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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
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.
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 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...
But it breaks vi! What's the point??????
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 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/
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.
Found some on this page http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/national.html, as I was looking for a norwegian layout. There is a swedish layout there aswell.
The link to the norwegian dvorak layout is a bit wrong on the mwbrooks page the correct is http://www.stenling.no/dvorak/
Have a mirror.
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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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
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"
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.
On a side note, Some of my friends never used a computer before the late 90's never mind actually typing.
I'm impressed that you have friends in their late nineties that can even use a computer.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
- 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!
If you're typing fsck often enough to worry over speed, you've got bigger problems than your key layout.
Dvorak didn't think of those because he was a classical composer and wasn't into heavy metal. Sheesh, didn't you learn anything in school?
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.
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.
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~
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.
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.
He's been dead for years. He's a decomposer now.
rewriting history since 2109
I've never understood how some people can be so vocal about wanting others to STFU.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
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.
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?
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.
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.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Wow! I get 34% more excercise than you! Watch those calories melt away, to say nothing of my fingers' 34% better muscle tone! ;)
Why is your backspace key still mapped to control H? Fix that one first.
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