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Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY
Michael Pyne sends in an article published at Reason Online 13 years ago, dismantling the entrenched myth that the Dvorak keyboard layout is a superior technology to QWERTY. The odd thing is that this 13-year-old article recaps research (refereed and published in a respected economics journal) 19 years ago. While we have discussed Dvorak many times over the years, I don't believe we have dug into this convincing-sounding refutation of the Dvorak mythology. The article is in the context of arguing against the conventional wisdom of "first mover advantage" — that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece.
Is that old blowhard at it again? Why do you keep posting stuff about this bozo?
This guy's the limit!
The world is full of people who tried Dvorak and didn't think it was all that special.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
clearly never played EVE-online
Don't panic
tl;dr
If you're serious about typing at high speeds, you know better than to use a sequential keyboard, you go for chorded. A sequential keyboard is one where you type all letters in sequence, such as the common qwerty or dvorak. A chorded keyboard is parallel in the sense that you type whole syllables at the same time; it's kind of like playing the piano. Instead of typing s-y-l-l-a-b-l-e, you'd type syl-la-ble. Do that at speed and you're golden; you can get around three times the speed of ten-fingered qwerty once you're into the system and have it in muscle memory.
The sad truth is of course that that qwerty is here to stay since it has no barrier to entrance: you start with hunt and peck and take off from there. Chorded keyboards take conscious effort to master, but once you're trained on them, they're bliss.
Check out the Veyboard, by a Dutch company, it's one of the nicer chorded systems. (Doesn't lean heavy on abbrevs and cryptospeak like Stenotype.) http://www.veyboard.nl
but because it saved my writs from the carpal tunnel syndrome. I really started to feel pain in my wrists, after switching to dvorak it vanished. Now, tell me what you want, it may be a placebo effect or whatever, but my fingers move less on the keyboard, I write about 10wpm faster than I did before with qwerty (150 vs 140), and best of all I don't feel any pain any more.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
From what I've heard, QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down, but rather to try to stop commonly adjacent letters being adjacent on the keyboard. Keys jammed then adjacent keys were pressed at the same time, so you want this to happen infrequently.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.
As someone who types with only one hand [nerve damage to left hand/arm] I'd like to point out that Dvorak exists in three standard layouts: two-handed, left-handed, and right-handed. I've been typing on QWERTY since I was about 10, and typing on Dvorak-RH since I was 18. The difference in speed isn't actually great, but the difference in required range of motion and therefore repetitive strain injury is significant. It's worth it for that alone; QWERTY spreads keys so far apart that typing with one hand is painful after only a few minutes.
..Just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for other keyboard layouts, accessibility for the disabled among them.
That said, it's really only good for English, which isn't an issue to me but would of course be for people who type more often in other languages.
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
I find switching between QWERTY and DVORAK as easy as transposing key signatures in music. Ask any studied musician about transposing from C major to G major, it is just a tiny mental shift, that's all. I must admit, though, that going from a regular DVORAK to a Microsoft "split" keyboard , natural keyboard, or ergonomic keyboard is very frustrating.
Optimizing layout for specific use would be cool. But having to re-learn the layout every time I encounter a new keyboard isn't.
Not really, the keys are placed on a Dvorak keyboard based upon the frequency of use. Trying to balance it so that as much as possible you're not using the same finger for consecutive letters and often times not on the same hand. It's basically meant to be fast and efficient. Whether or not that's the case is a matter for consideration elsewhere.
And yes, that does depend a great deal upon the language, as just because you're talking about 21 different non-vowels, they're not necessarily optimally placed in the same places in French as in German as in English. And you've also got the added need to consider the special characters, accents, umlauts, etc.
The first mover effect is just another case of hysteresis induced by positive feedback. This is a very common phenomenon present in many physical and other systems; it is hardly a surprise that it would exist in economic systems as well. In the context of the economy, it is simply a reflection that sometimes any standard is better than no standard, even if that standard is absurd.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"? I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
This article is the sort of crap that results in people talking about "market fundamentalists" and dismissing the very real benifits of decentralized decision making produced by healthy markets. The authors of this article missed three key points:
Healthy markets really are a good way to solve resource allocation problems and to make locally effective choices. They're probably even the best way. But saying that all markets always have optimal outcomes is absurd and results in people making the opposing absurd claim ("all markets are broken and need either heavy regulation or to be replaced with central planning") sound more reasonable.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I used to get pains in my finger joints from typing too much. Switching to a Microsoft Natural keyboard helped, but did not alleviate the pains I was getting. Then I did some research and reasoned that switching from Qwerty to Dvorak layout might help me. Ten days later, I was completely switched. My finger pains completely stopped. I haven't looked back.
