, I'm a stupid mono-lingual American) switching around the way I interface with the computer helps keep my brain a wee bit flexible.
QWERTY (like Windows) is "good enough". It has some flaws and there are "better" alternatives, but for the vast majority of people it gets the job done and doesn't get in the way enough to compel them to switch.
- Jasen.
I work on many systems as well, in school and stuff. I never have much trouble changing computers to Dvorak. It's done in less than a minute, it becomes a normal ritual just like having to wait for a computer to boot. The typing comfort more than makes it up for me. And it's always nice cause people always look puzzled when they see me change the layout and stuff :-).
:-)
My ibook and my logitech ultraflat keyboards both have easy to remap keys, so also gives alot confusion when you let someone else type on your keyboard, they go like; WTF?? And they even start saying; I'm never going to switch to apple, this sucks!
I know how to change keymaps on most important systems now;
- linux and solaris; loadkeys / xmodmap
- freebsd; sysinstall
- macos; easy dock thingy
- solaris; xmodmap
And it is true that when you need to type a bit in qwerty it's easy to find the keys.
I could blindly type dvorak in less than a week with about a half an hour training a day. Although it takes longer to just type without thinking where keys are (about 3 weeks). Just learn it using a typing tutor such as dvorak7min.
Once programs allow you to replace ctrl+z, x, c, and v with ctrl+;, q, j, and k, I'll switch.
I switched to Dvorak because I switched to a TouchStream keyboard. They use touchpads rather than keys, so there isn't much tactile feedback. This leads to the home row being much more important than on a normal keyboard, because you need to know where the home row is to find anything else.
In the end I modified the Dvorak layout in a few rather specialised ways supported by the TouchStream... it has separate symbol pad layouts that I enable by pressing what would be "QWE" on a Qwerty keyboard. These allow me to get all the symbols I need without ever having to reach for modifiers. And in my opinion that's exactly what a programmer needs.
So... Dvorak helps, yes, but what you really need is a fully customisable keyboard like a TouchStream. The Dvorak layout helps from a comfort point of view, in that it reduces the amount of reaching you have to do, but having a good keyboard in the first place is more important.
(Incidentally, I don't think it's seriously affected my ability to use other setups... although I'm slower with other setups, just because I'm faster with the TouchStream than I used to be...)
I tried and sold the "touchstream ST" from http://fingerworks.com/ which cost me like $350 and it did help my pain... but typing was a disaster... i used it until by mistake I erased something by putting the hand (and finger) in the wrong place ....
so we will see now that i ordered the kinesis a few min ago
- - - - - .
Folks,
Dvorak Vs qwerty debates will go on for ages. However, there is one thing you *can* do now for your aching wrists - use mouse with the other hand (left hand if you're a righty, right if you're a lefty).
I got severe CSI problem around two years back. I tried dvorak, didn't find it much difficult, but couldn't stay on it. However, due to severe pain in right hand wrist, I tried using the mouse with left hand. Eureka! It was a little awkward at first, but in a couple of days, I got used to it. The pain in both wrists was gone in a week.
I found that I was using right hand much more due to constant shuffling between keyb and mouse, while left hand was not used as much. Shifting to left handed mouse, evened that out. It specially helps if you need to shuffle between mouse and arrow keys (most GUI editors).
Its been two years since I'm exclusively using mouse with my left hand. Except for FPS games, I don't have any issues and haven't had the throbbing pain in my wrists since then (touch wood!)
- mritunjai
Every so often when people advocate Dvorak, contrarians pipe up with nonsense saying QWERTY is exactly equal to Dvorak, or Dvorak is only 5% better, etc al.
Frankly, it is not relevant whether historic studies on Dvorak were true, false, or made up. It does not change the facts on either keyboard, any more than studies that defended QWERTY had their source material 'interesting' destroyed.
Today we can use medical analysis and fairly advanced mathematics to evaluate keyboard layouts.
For example, this was on Slashdot several years ago:
http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.html
People have gone to great lengths to analyze how much and what kind of motion a given keyboard layout forces its user to maintain. The results are quite clear - QWERTY users have to move their fingers vastly further than Dvorak users. Dvorak places the most common letters on the middle row, and alternates the hands better between keystrokes. QWERTY doesn't do this nearly as well. QWERTY is better than random, but not by much.
I'm not some Dvorak nut or fanatic, I'm actually using QWERTY right now. But when I used a Dvorak layed out keyboard I was shocked by how much less I had to move my hands and therefore how much less stressed they were. The reason why people become so evangelical about ditching QWERTY is because QWERTY really is that bad. We're not talking apples and oranges, but rotten apples and oranges.
Another alternative which is somewhat out of the box is alphagrip - URL:http://www.alphagrip.com/>. They havnt quite made it to the shelves yet, but look rather cool nonetheless. I think ill be getting one of these puppies because they claim to make typing easier and faster (with practice), while looking wicked and letting you move around without banacing your keyboard on your hand
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
... and that, dear /.:ers, is but one reason why God (TM) created languages such as Fortran and python and not C.
It is getting hard to even find a phone with a standard phone pad! Look at the bizarre keyboards on many recent Nokia offerings. I guess "let's place the 7 key next to the 8 key instead of above it" was just to hard for them. I won't even get into the N-Gage.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
In high school, ~20 years ago, I first became aware of Dvorak. I was tempted, but made a conscious decision not to switch. Even back then, I used six different machines with varying ownership stakes all the way from personal to public. That pattern has remained substantially the same my whole life.
Get MS and Linux to generically implement a single no-reboot command method to soft-switch from a QWERTY keyboard to a virtual DVORAK, and I'd think about switching.
I agree, just look how stupid the Swedish keysetting is compared to the english one: here.
yup, it took a week or 2 but I adapted to it eventually. That was actually the hardest part of the switch.
DataHand is where it's at. Seriously, if I ever find myself with a spare $500, I am definitely getting one of those.
Admittedly, Kinesis keyboads look cool too, but being able to type anything just by twitching your fingers in certain directions by miniscule amounts? Come on.
I have used a Dvorak Keyboard for years now. In fact, I put the dvorak map on the MS Natural keyboard (the original, not the crappy ones they build now), and it works great. I can touch type on both Dvorak and QWERTY.
