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?"

Comments

Languages

[JanneM]

Dvorak is optimized for writing English. Most coders - like most computer users in general - do not use English as their main language, and for us Dvorak is substantially worse than the qwerty layout in every way.

So no, most coders are not switching to Dvorak.

Re:Languages

[JanneM]

Can you provide any examples? Most code consists of words. What's left over is punctuation.

Most coders spend at least as much time - normally substantially more - writing in their natural language, not actually writing lines of code. Comments, specs, documentation (in the code and test documentation sense), email, project reports, IM ... And that's the stuff you do as part of work, not the time you spend off work on discussion sites, writing a blog, communicating with friends and family or whatever.

I don't assume anyone seriously proposes switching to Dvorak when about to write code, then switching back to their normal layout once you've written your line or two.

Re:Languages

[ozamosi]

I am currently using it, and I've used a more normal Dvorak layout before, and I'm not that impressed. Partly because I use funny letters, like åöä, which the Dvorak Programming layout requires me to use alt-gr for, but that is not in any way different from normal dvorak - just from the dvorak I used before.

My other complaint is that you have to use shift to type digits. Even though I enjoy being able to type special characters without pressing shift, I rarely write two special characters in a row, but I often write multiple digits, since numbers very oten consist of multiple digits. To solve that problem, I've replaced the numbers and the special characters. However, too many keys are on the numerics - the special characters would IMHO be much better placed on your home row or your upper row, just like they are in many swedish dvorak dialects, so I wouldn't have to stretch my fingers so much. I mean: I don't touch type on the numeric row, because my fingers are too short to reach it properly - don't cram too much stuff up there!

I sometimes wonder if there is any logic behind where the keys are placed. For instance, = is used on almost every line when you code, but it is in the least accessable position on the whole keyboard - on the absolute top, exactly between your index fingers. It feels like all special characters were moved around Just Because.

When it comes to the special digit arrangement: I'm not sure. I haven't been able to get used to it yet, so that means either that it sucks, or that I haven't tested it enough yet.

I should tell you that I probably don't code enough to experience the eventual advantages of this layout, but I still feel the layout isn't that good.

Alas, a laptop!

[Tragek]

I probably would switch, if there was a simple way to reconfigure my keyboard. Alas, laptops are not exactly amenable to keyboard layout switches.

Re:If only the cost was less...

[Seumas]

I don't know about that. If you already type about 100 wpm or so, how great is Dvorak giong to be for a coder? Are you really going to write code at 300 wpm? I doubt it. And while I suppose it might put less straight on your fingers, a lot of us have absolutely no problem with QWERTY. Not to mention the time involved in re-learning a new layout. And I gaurantee they aren't teaching Dvorak in school.

It's an improvement over QWERTY. Over that I don't think there is any doubt. But I'm not sure the improvement is worth it if what you have is working as it is. Dvorak is mostly just something people can brag about to be different, just like people who buy Zunes and iRivers so they can show how cool and different they are because they didn't buy an iPod.

DVORAK -- just for fanatics

[Henry V .009]

DVORAK is another way to show other people that you're different. Any benefits are minuscule and are outweighed by the incompatibility downsides. It's another symptom of the "geek" disease.

Buying a new keyboard is pointless.

[spiritraveller]

The complaints about there not being many Dvorak keyboards for sale are just silly.

Why would you change layouts without bothering to learn how to touch-type??? If you don't touch-type, you will never type fast, regardless of which layout you use. It doesn't matter what the keys on your keyboard say if you are touch-typing.

The best thing to do when learning a new layout is to have a copy of it on paper taped to your monitor. You want to get out of the habit of looking at the keyboard, not perpetuate it.

Re:Vim

[zsau]

I learnt VIM with Qwerty, and now I use VIM with Dvorak, a lot better and more skilfully than before. There's no reason to remap VIM's layout (and plenty of reasons not to). It will probably take a while to get used to it, but once you are you might find you use hjkl a lot more: in particular, I've found the hj (up/down ... or is it down/up? i just use them, i don't think about them) to be much better placed on dvorak than qwerty (they're on the left hand, so you have a choice: use hj with left hand, or cursor keys with right hand).

Once you're used to VIM+dvorak, it's absolutely no harder than VIM+qwerty. I would expect it'll take you longer to get used to VIM+dvorak than anything else+dvorak, but if you love vi as much as I do, it'll only motivate you to learn faster :)

On the other hand: Although I can touchtype fluently in qwerty and dvorak, my VIM+qwerty skills are almost entirely gone. I have to stop and think about just about everything; it's painful and the only time I ever regret switching. If you're going to be bouncing around on computers whose keyboard layouts you can't control, and you use VIM, consider this before switching. Maybe just remap some keys so up/down are where god (not Bill Joy) intended.

Re:Vim

[im_thatoneguy]

I switched to Dvorak. However:

1) I hated switching the hotkeys of every app I touched.
2) After a month was still significantly faster at QWERTY and doubted I could catch up to a lifetime of QWERTY in less than a year.
3) Knew the world would always be qwerty and I usually wouldn't be able to switch it over, so I would have to switch back and forth at work, on a co-workers computer, on my blackberry, etc etc etc.

so I gave up.

I'm not going to carry around a config file for the 10,000 applications I use every week on multiple computers because I want to type a bit faster. That's a false optimization in my opinion.