I don't care about the subjective speed or typo difference between Qwerty and Dvorak. Dvorak's logical arrangement of keys cuts down finger travel, and that is easily quantifiable.
It's very much a pro-markets piece.
It's very much a pro-markets publication. While the arguments put forward rest on their own merits, it's safe to say that Reason Online -- whose masthead includes the slogan, "Free Minds and Free Markets" -- is certainly not going to publish articles that challenge the idea that the market is an efficient and rational actor, at least most of the time. Whether that inherent bias extends to cherry-picking the data used to reach conclusions, or whether the data is even unambiguous, are things one needs to consider in cases like this.
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse. For any of that to mean anything, one would have to survey a substantial sampling of such cases, determine which represented the majority and by what measure (total monetary value, units sold, etc.) and then look at all kinds of other factors (market segment, cost of switching products, and so on) before one could begin to draw useful and quite probably heavily qualified conclusions.
Then there's the inherent ambiguity involved in "superiority". Take Mac versus Windows versus Linux, for example. If, like most computer users, you have a preference, you can probably explain what drives that preference. But so can people who have different preferences. One might prefer Windows for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to a Mac aficionado, and vice versa. So which is superior? Obviously, there is no single, universal answer to this question -- and many others like it -- so we continue to see a market for Windows and a smaller, but quite healthy, market for Macs. Likewise, Harley-Davidson motorcycles continue to sell alongside everything from Vespa scooters to Honda racing bikes, and there are a dozen or more brands of sandwich bread at the average supermarket despite, what, more than six thousand years of not very exciting developments in bread technology.
The short version is that in any complex area of study riddled with exceptions and special cases, sweeping general conclusions are likely to be true, if at all, only within some arbitrary subset of cases that may be of very little predictive value, but that will seldom deter anyone with an article deadline and a point to "prove".
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I believe that the typewriter jamming issue solved by QWERTY makes typists faster. It's not true that QWERTY is designed to slow typists down. QWERTY is designed to eliminate ``hazards'' in the machine's ``pipeline''.
We can in fact liken this to the execution of instructions on a processor.
The opponents of QWERTY say that its purpose is to bring about ``underclocking'', i.e. slowing down of the overall keystroke issue rate. But the technical issue is not speed, but collision between the hammers in the typewriter. The margin, or window of interference for adjacent hammers (corresponding to keys that are in adjacent columns of the keyboard) is worse than for keys that are horizontally distant.
There can be consider parallelism in the action of these hammers. Two keystrokes can be in progress at the same time, with one hammer slightly ahead of the other. One strikes the tape and paper, then recoils, and the other one lands in the same spot afterward. The farther apart the hammers are located, the closer together they can be temporally; i.e. the faster the typist can issue these keystrokes without causing a jam! I.e. the typist is encouraged to be faster, not to be slower.
But this spaced arrangement also makes it easier for the typist to go fast. Alternation between the hands leads to much more rapid typing. The typist can double the rate compared to using one hand. It's difficult to type a fast sequence with the fingers of one hand. This is particularly true of the weaker fingers: ring finger and pinky. Pianists struggle to get these into shape. Try playing a fast trill using your ring finger and pinky on a weighted piano keyboard, then try it with your thumb and index finger, then with two strong fingers from the opposite hand.
Also it takes energy to make the keys and hammers move, in a typewriter or piano. The typist can use gravity: the weight of his forearm from the elbow can act through a single finger to send power to the keystroke. If two or more keys have to be hit in rapid succession using the same hand, the energy of a single fall of the forearm has to be distributed across all three. C. C. Chang describes the concept of parallel sets and gravity attack principle in his Fundamentals of Piano Practice http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book.
When piano music contains a monophonic passage (one melody line), pianists take advantage of two-handed fingering to achieve greater virtuosity. Playing a melody with one hand is a difficult compromise for the sake of polyphony (e.g. Bach two-part invention with two independent melody lines often at the same tempo).
Also look at the African folk instrument known as the thumb piano. It's a resonant box with protruding, tuned metal reeds that are plucked with the thumbs. The scale is arranged such that you can play fast runs by hitting notes with alternate thumbs on opposite sides of the ``reedboard''. Virtuoso thumb piano players can shred blazingly fast over scale and arpeggio runs due to this left right alternation. You can see these guys in action in Bela Fleck's documentary film Throw Down Your Heart http://www.throwdownyourheart.com/. It's hard to believe they are just using their thumbs.