I have found that I don't type any faster on the dvorak map, but my hands are less tired after a day of work than they would be on a qwerty. Highly unscientific, I know, but it works for me.
One thing that I find interesting is that I bind by keyboard. If I sit down in front of a MS Natural keyboard, I expect it to be Dvorak. If I sit down in front of a standard (rectangular) layout keyboard, I start typing QWERTY. It's actually kinda difficult for me to type in Dvorak on a standard keyboard; I find I have to stop and think about it a lot.
I've been doing this for about 15 years now, and there's no way I'd ever want to go back to QWERTY. I'm very happy with where I am, my wrists don't hurt (except after the occassional gaming marathon, but I think that that's mouse related), and I'm fluent enough with both to switch back and forth reliably.
I do wish that MS would start building the original Natural keyboard again. That was a great product. Raised up in the front, which really seem to keep me happy. The newer ones raise in the back, which does nothing for me.
I switched to Dvorak when I was 19, spent about six years using it, developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
Now I'm fully aware that bad posture may have had a lot to do with it, but I found that with switching back to qwerty, forcing my fingers to move more and irregularly seems to ease the pain, whereas the little-movement dvorak system locks your hands into one uber-ultimate typing position.
There's a lot of talk about efficiency, but efficiency in typing isn't the fastest way to a happy life.
Music wants to be free.
But how do you switch on a PalmOS device with a keyboard too small for a hobbit child?
It's so fucking annoying when som lame-ass fag that I work with needs help with something and they are using this layout.
QWERTY IS WHAT THE WORLD USES, GET USED TO IT LOSERS!!
Check out http://www.stenling.no/dvorak/ for a very nice Norwegian Dvorak layout. Shouldn't be too hard to copy for Swedish...
Please don't create another Swedish Dvorak keyboard, there already is one.
It's not just a keyboard layout (QWERTY/Dvorak) that is important, but have the keys are physically organized. Even most of the so-called natural keyboards have the keys at an angle, which is a holdover from the old manual style keyboards with rods. There is absolutely no reason why they should be organized that way today. http://www.typematrix.com/ has both QWERTY and the Dvorak keyboards. And yes, you can toggle between the two layouts. I chose this keyboard because there is less strain on the fingers when the fingers don't have to move at an angle, and yes, they have documentation supporting this. I started typing in my early teens and started programming in my early 20s. I am now turning 50 this year . About five years ago, I made the switch. Not only to Dvorak , but to a TypeMatrix Dvorak keyboard. It was not an easy switch, but I'm very glad that I did it . I now have one TypeMatrix keyboard at home, one at work, and one in my laptop case. This makes it very easy for me to stay in a TypeMatrix environment. I also have a keyboard splitter with a QWERTY attached, so others can use my machine at work . No matter how right it is to switch or how unreasonable the old way is, people especially in the United States are reluctant to change. I gave up the fight to switch to metrics along time ago. I also had a bear of the time convincing people to get a hard drive instead of you just using their good old floppies. Now I'm trying something totally new altogether. I'm getting away from using a keyboard as much as possible, and beginning to explore the possibilities of hands-free programming using dictation. http://www.codevox.com/ Like my switch to Dvorak, I expect a long learning curve, and I'm just at the beginning of this. However like using Dvorak, I expect it to be a big win in the long run. By the way, this post was dictated by voice.
I switched to Dvorak for several years in the late 1980s when I ran a PS/2 with SCO Unix/386 as a late teenager. I was able to pull the keycaps off the keyboard and rebuild the keyboard maps in the O/S so everything worked just fine and the keyboard actually looked "correct" (with a few minor exceptions).
It did improve my typing speed (which was already in the 80-wpm plus, which I attributed to my piano skills) somewhat after several weeks. However, despite what others have said, it also made using QWERTY much slower.
Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the fact that nobody else ran Dvorak was much worse than getting a little typing speed increase. Most of the time, my typing is not so much limited by my speed of typing, but my speed of thinking. Especially so when doing things like programming or concocting a long pipe-filled command line to do something.
The only times I ever noted the utility of the additional speed was when typing dictation (which I almost never do anymore) and when transcribing (think "manual OCR", which I also almost never do anymore). On the other hand, I was frequently using other computers and so the major hit in my QWERTY speed (we're talking 20-30WPM) was quite problematic.
Now, I almost universally use my PowerBook for everything. I can't change my windows computer because that's made for gaming primarily, and most games wouldn't abide well by the change. However, the lack of the ability to move the keycaps would deter my desire to try. Furthermore, the QWERTY reversion issue still exists.
No need to use Dvorak. It just doesn't buy you enough in the grand scheme of things, and harms much more than helps.
Geeze, guys, you killed it!
Is there a mirror?
--LWM
Come! Join us!
While I am myself kind of lukewarm on Dvorak (as you can see from my other post), I do feel it should be pointed out that Liebowitz and Margolis were market-forces fanatics who were trying to show that market forces are never wrong and that 'path dependance' (ie an inferior solution becoming standard because it has early support) does not exist -- a rather questionable thesis to say the least.
How anyone managed to make a political/ideological discussion out of keyboard ergonomics is beyond me, but apparently at the Cato Institute you can find people who are just _that_ messed up
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm always curious about this. As someone who touch-types Dvorak on his home machine(s), and who has programmed extensively on both Dvorak and qwerty, plus the fact that school/work use qwerty.. I don't have any troubles going between them. They are 2 different sets of muscle memory for your hands to type words, and it's not hard to have both around.
"It's all very well to be happily chugging along at 80wpm on your own machine, but when you have to sit down at your boss's desk for 2 minutes to look into a problem, and you're slowly hunt-and-peck typing, it's rather embarassing."
Again, I have had no decrease in my ability to touch-type qwerty since learning Dvorak. I made the switch about 4 years ago, and use it at home all the time. The only thing I have to do is periodically reference down. Why is it that you can't effectively swap between layouts?
I've been using the TouchStream LP from FingerWorks for over a year now and love it. I went and bought the Dvorak layout at a time where I wasn't sure whether I wanted to make the switch or not. I've been happy ever since.
I can switch from qwerty keyboards on other's machine to dvorak without much trouble. The actual keyboard is USB so I can usually plug it into the front of another's machine if I want, and since I have it sending the usual qwerty codes, there's no need to switch layouts or anything on a friend's computer.
