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Is DVORAK Gaining Traction Among Coders?
coderpath asks: "At a recent Seattle Ruby Brigade hack night someone asked how many people used the DVORAK keyboard layout. Out of 9 people, 7 used DVORAK and only 2 were using QWERTY. I personally made the switch last Christmas, after 25 years of typing with QWERTY. What do you use? Have you switched to DVORAK? Have you been wanting to make the switch? Has anyone else noticed an increase in adoption of DVORAK lately?"
Very few people are switching. Very few people ever did switch. And very few people will switch in the future. I use Qwerty, or a national variant of it, as is 99.99% of everybody else using a computer. I have never switched to Dvorak. I once considered it, and determined it would be a waste of time, as I'm not a secretary, I already type pretty fast, there is no Dvorak for Norwegian, and I like having labels matching output on the keys of my keyboard. Also I'm weird enough as it is, and don't need to type weirdly too. So in conclusion, no I haven't really wanted to make the switch, otherwise I would have done it long ago. I have absolutely not noticed an increase in Dvorak use lately. It's probably the same two people who are still using it now, as it was in 1952.
You don't need a Dvorak keyboard anymore. Just change the settings in the OS. Ah, but what about the keycaps, you ask? Leave 'em as they are. I started using Dvorak about seven or eight years ago, and when I did I got a programmable keyboard. I was never quite as fast using Dvorak as I was with QWERTY, but I persevered. When I eventually got a Mac, the programmable keyboard wouldn't work with it, so I just used a QWERTY keyboard and remapped it within the OS. Within two weeks my typing speed in Dvorak significantly improved, since I could no longer fall back on looking at the keys as a crutch. When I didn't know where a key was exactly, I would start hitting around near it until I found it. I think the learned muscle memory from that experience was a far better teacher than having the keycaps. Interestingly, my QWERTY typing speed improved somewhat as well, because I realized how often I had been glancing at the keys while I typed, out of sheer force of habit from when I was learning to type. I quickly broke that habit, and my typing speed went up maybe 20%.
I ultimately stopped using Dvorak because it was too much of a pain to reconfigure the keyboard all of the time when getting a new game or something. I doubt I'll go back at this point, since I currently make my living using Avid and I know all of the Avid commands I regularly use by their letter and keyboard position. I could remap them, I suppose, but after all the fun I had trying to use Emacs with a Dvorak layout, I'm not sure I find the advantages of Dvorak compelling enough to bother.
The cost is nothing. I'm typing this on an IBM model M with the keycaps re-arranged to Dvorak. I've had Windows, MacOS X, and Linux all set to use the Dvorak keyboard layout with no troubles.
Now, as for actually having the keycaps set to Dvorak, that's mostly for when you start out. Once you develop your muscle memory so that you can touch type, it's really not an issue. MacOS X even has the DQ (Dvorak-QWERTY) mode for helping people who type like this. When you're typing normal text, the layout is Dvorak; when you press the command button, it shifts back to QWERTY so the shortcuts you're used to (Apple-X, C, V, etc) are all in the same location as before.
The real cost is your personal time. You will not be able to type above 50wpm for a few weeks.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
How much of an improvement in QWERTY could you see if you spent as much time improving that skill rather than learning DVORAK? Obviously you hit diminishing returns, but for a lot of people, the effort and time spent to switch just won't get enough of a return.
Now if only I could figure out how to make vim map CAPS LOCK to CONTROL when it starts up, I'd have it made...
Just junk food for thought...
Nice link. Perhaps you'll be interested in another post from that site?
Charming.
I use the Colemak layout, which has a custom mapping for vim.
Colemak is much better than QWERTY, from a research paper listed the Colemak site:
"All things considered, I believe Colemak is better than Dvorak and the best alternative to QWERTY."
The layout is similar to QWERTY in some ways QWZXCVBM stay in the same place, but everything else moves.
CAPS becomes BACKSPACE. Colemak was entered in the CAPSoff competition (a contest for keyboards with CAPS lock), which it won.
Colemak was designed by Shai Colemak after considering the most common digraphs (two letter combinations).
When you start to type quickly, your brain works on it's memory of key combinations, not key locations, so you'll start typing in QWERTY while you're learning, as you speed up.
It took me 3x 10 hour days using ktouch to learn the layout well enough to use it well and about 2 months to equal my QWERTY speed. All progress from there.