Well, that concludes my typing rant. At least it's not about static versus dynamic typing, for once! :)
I have never understood how merely rearranging the keys on the same fscking keyboard could make a real difference. Yeah, you might get a 6% improvement in typing speed. Who cares?
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.). Our keyboards are in the stone age and the challenge is *not* the arrangement of the character keys, it's the arrangement of everything else. Where in a given layout your p's and q's actually are is a minor thing. Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
Its very difficult to compare as in typing speed measurements one will either be limited to different people as well as different keyboard layouts, or at least different amounts of exposure to each layout. And what about some control cases of randomly generated layouts or alphabetical layouts?
An interesting hypothesis to test would be that any keyboard layout might have similar typing speeds (say give a factor of 2 or so) once a user has enough experience with it - for things that can be typed with single key presses.
I _do_ have some personal experience with the (standard 2-hand) dvorak keyboard layout which anyone can try by selecting that layout in their OS's keyboard settings (irrespective of their physical keyboard), a side effect of this is that you will be forced to learn to touch-type as obviously the letters written on your standard keyboard will have no relation to what comes out on the screen any more!
Speaking entirely qualitatively - it was suprising how easy it was to learn, and a few times since I abandoned it I've gone back and found that it can be picked up again within an hour or two once learnt (just like riding a bike?). And as a few other posters have already mentioned (for typing normal English) it feels more comfortable as less finger movement is required on average.
However (and this is the reason I've abandoned using it) - the dvorak layout is inappropriate for most uses apart from simply typing English - such as computer programming, working with spreadsheets, linux command line usage etc.
This is because by arranging the characters by their frequency in standard english, many non-alphanumeric characters which are rarely used in standard english but now very frequently used for other tasks on a computer are placed in very awkard positions requiring you to type with the little finger (or even worse, shift + little-finger). Here are some examples
':' - used a lot in C++, is where shift-'z' is on qwerty.
'{' and '}' - are shift-'-' and shift-'=' on qwerty.
'\'' and '"' - are q and shift-'q' on qwerty.
The Flemish use an AZERTY layout, because then all of Belgium uses the same layout. It could have been the other way around, were it not that not too long ago, the French-speaking community (which included the upper class of Flanders) ruled over Belgica.
The Dutch had a wrangled QWERTY-layout, but these days it is almost obsolete. Almost everyone has switched to the standard en_US variant.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Dvorak layout is based on far more than that. Dvorak looked at the relative frequencies of words, of letters, of 2 and 3 letter groups and used a few mechanical principles (keystrokes that alternate hands are faster, the 1st and 2nd fingers are stronger than the others, the right hand is stronger for right handed people, that moving up is easier than moving down, that consecutive strokes with the same finger are easier if the finger is tracking down etc.).
Dvorak layouts exist for many languages, and the left-handed layout is different to the right. There are also one handed Dvorak layouts for each hand for those who can't use the other hand. And it's a simple mathematical process to develop a Dvorak layout for any alphabetic language.
For an example of a keyboard for a non-Latin alphabet, look at the alternate symbols on this Japanese keyboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBookProJISKeyboard-1.jpg
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Yes, very mysterious.
Frequencies English:
y = 1.974%
z = 0.074%
Frequencies German:
y = 0.04%
z = 1.13%
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequencies
> still wonder by how much, in that case.
./countletters.py <<EOF
Use this Python script:
import sys, string
d=dict([(k,0) for k in string.lowercase])
for ch in sys.stdin.read():
if string.lower(ch) in string.lowercase:
d[string.lower(ch)] += 1
print sorted(d.items(), key=lambda x:x[1], reverse=True)
Usage:
$
This is a sample sentence in English.
I am typing this text to see which letters are used the most.
I will repeat this for other languages I speak.
EOF
[('e', 18), ('t', 14), ('s', 13), ('i', 12), ('a', 8), ('h', 8), ('l', 6), ('n', 6), ('r', 5), ('g', 4), ('o', 4), ('p', 4), ('m', 3), ('c', 2), ('u', 2), ('w', 2), ('d', 1), ('f', 1), ('k', 1), ('y', 1), ('x', 1), ('b', 0), ('j', 0), ('q', 0), ('v', 0), ('z', 0)]
Do a `wget|html2txt|countletters.py' with a few pages from Wikipedias in various languages and you'll have the answer.