The thing is also gesture based, so all those damn shorcuts are just gestures, and it's a LOT faster to me now than using key-combo shortcuts.
Also, the pad itself is the mouse. No more reaching for that trackball (mice are so 1980s!)
http://www.fingerworks.com/
The guy's a total hack. /only saw RSS link
As a system administrator who switched to Dvorak about 5 years ago (tendinitis), I was curious too. So, I piped my shell history (533 lines worth) to a file and ran it through a finger movement calculator. The results are as follows:
Dvorak: Total strokes are 14613 and total distance is 19593.6341607972.
QWERTY: Total strokes are 14869 and total distance is 26349.32260203948.
So, there you have it. If you're a UNIX admin who uses QWERTY, you are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
Here is the specification:
r .htm
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/kbdb
(page only opens in Internet Explorer)
It is a QWERTY keyboard but has an extra couple of keys no other keyboard has. It is physically different from other keyboards. What do you use in Brazil if you don't use your official national keyboard?
But what about typing with one hand? I can get away with typing lots of words with only one hand on the qwerty keyboard, but Dvorak seems to have set it up specifically to force switching.
Interesting, but slightly irritating...
Has this caused a problem for anyone?
--LWM
I was never a touch typist - I was a real fast hunt & peck typist. This was fine when all I did was type papers for school, but when I started working in IT later in life I came down with a bad case of tendonitis that almost put me out of a job. I made several changes in ergonomics, and one of them was to learn to type properly.
;)
I worked with learning QWERTY, and it was excruciating. I had an awful time trying to get the key positions in my mind. Then, I found out about Dvorak, and decided to give it a try. I found that, within a couple of weeks, I felt comfortably proficient & could concentrate on my work, rather than where this or that letter was.
I'm sure it's more difficult to re-train oneself to a new system. But in my experience, it was far easier to learn Dvorak than QWERTY from scratch.
Added side benefit: there was a guy in the office, who was very good at his job - but when it came time for him to help, he often made you get up while he did all the work & you looked over his shoulder. When I changed key layouts, he couldn't type on my computer anymore - and I learned a lot more from him after that, by doing it myself.
I tried to use Dvorak, but one thing keeps stopping me from adopting it more permanently: vi!
vi uses the home row letters for navigation, specificly "hjkl" move the cursor. When in dvorak mode, these keys are no longer in the home row and have been replaced by "dhtn". If I remap the movement keys to dhtn, then I lose the previous function of those keys:
d: Delete
t: move To character
n: repeat last find (Next)
Then I have to find new homes for those functions, and new memonics. ARGH! Help! How does one use vi with Dvorak sanely?!
Thanks
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
To type quickly you need to be able to type without hunting for the keys (i.e. you need to have memorized what finger movement is necessary to hit which key).
The "home row" just helps less spatially-oriented people (remember the early typists were women and women are typically much worse than men at mental manipulation of spatial relationships) memorize finger movements as essentially simple 2D.
Folks who are really good at mental handling of spatial relationships memorize the 3D relationship of all or most of the keys to each other and can, therefore, reach onto the keyboard straight out of the air (i.e. with no tactile reference point along their fingers/hand/arm) to hit any key they want.
So, yeah, people who type like that really do have their hands "floating" over the keyboard and desk. They also tend to type very quickly because there is no need to re-establish an intermediate base for any finger to move between keys.
About 5 years ago i began to experience problems with my right hand. I shifted the mouse to my left side and, voila!, the problem went away. Now i have absolutely no problem shifting between a left and right sided mouse. However, it's made me appreciate that many of the "hot" keys (cut, copy, paste, etc.) were specified by right-handed people using a right-sided mouse.
What about non US/english users? I figure that there is probably no advantage at all for me to switch. Err wait, do I type more in Portuguese or English nowadays? Oh wait, invalid question... I type more in C/C++ and Portuguese (on msn messenger...).
So I guess I won't have any advantage in switching to another keyboard layout, since none of them is probably optimized for any of those languages.
Unless I did this...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Please mod the parent post up
Has someone written a javascript page where I can try out this Dvorak layout without switching my OS settings etc?
Waaah!
This is the ultimate geek keyboard. I've been trying to find an ergonomic keyboard for the last couple weeks and fell in love with the Touchstream last week. The keyboard is thin and flat, with no actual keys, just two large multi-touch sensitive pads. This allows for gestures based on multiple keypresses at once.
The gestures can be interesting, like pinching your fingers together to 'cut', twisting counter-clockwise to open a file. Shifting can be done by putting four fingers down on home row. Mousing is done right on the keyboard, with three fingers used for dragging.
The key locations (positions, sizes and mappings) are in an xml file. Software allows you to remap gestures based on the current application.
The Touchstream has won several awards, was developed by a professor at the University of Delaware, a few years ago. They also made a low power version that replaced the removable PowerBook keyboard (called the MacNTouch).
The Touchstream forums knew since April? that Fingerworks had been bought by a large corp, and rumors abounded. By late May, all the mainstream resellers had sold their last keyboards, snatched up by fans who couldn't bear to switch back to regular keyboards.
On June 10th, their website announced that they had discontinued manufacturing, and ebay bids jumped from $400 to $800. (Retail price was around $350)
I'm so annoyed. I find the perfect keyboard, and the company dies right in front me. If I'd done this a month ago, I could've gotten one from Thinkgeek.
The forums are still active. The official forum is now read-only, but before it died, someone setup an announced a fan-driven forum which is going strong.
Their mouse replacement, which has the mousing and gestures of the keyboard, but not the keys, is still available. It's called the iGesture. I bought one last week, and am waiting for it to show up.
FYI, I switched to Dvorak last year.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
The problem is that the folks who created most of the old school Unix stuff were either lazy typists, or just happened to design a system very friendly to them.
;)
ls on Qwerty is both ring fingers. Did they really mean list, or is it just easy to type and then the definition came afterward? I'm not really sure. Type those two keys on Dvorak, you get "no". O and N are both common, and both no and on are actually words. Even with a lot of sysadminning, you should really be typing on and no a lot more than you type ls.
Typing it on Dvorak maps to p; keys for the Qwerty folks.
Unix commands that are based on words except shortened by losing vowels don't work superfast either, being very right-handed centric (though I bet it's hard to get close to the left-handedness of a normal Qwerty board) without the vowels under the left hand being needed.
