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."

Comments

Dvorak is very good

[treff89]

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!

Re:Dvorak is very good

[johnrpenner]

it IS very good -- i switched back in 1997 over christmas.
although the first two weeks were hell, having all the vowels
and the most statistically frequent consonants on the home row
really increases typing speed and comfort.

the things that have helped most with reducing RSI are:

1) using the dvorak layout for typing.

2) reprogram mouse to eliminate double-clicks, and

3) learning to play a musical instrument (e.g. bass guitar)
to force the muscles into definite 'other' contortions
than are required by using a mouse (handwriting would
also work).

(btw - this is typed using a dvorak layout).

Staying away for now.

[AtariAmarok]

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?

Re:Only going to work if it became standard

[bigtallmofo]

My history of typing (all on QWERTY):

First learned to type on my Commodore 64 when I was 10.
My first year of typing class in high school, I typed 70 WPM while my typing teacher typed 65 WPM.
My second year of typing class, I was up to about 90 WPM.
My third year of typing class, I was up to about 110 WPM.

I'm a 33-year old professional programmer with 15 years professional experience and now type over 130 WPM. I've never had a single problem with wrist or hand pain until about 3 months ago. I started having all kinds of numbness in my hand and pain in my wrist. Needless to say, I freaked out. The problem went from nothing to seriously impeding me in a matter of days.

Considering I never believed that carpal tunnel syndrome or other wrist problems existed previously, I was quite surprised. After a few weeks with fiddling with various things (using wrist straps at night, using Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard, taking B vitamins, etc.) I'm now symptom free. Pretty much the only thing I do now is use the MS Natural keyboard both at work and home and that seems to keep any problems at bay.

The bottom line is, just because you don't have any symptoms now doesn't mean that you won't sometime soon. Trust me, you'll be quite surprised if it happens.

My findings

[kahei]

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.

Dvorak sucks if you're not American.

[Vo0k]

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.

in Mac OS X...

[mnemonic_]

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.

Studies on Dvorak - the patent holder

[tz]

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.

Re:Only going to work if it became standard

[Azghoul]

If your troubles went away that quickly you probably just sprained a nerve or something.

That kind of thing has happened to me on occasion, too.

Re:Only going to work if it became standard

[Troed]

Thanks. More stories like yours are needed for some elitists to believe the rest of us. I started using computers when I was 12 - but I got serious RSI problems already at 23 (many years ago now). Nowadays I seldom have problems just because I learnt how to deal with them.

For me, I use different setups at work and at home - change is a good thing. I have a "normal" keyboard at home, and I use the mouse with my left hand (I'm right handed). At work I use a natural keyboard and a symmetric trackball (Kensington Orbital) centered _in front_ of the keyboard.

I cannot use my right hand to control a mouse for more than 5 minutes though - that's the one lasting effect I got.

Cato institute hmm

[kahei]

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 :)

Re:Only going to work if it became standard

[19thNervousBreakdown]

You just need to stick with it. I made the switch about 2 years ago. It was the most about the most frustrating thing I've ever done. I couldn't type more than 10 wpm for a week, and didn't get above 30 for a month.

After hitting about 30 wpm my speed picked up very quickly, and I was back to my old speed of ~80 wpm in around 2 weeks.

Then I sat down at a QWERTY keyboard. I was down to 20 wpm or less! Because I was forced to do it, I switched back and forth every day for months, primarily using Dvorak and very slowly regained my old speed. Now I can switch back and forth between keyborad layouts in an instant... just to test myself to see if I'm exaggerating I've been switching my keyboard layout back and forth while typing this reply. I do have the occasional mistype, especially with vowels and punctuation, but if I slowed down enough to be at 0% errors I'd still be at 60 wpm in QWERTY, and I don't have any problems in Dvorak. After using both layouts for a while it's about as easy as switching languages.

Re:DVORAK for real world, SysAdmin/Programming use

[helixblue]

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.