No instead they looked at previously done and reported studies on the effects of training typists with it.
Which is about seven thousand times better than making up your own anecdote without a control group.
Everyone I've known who has spent time training on QWERTY has said they are as fast or faster at it then before too. Almost their entire point was that of course with training people get faster, that's why you need a control group who is trained for the same amount of time on QWERTY... And looking at the apparent biased selections for that used in some previous studies.
...published in a respected economics journal...
Economists, meh. Who trusts them now? Look at the mess they got us into.
That's as logical as saying it's a reptile specific food geared towards mammals. And about as true.
At the bottom of the
I attest that Y is a consonant in Spanish. Vowels are only five: A, E, I, O, U.
Ydco b., nafrgy co k.pf jrbugocbi abe jrgby.p cbygcyck.
I've been using the dvorak layout for several years now and will say that:
1. Dvorak isn't necessarily faster than Qwerty.
I certainly used to be able to achieve faster typing speeds using Qwerty.
2. Dvorak is more comfortable.
I used to suffer periodic bouts of painful wrist and finger ache (no comments please!) when typing on a Qwerty layout. I switched to Dvorak and everything has been hunky dory since.
German, sometimes. German has A E I O U Ä Ö Ü and Y, but Y can be a vowel or a consonant depending on context and it's only counted by a vowel by most people because it's most often used as an Ü allophone. Still, some people learn in school that Y is not a vowel... But then again, school has always lagged behind current science by 30 to 50 years.
An example for consonant use of Y would be "Yacht", which means exactly what you think it does.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
It took awhile, but I'm at the point now where the only place I really run into problems is games -- some don't let you change their mappings, and most are not written with alternate keymaps in mind.
WASD doesn't work very well when you're actually typing something like comma, A, semicolon, or H.
Solution: Learned it, got very proficient at everything except games, grudgingly change the mappings in games, and re-learned QWERTY at about 30-40 WPM so I'm not completely helpless when I borrow a computer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
One more thing: It doesn't matter whether Y is a vowel or not; it simply doesn't occur that often in some languages. For example, it's actually the third least common letter in the German alphabet, before X and Q. (Source: Wikipedia citing Albrecht Beutelspacher, Kryptologie, 7th edition, ISBN 3-8348-0014-7, p. 10) Having it smack dab in the middle of the keyboard is pretty useless - observe the German standard layout, where the Y and Z keys have been switched.
For comparison, in English the Y appears almost 500 times as often as in German (1.974% vs. 0.04% of the alphabet) whereas the Z is more common in German (1.13% vs. 0.074%).
The Dvorak layout simply doesn't work that well for non-English languages, hence localized (and even more obscure) layouts like NEO have been created.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If one of my writing students had created that headline, I'd have flunked him.
"...claimed not superior to..."?
This is why techies who know how to write well are such a valued commodity.
But thanks for the interesting story. I tried dvorak in grad school and I had my doubts about it back then.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Italian doesn't have a 'y'? Well, at least Italy does.
OK a new size TV
The author ties it all into a criticism of path dependence, the fairly obvious idea that once a particular option becomes entrenched, it can keep superior options from replacing it. To do that, he cites studies that found retraining existing QWERTY typers in Dvorak wasn't cost effective compared to additional training in QWERTY.
Well, duh. That's almost what it means to be an entrenched option. We've reached a local maxima; movement to the global maxima would be costly. Whether or not Dvorak is superior, it is highly unlikely that QWERTY is the perfectly optimal layout, so there's probably some better layout. Yet we're stuck with QWERTY for the conceivable future because QWERTY came first. That is path dependence in action.
The "Z" key in qwerty: pinky finger, lower row. The pinky finger is the least accurate and most quickly tired of the fingers.
The "Y" key in qwerty: index finger, one up and one over from the home keys. The index finger is the strongest and most accurate of the fingers.
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
Wow, you're right. I'll fire off an email to Taco letting him know that kdawson's account has been hacked. That sort of compromise can't be tolerated, even if it's by a benevolent professional editor.
I always read about how our QWERTY typewriters were designed to deliberately 'slow' you down. I even taught this to my classes of elementary and middle school students.
In my classes I tried to teach my young students (5th grade) to use the computer to enhance their regular school work. One day they came to class and told me that their homework was to find a sentence and count, how many a's, how many b's, etc. I delighted in teaching them to use a spreadsheet for this.