I bet it's slower by a bit, honestly. vi is harder to get around in too, because hjkl are nowhere near where they are on Qwerty. But then, vi is the only program where L means "Go Right", so whatever
That's to be expected when the names where chosen with the implicit assumption that Qwerty was the One Keyboard.
I don't think it matters. Assuming you type actual language ever, Dvorak will help you.
Warning to coders: hard to get used to location of [] keys (where - and = are normally). Underscore, however, doesn't wreck your day (it's where apostrophe/quote normally is).
One keyboard.
No problems.
Different server and rack layouts + natural keyboards = hunt and peck, the ultimate method!
When you're hammered everything looks like it needs nailed....
Wow! I get 34% more excercise than you! Watch those calories melt away, to say nothing of my fingers' 34% better muscle tone! ;)
farkers prefer the dvorak one handed layouts ;)
brooks dvorak dissenting
Arguing that market forces will always select the better product is pretty ridiculous. Market forces may always select a product that is good *enough*, but it may be only a local maxima...
the location of symbols on dvorak is not significantly different from querty. some of them are easier to reach, esp. english puncuation like comma, period, dash, quotes. I find the semicolon very easy to reach as well, it is the querty "Z" key.
I would guess that in a contest of typing only symbols, dvorak would win because it spreads more of them out, i.e. assigns some to each hand so the load is more balanced (there is a speed advantage as well since one hand can prepare for the next while the other is still executing the current).
Every conversation about Dvorak, these two supposedly genius contrarians get brought up.
The big thing is, their whole agenda was to show that the market doesn't make mistakes. Since everyone using an inferior keyboard is obviously a market making a mistake, they decided to grab the bull by the horns and attack that.
Go ahead and read it. Then google the search, and find people who don't have an economic point of view to push have addressed its sketchy (and often ad hominem) attacks.
(Oh, here's a link to a plaintext version:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html )
It will point out that the Navy study is dubious, etc. It won't actually point out other important things, like that Sholes (the creator of the Qwerty keyboard) never intended it to become the defacto standard, and actually designed a somewhat Dvorak-like keyboard (vowels one place, consonants another, though he didn't have detailed statistics to get key placement) and intended for *that* to become the standard.
But, everyone already knew Qwerty by then! He knew his standard was substandard, but it was "good enough", and he couldn't move it. Dvorak, trying decades later, barely made a dent.
Anyway, Dvorak is better. The fastest typists in the world use it, and they know more than two guys who desperately want to show that the market is always right.
But I don't use it to type faster, I use it because my fingers hardly ever get tired (the mild performance increase is pretty much nothing). Typing is more pressing buttons and less fingers flying. I mean, just *look at the layouts with your own eyes*. What do you want to type a lot? J? K? How about H and T instead? Hey, "E" is the most common letter, get that the hell off the home row! Etc. Qwerty is a pretty arbitrary layout, meant for a specific purpose, over a century ago. If you don't want to learn to do it better because it's a big pain, then don't. But don't let these people go denying reality because it's convenient for them.
Anyway, if you don't want to google Fable Of The Keys to find it debunked, here's at least one link:
http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/dvorak2.html
This is so coincidental.. Just YESTERDAY I was at the doctors, I suspected I was coming down with Carpal Tunnel.
I've used PCs (and TRS-80s, Apple IIes, etc etc) since I was 8. I'm 29 now, and am in serious pain as I type this.
I had NEVER experienced any typing related pain. Then two weeks ago, I woke up in the night with pain in my wrists. I thought hey no biggie, I must have slept on it funny. Nope. It came back again that week, and then again. The pain grew QUICKLY - It's not a slow progression, it snowballs.
I'm typing this in braces, and hope I won't be permanently disabled (CTS deteriorates your median nerve).
I really don't know what to do - I was just at the doctor yesterday and am still in shock and very scared.
=~(
1) I'm tired of the old windbag.
2) You mean the keyboard that makes endless prognostications while you type, most of which never come to pass, wasting a lot of your time for nothing ?
3) Are they still kicking that around ?
4) Are they still kicking him ?
5) Pointless waste of time and effort. Same goes for the keyboard.
6) Next topic.
Been using DVORAK for half a year before and loved it.
My conclusion: go for it unless you're a sysadmin kind of a guy who needs to type on other people's computers pretty often.
I just found myself being constantly pissed off every time I needed the context switch to dvorak and back to qwerty.
I switch to dvorak about 10 years ago when I was having problems with my hands cramping. The first few weeks were almost impossible, but soon it became natural and I've stuck with it since then. After I became comfortable, I found that I can switch between the two without even thinking about it. When I first sit down to type, if the first character is an error, my brain automatically switches.
My experience has been:
1) No more hand problems at all.
2) I still type slower in dvorak than I did with qwerty, but I was a really fast typist. (I worked as a secretary for a few months before I got my first full time programming job.) I really haven't worked on typing faster because I attribute 1) to my slow down in typing not a better layout.
3) I can still type qwerty, but I am quite a bit slower.
4) Having dvorak as your keyboard prevents people from pushing you off the keyboard when you are working on a problem.
Why is your backspace key still mapped to control H? Fix that one first.
There's a "Programmer Dvorak" layout designed for just this purpose.
Wow, I never thought of it that way.. I always hated the way that the letters were moved.
I am a Dvorak typist. Check out my sig for a review of the keyboard I use - it's pretty slick in my opinion.
Read my keyboard review.
I thought that most people would have it the other way around. (Dvorak at home and qwerty at work)
How can you be on Slashdot and not get the joke? My how things have gone downhill over the years.
As a kid, I set up my Apple IIc in Dvorak (there was a little switch), but it didn't stick. I again took up Dvorak six years ago, when I bought my first Kinesis Ergonomic (Classic) keyboard.
The interesting thing is, I can type very well Dvorak on the Kinesis... I can type very well QWERTY on a flat keyboard (and a 'natural' keyboard is a flat one compared to a Kinesis)... I can type Dvorak on a flat keyboard with some mental struggle (I sometimes put my laptop in Dvorak to keep others off)... but I can't type QWERTY on a Kinesis at all!
Well, I have a Model M in which I moved all the keycaps to Dvorak. My typing has gone from about 80 wpm to like 10. I've only had about three days practice on it.