The next day my son came home from school and showed me the class totals. I was struck by an idea. I pulled out my Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing manual (in the days when they came with paper manuals) to compare the results of these 5th graders with the Dvorak keyboard. I was stunned, as they matched almost perfectly.
If young children without a bias come up with the same result, there is a rightness and a logic to it. Soon thereafter my son switched to Dvorak and after about a week was faster. He was even much faster another week later.
Soon thereafter, I used Mavis Beacon to learn the Dvorak keyboard while on a flight to Tokyo. I was typing fully in Dvorak by the end of that flight and never went back. Only rarely am I forced to type in QWERTY and on those occasions I have to look at the keys. I try to keep it out of my consciousness so as not to conflict with my use of Dvorak, and I have forgotten how to type fast in QWERTY.
The main benefit is that it feels so much better, as my fingers travel less. There is a lot less stress on my fingers. My fingers were starting to exhibit signs of pain and exhaustion when typing in QWERTY and that went away. Dvorak is much easier on the fingers.
OK a new size TV
For an example of a keyboard for a non-Latin alphabet, look at the alternate symbols on this Japanese keyboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MacBookProJISKeyboard-1.jpg
Obviously, that's not a real Japanese keyboard, because it's missing they keys for ^_^, o_O, and =3.
But Italy is called Italia in Italy ;)
I, personally, find Dvorak a lot more comfortable.
But try this app out: http://colemak.com/Compare
It's a java app that let's you enter text and compare how far your fingers are traveling each time and other fun stats.
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"?
No.
:)
Is this a typical Slashdot-type attempt to make a point and win an argument by bad analogy?! Answering that question properly would probably require more in-depth consideration of linguistics, word origins, meanings, etc. than you intended.
And it would still be a misleading and pointless analogy, so why bother?
I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
Say that if you want. :) Can't say I feel like getting into a long, pedantic and pointless argument about how one wants to classify them.
I consider them variants because (a) they're near-identical to QWERTY (compared to something like DVORAK) and (b) they're very obviously derived from it.
If that similarity was pure coincidence, I would be more inclined to agree with you, but I doubt that's the case.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
You are correct about the design principles behind QWERTY, but your metaphor for human efficiency is terrible. Human fingers are not hammers of a type writer, and do not behave similarly at all.
More importantly, you follow with principles of fast typing as if they support QWERTY over Dvorak, when in fact Dvorak is designed with all of these things in mind. The most commonly used letters are in the home row, but spaced such that the same hand rarely types multiple letters in a row. Meanwhile, with QWERTY, vast quantities of common words are purely or a majority one handed.
Having used Qwerty, then I switched to Dvorak for about a decade. Then I switched back about 4 years ago, so I feel qualified to talk more than most.
* Your fingers move a lot less under Dvorak. You can definitely tell.
* Because your fingers move less, you've got to be more careful about overdoing it and getting RSI. You need to lift your hands up more and do some exercises.
* I think Dvorak is definitely faster with less effort. Maybe Qwerty can be as fast (don't know) but you'll need a lot more training to get there.
* For general use as a programmer, it doesn't matter much. As a secretary typing big documents as quickly as possible its more likely to matter. But typing at the speed of your own thoughts it doesn't matter much.
* At the end of the day the reason I switched back was the annoyance of living in two worlds. If I'm at somebody else's computer with Qwerty, it was a pain. If somebody else came to my computer it was a pain. Yes, to some extent you can learn both, but basically living with both systems was more trouble than it was worth I think. If you don't have anyone else using Qwerty to deal with, it might be worth a go.
Y is a vowel in Swedish too. And it just like GP says about it being able to act as a vowel in German, it can act that way in english too, like in "why".
Dvorak is a more efficient layout, allowing a typist to type more words with less finger movement. The advantage has been quantified:
I also type Japanese in Dvorak, on occasion. I can't see how any language could be better in that POS QWERTY layout than Dvorak. A particular lameness is that XP requires a registry edit to use the IME and dvorak at the same time. Without it you can have dvorak, or you can have Japanese, but you can't eat it too.
1. This is not news -- to put it mildly.
2. As has been pointed out every time this comes up, the "research" isn't even CLOSE to addressing the real claims of Dvorak advocates. (Hint: Any test under about ten years isn't going to give you a fair comparison to "experienced" keyboard users...)
3. Furthermore, this also doesn't hint at issues related to RSI. I didn't switch to Dvorak because it was "faster" -- I switched because I was hurting my hands. Switching seemed to have helped, because my fingers moved in different patterns.