I wish to keep both under my hands. I keep reading how most people stick with either/or but not both. I know how to play a few musical instruments and they have different fingerings. How is keyboard touch typing any different?
I refuse to learn another language. I would not want to get confused when I return from France.
I started typing on a manual typewriter at age 7, I was taught by my Mother who happened to be a professional typist. I started using BBC Micros at about the same time and translated my typing skills to that machine.
:-)) and then my first job was as a legal secretary typing 30-40 legal briefs a day. Really boring, but I left the job with a 145WPM typing speed.
I also spent 2 years learning how to type properly for my GCSE's (got an A
The only time I've ever had trouble with my wrists was when:
a) I tried one of the MS Natural keyboard things for two weeks. I was in agony by the end of it and swore never to use one of the nasty things again.
b) To help my father-in-law out I spent 6 months working on a construction site using a hammer drill to drive 6" holes into concrete. Got some muscles and a nice tan out of it, however. My wrist and shoulders hated me for it.
The point is, if you are properly trained on how to use a keyboard and use sensible precautions I don't believe you will have any problems. The main thing to remember is to sit upright and not let your fingers curl.
You can use someone else's computer just fine. You don't just magically forget qwerty because you learned dvorak any more than you forget english because you learned spanish. And if you are typing for long enough on someone else's computer that the slower speed of your qwerty typing is a problem, then changing the keyboard map is very quick and easy.
Oh...sorry, my keyboard was accidentally switched to qwerty. That should be "dvorak rules".
For those of us with short fingers, the fact that the five true vowels are right there on the left home row, and the five most important consonants are on the right home row means less stretching. It's also a much faster way of typing. I won't be winning any typing competitions soon, but I went from barely clearing 20wpm on qwerty to over 50wpm on dvorak.
The only downside is that as a sofware engineer, I use curly and square braces far more than the average person, but they're way up there between the 0 and backspace keys.
He's right. Signing posts is dumb. Surrounding your nick with tildes is gay. I'm willing to sacrifice karma to second that vote.
I have always been interested in dvorak but in addition to the retraining time you have to figure out how to use vi all over again. The keys in vi are positioned where they are for a reason such as the hjkl cursor movement keys. They become scattered all over with dvorak. How does one deal with this?
In just twelve weeks, you will havd 45,352,718 keyboards! Surely *some* of them will beo Dvorak . .
hawk, now a keyboard merchant
No, this isn't a troll (not that I'm above trolling to mock that operating system in search of a decent editor).
.).
.
Anyway, Emacs is one of those habits that causes injury. After spending days engaged in massive editing with a CKIE [1] keyboard, I actually had to seek the quack for the pain. GIven the size of the keyboard and my hand, I have to rotate my left hand slightly to reach that far corner. On top of that, it's a long reach for my pinkie.
Yes, you *do* feel somewhat silly sitting there doing exercises for your pinkie (rubber band about pinkie and ring finger. Stretch, release, . .
hawk, who wishes that he could say that that was the only time he'd injured himself on a computer . .
[1] Control Key In Exile
I'm curious though how skewed this figure is, due to the fact that you probably use special keys (tab, escape, up arrow) to auto-complete file/directory names or repeat an entire command line. Don't forget also that you might use arrow keys and alt combinations to navigate within a single line.
hawk
Here they come.
The Dvorak proofs.
The debunking of the proofs.
The debunking of the debunkings.
The debunking of those who debunked the debunkers.
[Insert Monty Python break here]
The only solution to YADS is tasteless humor.
Oh, wait. Even better: a compromise. All new Amigas will ship with Dvorak keyboards.
There.
Everyone happy and free of debunked debunkers?
hawk
This is an interesting article showing some of the myths associated with Dvorak vs. QWERTY: http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml
alias aoeu='xmodmap ~/us.modmap'
alias asdf='xmodmap ~/dvorak.modmap'
Just stick the maps in both files and your done. Type asdf at the command line now it is dvorak. Do it again and it is back to normal. Easy. Now, lets get onto a real argument - use the normal dvorak layout or the Microsoft layout.
If you google around a bit, you'll find that the "Fable of the Keys" was written to talk about economics. They heavily cite one biased study, and make some ad hominem attacks, and then they pretty much close shop.
You can find ample debunkage if you look.
A lot of programs depend on positional layout of the keys to make sense instead of lexical meaning of the keys. Vi is the big obvious one, but there's also the notion that Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V are adjacent (Take that away and their lexical abbreviations don't make any sense. Since when does "V" stand for "paste"?) And then there's the video games, using the asdw diamond, and so on.
It's not worth the hassle for me to switch when there's other ways to decrease ergonomic stress, like not using an editor that requires the use of the pinky keys. (Vi is better ergonomically because you don't have to pinky-type for the arrow keys, the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys, and you don't have to crimp your hand in the unnatural position that is needed for mouse use.) That and the speed of editing things with Vi means I don't need to type as much to achieve the same effect.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
...you might as well advocate Esperanto.
While learning dvorak, and for months afterwards, I did indeed have a great deal of trouble typing in qwerty. That difficulty has eased with time. I fairly quickly (a couple of weeks) learned to type qwerty in a dos window (this was windows 95, which didn't have a command prompt so much as a dos prompt, and dos did not pick up the new layout). But in any other context I had problems with qwerty for months afterwards. It's now years later, and I can now switch back and forth with ease.
I'm ambivalent about the switch to dvorak, I'm not at all convinced it was worth it. It is nicer to type English text with, but I rarely type flat-out, so I don't think I've gained much.
I'm a programmer who switched to Dvorak quite some time ago. It's true that some of the symbols (C/C++ heavily used ones) are in odd locations, but that never really held me back from being able to type them for some reason.
The most significant difference I noticed was that I am now using more verbose variable, class, and function names because it's quite simple to type out what something's really used for now. As a result my code is much easier to follow and maintain than before.
In summary, I don't think the fact that I use vi made things any worse than if I used a mouse-based editor. In any case, after about 3 days I stopped feeling uncomfortable with Dvorak, and in about two weeks I was whizzing along. There's a few things that feel weird in Dvorak (like typing "ls" into the shell, which requires three different pinky keys for me), but there are other words that feel real good because you can "snap them out" fast and easy.
Chick Comics It IS work safe
I know I for one was moved
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
(btw - this is typed using a dvorak layout).
I couldn't tell! It's just like a real keyboard!!
It seems to me that Dvorak benefits mostly people who have already developed RSS. There's plenty of evidence that Dvorak reduces the amount of movement that's required given the same text. The value of that reduction in movement is of dubious value to a person who doesn't have wrist issues.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
and I found the Dvorak layout still a great improvement over Qwerty, but slightly less efficient than it would be for English.
If I would only type in Dutch, I would switch the 'j' and the 'y' key. But I type so much English that it's not worth it.
OTOH, when I type really fast in English, I tend to make mistakes with the vowels that don't happen in Dutch. I guess it's a combination of all the vowels being next to each other, and typing in a second language with these really weird un-roman vowel sounds.
However, there are many languages which are much more different from English than Dutch is. And luckily, Dutch doesn't have Umlauts. (Well, it doesn't have Umlauts to extent it's vowel repertoire. It does sometimes use them to mark syllable boundaries, but that's very rare. And even then, I usually need to ä or \"a)
I find the / and * keys on the keypad convenient for commenting in C and similar languages. It's faster than using shift-8.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Funny, I find that my speed limiting factor when doing any work is the thinking! I do most of my "work" with a blue Pilot pen. Man I love those pens. Then I go to the computer and write it/code it.
Which you don't do?
Where 'learning' is any typing where you don't pause to think all the time. (copying stuff, dictation, typing tutors, etc.) If you cram lots of typing hours in very little days, the effect will be less per hour (but more per day).
It took me 2 weeks to get to 30 wpm, and I spent about two hours a day learning. After that, I stopt typing for the purpose of learning to type, and the speed gradually kept rising.
I think I can type 'comfortably' at 70 wpm - I don't usually measure my relaxed, untimed typing speed. On a short (few minutes) typing test, I can score 90-100 wpm, but it is mentally strenuous.
My 'before' qwerty score was about 60 wpm. But that is not reliably, because I typed with 6 fingers then, and with 9 fingers now.
If you're already typing really fast, the mental process rather than the motorical process can become the bottleneck. Switching layouts will not help in such a case. Even then, typing Dvorak might be more comfortable.
My 'learning' from an English typing course easily transferred to other languages, to unix commands, etc. So once I had learned to type 30wpm in English, I could do the same in Dutch without studying. But programming punctiation, the one-letter commands in mutt and emacs, and all my passwords, had to be learnt all over again. That might take some extra time, depending on which applications you use.
I just think that people cause it themselves.
:), and he's helping address the root cause of my disfunction.
That's easy to say if you don't have any structural problems that predispose you to an RSI. My "RSI" flared up first semester in college (CS program). I tried everything - exercises, stretches, postural changes, expensive keyboards, massage (all different types), diet, vitamins, chiropractors, "keyboard vacations", Bowen therapy, other energy modalities, etc. Nothing worked. Some things helped a little bit, the first time or two. But nothing helped consistently.
I recently started consulting a certain kind of Osteopath (see Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Healing chapter 2, or the osteopathy heading in Robert Zieve's Healthy Medicine - it's taken me a long time to put this information together, you'll have to work a little bit too.
The year before I entered college, I was knocked out with a blow to my chin, spent 10 days in the hospital, and don't remember about 2 weeks total. I figure that's when I broke the rib. (Osteopath: "You have a broken rib back here." me: huh? when did that happen? "like an old injury, that's all healed up now?" Osteopath: "yes", poke poke. me: ow!) Trauma from that incident got stored in my body's myofascial tissue. I was holding my left hip 1-1.5" higher than my right, had a couple displaced ribs, a displaced 1st cervical vertebrae, and a pile of myo-fascial lesions, all of which conspired together to make computer usage a burden for these past 5+ years.
This osteopath, using just his hands, can find these "lesions", and release them. I've been back to see him several times, and while the results are not instant, progress is steady, and I've never felt better. My jaw works much better (used to have horrible TMJ trouble), I'm beginning to be able to relax, and my keyboarding troubles are gradually improving.
I found Dr. Weil's book at a thrift shop soon after starting osteopathic care. I read Ch. 2, which clicked with something my mother had told me the last time I was around her. She'd tell me frequently what a difficult child I was, how I was always crying at the slightest provocation, and how nothing she did could quiet me. She ended up blaming all the grapefruit she ate, or maybe the yellow paint in my room... Fortunately I don't remember that period in my life, because from what I now know, I was crying because I was hurting.
Growing up, I remember tossing and turning in bed for hours before I was able to fall asleep. Every night. I finally learned a form of self-hypnosis after my head-injury, and was able to "drop out" most nights with ease, though some nights I'd still toss for a long time before sleep took over.
So I asked my osteopath if some of these lesions I had/have could be old, from when I was a child. He said this was probable. I've been stiff like a 4x4" wooden post... And now my flexibility is beginning to improve too.
The trick to not getting injured is fixing your habits, toys or no toys...
For me, the Thinkpad laptop (w/ the eraser pointing device) I got that freshman semester was the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back". There was nothing I could have done to prevent "getting injured", with all the lead weights I was carrying around from unresolved traumas suffered while growing up. Or in another analogy: I'd accumulated a large bunch of kindling over the years. The Thinkpad was the spark that set the kindling on fire, and the only way for me to put it out was to take the kindling away (osteopathically).
I asked my osteopath if the lesions ever come back. He said "no", then corrected himself with the example of a secretary who'll hold the phone up to their ear with their shoulder - those kinds of lesions will reappear, and you fix that by changing the environme
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Here, compare the two keyboards side-by-side with your own text!
"Good news, everyone!"
It's nice that all the Dvorak promoters were able to get together at one time.
I have been using DVORAK for 6 years.
:)
I currently type about 80WPM in both DVORAK and QWERTY. I use QWERTY at home, because the wife and I share a computer, and I use DVORAK at work. Switching back and forth is no problem, except for curly braces {}. I can't type a damn curly brace in QWERTY without looking...
Also, as others have pointed out, it is a slight nuisance whenever other people want to use your computer; you have to alt+shift+2 to change to QWERTY, and then alt+shift+1 to change back.
I did not see any speed boosts when switching from QWERTY to DVORAK, but I do feel like my wrists have improved. I was feeling some carpel tunnel pain when I made the switch, and the pain went away within a few weeks!
However, I also started using a wrist rest at the same time, so maybe that was the key factor......
Anyways, I don't plan to ever give it up, because I figure it can't hurt to be proficient in both layouts! Plus, my good friend - FireWrought - uses it, and I want to be able to use his computer
I don't get how you can have a different number of strokes for the same number of characters. Is a stroke only counted when a finger moves from the home position?
I really have nothing to say, but being passionate about Dvorak means that I have to post *something*, how could I not?
OK, I also speak Esperanto and vote Libertarian.
One main problem that I have with Dvorak is that in the event of a typo, the mistyped words become *other* real words. While typing on Qwerty, I can usually see my typos from a mile away, what with A's becoming Q's and E's becoming R's. With Dvorak, like letters are next to each other to help facilitate typing, but this also increases the probability of typos becoming dictionary words.
;D
This wouldn't be such an issue, except that with all the official correspondence going on online and using computers these days, a typo could lead to a word that wouldn't be.. appropriate.. for the document(s) at hand. It's hilarious to see in chat rooms though.
and it is more comfortable
Can the DVORAK keyboard offer a viable alternative to WASD for first-person shooters? Looking at a picture of it on wikipedia, it doesn't seem like very practical switch for the avid computer gamer at least. Maybe a DVORAK user could share his or her gaming experiences?
Sorry, but the problem isn't your keyboard layout, it's that you're using a keyboard to enter information to begin with. I'm a decent typist, but in the few minutes it's taken me to compose this, I could have had a couple of phone conversations on the same topic and transmitted more information. Altering the layout is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, you feel like you've accomplished something but the ship's still sinking. While I think voice recognition systems would be ideal (given the information density that I mentioned above) I don't think any of the currently available ones could completely replace the keyboard under all circumstances. Given that we know how to build alternative input devices for those who can't type, can't we leverage that knowledge to enable faster input?
I first learned about Dvorak from some magazine like Byte back in the late 70's. I bought a keyboard with nothing but pins sticking out the back, moved the keys around into the Dvorak layout, wired it by hand soldering wires to make the matrix in the proper order, wired that to a keyboard encoder chip, and mounted it in a box. That went via a parallel port to my Altair 8800 computer. I'm not a touch typist but I did find that I could type a lot faster and with less movement. This concludes today's Ancient History of Microprocessors lesson.
J
I've been typing Dvorak for over ten years, and can tell you from experience:
1. You don't spontaneously forget how to type Qwerty. The worst thing is that when you sit down at another person's keyboard, the first word often comes out in the wrong key mapping.
2. It does help with repetative motion disorders. In fact, that's why I switched. The aching in my wrists often reminds me that it's been too long since I switched over the machine I'm currently working on.
3. Oddly enough, when I'm typing Dvorak and my wrists start aching, switching to Qwerty also relieves the pain for a bit.
Microsoft's implementation of Dvorak is REALLY annoying for anyone who is a switch typer. In the last three versions of windows that I've had, the location of the dialong where you set this information has changed with each new release. It was under "keyboard" in 98, Accessibility options in 2000, and is now under Regional and Language options in XP.
As if finding it weren't difficult enough, once you've performed the switch, you have to close all of your programs if you want them to have the correct mapping. This is really annoying if you decide to switch mid-document. You have NO IDEA how tough it is to have half of the windows open be in one mapping while the other half are in the other.
On the other hand, I've always cherished the looks of various people when they go to use my keyboard to type something. It's worse than an Emacs user trying to use vi. I often joke that I have an encrypted keyboard. One of these days I'm hoping that I'll go to type on someone ELSE's dvorak keyboard and disappoint them when I just shake my hands, hit the backspace a few times, and then happily pile out words in dvorak.
I believe that the point was that those things don't make it into the shell history file.
I've been using dvorak for about 6 months now on all my computers, and using qwerty occasionally at school... but every now and then I start typing qwerty on one of my home computers. This started very recently, like in the last few weeks. You ever noticed this, or am I just weird?
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
I dunno about that... maybe I just haven't been using vi for long enough (2 years at most, so far), but when I switched to dvorak, even vi commands still came naturally, as if I were still typing on qwerty (i.e. they still worked just fine). I don't use the hjkl keys, which would probably have been troublesome, but I never had a problem.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
At one point, I wrote a keyboard "evolver" program, using a fairly good model of finger travel as the objective function, and a genetic algorithm to make things go -- and what I found was that if I seeded dvorak in, I ended up with basically no evolution, just a lot of little dvoraks running around. Now, that doesn't mean that Dvorak is the optimum layout -- but it would seem to indicate that it's smack in the middle of a rather deep local minimum. :)
Go ahead, resort to an ad hominem attack when you don't like the message.
It may not be politically correct to mention but it ain't "pseudoscientific babble".
See Arlington, D.E., Leaf, R.C. and Monaghan, J.R. (1992) Effects of stimulus color, pattern, and practice on sex differences in mental rotations task performans. Journal of Psychology 126, 539-553.
See also Halpern, D.F. (1992) Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
See also Resnick, S.M. (1993). Sex differences in mental rotations: An effect of time limits? Brain and Cognition 21, 71-79.
See also Delgao, A.R. & Prieto, G. (1996). Sex differences in visual-spatial ability: Do performance factors play such an important role?. Memory and Cognition, 24, 504-510.
See also Burin, D.I., Delgado, A.R. & Preito, G. (2000). Solution strategies and gender differences in spatial visualtization tasks. Psicologica, 21, 275-286.
And there's tons more published, supporting research out there in well-respected, peer-reviewed journals.
Sure some research is starting to investigate the cause (the old nature/nuture chestnut) but the only assertion I made was a correlative one.
This is a true story that depicts my descent into the hellish world of "computer customization."
It started innocently about a year ago; as few friends of mine sat around the glow of the monitor and trolling for Grammar Nazis on Usenet. Lucie said something or other about different keyboard layouts. I didn't think anything about it until the next time we met over at Bill's place.
Lucie had this black bag with her and she pulled out a keyboard. "C'mon," she urged with a malicious twinkle in her eye, "its called a Dvorak and all the kewl kidz are using them."
Bill said that was cool and plugged it in. We each took turns typing with it and all of us liked it much better than the old QWERTY keyboards.
I felt odd going back to the old layout on my own computer so I gave Lucie a call a few evenings later and she said her brother was expecting a big order at the end of the month. I managed to wait four more days until the 31st and I was riding high until the 18th when I was called in to the Principal's office. She asked me if I was alright or if there was something stressful happening at home. I said I was fine and I went to Lucie's place to wind down after school.
Lucie told us that the latest thing was "ergonomic keyboards" and she had only two for us to sample tonight. I fell hard for this and bought one before leaving. By this time I was leaving school at noon just to type on my new keyboard.
Over at Mike's place on Saturday evening Lucie pulled out a track ball and made Mike unplug his mouse and use this instead. Mike was too square to try using it and we all had a laugh at his old-school QWERTY keyboard and his cheap clone mouse.
Lucie and I began dating during the summer and then her brother committed suicide on June 15th. I started pushing peripherals in July and we bought his and hers Porsche Boxters in August. Apparently this was too much for our parents, Mike's Dad ratted us out and we now face charges of trafficking in computer accessories and other electronic devices. We lucked out since the police never found the boxes of aluminum mouse pads and chording keyboards in my folk's garage.
School starts in a week and I think we will each do well in our senior year. We have learned our lesson and now use standard peripherals only. Once a week we attend an accessories-anon meeting with our parents which helps a lot. Don't let this obsession ruin your life.
I'd heard of Dvorak and found some pictures of the layout and took the time to build my own Dvorak setup on System (Mac OS) 7.5
At first, it was quite a pain to type in. I started out mainly in the home row, typing words that really take advantage of Dvorak's setup, like "the", "then", "this", etc. At the time I did most of my thinking in Qwerty, still.
To type "the" for example, I'd think type "kjd". And, you know, that's not really much harder than the nonsense that touch typing programs have us spout. Only, even from the start, it was more likely I'd be typing something sensible with only the home row.
I'd say proficiency took about two or three weeks to obtain. The next stage came when I went back to school and started taking some programing courses.
The machines were running 98, and I wasn't really versed in how to change the layout to Dvorak. Going back to Qwerty was, initially a hunt and peck affair. I'd say it took a week to relearn that skill and now I type at least 65 WPM on either layout, and can switch at will.
As for comfort, Dvorak is far and away the most comfortable layout for me. It, in combination with an ergonomic keyboard make for a very nice experience. And, really, most operating systems make the switch as easy as going to a preference pane, control panel or a text file and changing the layout variable.
It's not a matter of drivers. And it's worth trying out. Give it three weeks, and if you don't like it, well, no one's going to care. We'll use Dvorak when we can and you can stick with Qwerty.
1) Take all your keyboards and sort them into two piles: one for all the rubber-dome keyboards, one for the buckling-spring and Alps-keyswitch ones.
2) Take the second pile and put them back where you got them.
3) Take the first pile out in the yard, dump them in a steel drum, douse them with gasoline, and BURN THEM.*
4) Go buy more spring- or Alps-based keyboards to fill any shortfall you now have.
* Standard disclaimers about toxic fumes, flame hazards, etc. apply.
I'm pretty well convinced it's less important which layout you use than how high the quality of your keyboard itself is. After two weeks using my wife's built-in higher-quality rubber-dome QWERTY laptop keyboard while on honeymoon, it's been physically painful going back to typing on the crappy rubber-dome QWERTY desktop keyboards we have at work for the last two days.
Yes, better keyboards will cost you (minimum $25-30, more likely $50, and you can go as high as $100 easily -- I even saw one super-duper-everything keyboard priced at $700), but this is your comfort and health we're talking about, plus they're much more tolerant of spills and other abuse. Spend the money. Invest in a relatively cheap (compared to half a dozen good keyboards, anyway) KVM so you don't have to buy a pricey keyboard for each computer.
If you think about it, Dvorak keyboards ought to make you more prone to RSI, not less... you're still typing the same letters, but now your fingers are moving with less variation to do it, which is practically the standard recipe for RSI. Am I missing something there?
-- Old Man Kensey
I've posted about Dvorak a few times, but here is my story.
I've been using Dvorak for nearly 4 years now - and it's been great.
At the time of my switch I was a software engineer, and I was suffering bad RSI - at times it was like there was sand in my tendons, rubbing up and down whenever I moved a finger.
Then, searching on the Internet (typically), I found out about Dvorak. I switched.
At first, it was a pain to switch over. I couldn't find the keys, I typed slowly. My favorite shortcuts in 'joe' didn't work anymore.
But after a few weeks, I found my typing speed increased. And my RSI pain lessened. Considerably.
Then I had to go back to a QWERTY keyboard for a while. Took a little while, but then I found my skills again.
Nearly 4 years on, I haven't had a reoccurance of RSI to the same extent, I type faster, and I can switch at will.
It's all good, and I'm one happy Dvorak user.
The moderators are definitely out to lunch today on the parent...
I went and found a chart showing the dvorak layout and have been trying to teach myself how to touch type all over again. It has only been a few hours but it is already obvious to me that if I stick with it that it will definitely pay off in the long run.
The bad thing is now I want to kick myself in the ass for spending more than 20 yrs on the qwerty layout. I actually thought that retraining would be much harder.
that many who are enthusiastic about the speed and ease of Dvorak layouts simply make that experience because they actually *did make* and effort to learn proper typing with that layout, but probably never made a similar effort with QWERTY.
What joke?
oops i forgot to turn my keyborad to dvorak for the title
... he was trying to touch-type. He should have used two fingers.
Of course, if you do QWERTY typing by the book, "cd" is just as irritating as "ls" in Dvorak...
I actually slide over one set of keys and use ESDF.
The little nubbin on the F helps me find the right keys again if I need to hit other keys to issue a command or something.
But you can double your productivity with Dvorak, and then double it again changing to Emacs. :)
Because real programmers use emacs, you know.
(Well, that's not so true, now I ditched emacs for Eclipse, most of the time. Well, now I code in java, so maybe I am not a real programmer any more.)
Yes, real programmers _do_ use emacs
QWERTY: Total strokes are 14869 and total distance is 26349.32260203948.
So, there you have it. If you're a UNIX admin who uses QWERTY, you are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
For a second there, that sounded like a really sick contest.