4. Why, oh why, is kdawson still able to post garbage like this? This is not news, it's not stuff that matters. It's a "debunking" over a decade old with major, blindingly-obvious, flaws. I don't even think this is the first time it's been on Slashdot in particular.
Can't we PLEASE get someone in who has actually read Slashdot before, and knows both what kind of material is suitable, and what's already been posted?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
y?
...I use Colemak. Switching from QWERTY took a few weeks to get back up to 85 wpm, and my wrist forearm fatigue left and never returned.
It's not necessarily faster but it sure is more comfortable, at least for me.
Assumption: alternating between left and right hand letters is fast and easy on the muscles (I think this has been found to be true, but I can't find the study)
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -E "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb][yuiophjklnm])+\$" | wc -l
254
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -E "^([pyaoeuiqjkx][fcgrldhtnsbmwvz])+\$" | wc -l
637
Conclusion: dvorak allows you to type 2-3 times as many words using the alternating hands technique
(Note: the regex is inexact, missing out words which start on the right hand side, or are an odd number of characters long; I leave a more complete regex as an excercise to the reader :-) )
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
both developed by sony+phillips.
I think you answered your own question here. Sony+Philips is not Sony. Sony's failures in media are all about the attempt to assert control too early in the demand curve. When they split ownership of a standard with Philips, they surrender the ability to assert control.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't know about you guys, but I prefer QWERTY because I can easily type "lol" repeatedly on one hand while having the other hand ready to cover my mouth in laughter, depending on how many "lol's" I type.
This comes really handy in conversations which use internet in pluralized form and conversations with cats with "lol" as the prefix.
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
On a mechanical typewriter, the levers were arranged in strict left-to-right order, ignoring the row.
That is, the actual order was 1QAZ2WSX3EDC4RFV... well you get the idea. Keys on the same row were four levers apart, much reducing the risk of jamming.
You can still find a few common letter combinations, but you should be looking up/down rather than left/right.
>>>When a technology is introduced, a small number of people are willing to pay an early adopter premium.
One mistake Sony made with Betamax was to screw their early adopters. They first sold Betamax-I, and then they followed it up with Betamax-II with many movies sold in that format. The early adopters were left with Betamax-I players that could not handle the new media, and naturally they were pissed. You do NOT want to make your loyal fanbase angry.
Sony is used to dealing with professionals, who are more willing to change formats every few years (first there was Umatic, then Betacam, then Betacam SP, then DigiBetacam, than HD Digibetacam, and so on). The professionals can afford rapid development from one format to another, but the consumer can not. The consumer expects to be able to buy ONE format, like VHS, and hang onto it for thirty years. Sony made the mistake of trying to treat consumers like professionals, and they lost.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The common shortcuts are too valuable to give up. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X, Alt-F, etc. are all in the wrong place on the keyboard when you switch to Dvorak. I tried to learn it for a little while, but I quickly gave up after running into this real-world problem.
Yeah, I suppose I could've gone through and re-mapped those shortcuts, but that would've been a pain in the butt doing at every computer I ever sit down at, for every application.
... WTF doesn't Slashdot understand UTF-8 input?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
When I was in college, having heard about the Dvorak layout, I decided to give it a shot. I switched my keyboard layout, applied some new letter stickers, and spent a couple weeks re-training myself to the new format. After about three months, I gave up and switched back, primarily for two reasons:
First, shortcut keys. The letter layout itself may be (arguably) more efficient, but the placement of shortcut keys is an overlay on top of that which has its own efficiently. Take Copy (Ctrl-C), Paste (Ctrl-V). They're right next to each other, and use the left hand so you can copy/paste while using the mouse with your right hand. If you use Dvorak, Ctrl-V is on the right-hand side of the keyboard, so you have to choose between moving your hand off the mouse, or using your left hand on the right side of the keyboard. I suppose you could re-map all your shortcut keys too, but that becomes an even more involved process with a higher learning curve.
Secondly, it became a struggle to use other computers. Although I'd retrained myself on my keyboard easily enough, it became more difficult to use other computers, and remember to switch back and forth. Hitting the wrong shortcut-key combination can have disastrous results in different applications, and it just became too difficult to deal with.
So, while the QWERTY layout may not be the most optimally efficient, in my opinion the overhead in switching it to anything else is simply too great.
It's still a great case study in how engineering decisions are made though, and I highly recommend giving it a try. Perhaps forcing a classroom of engineering students to do it for a quarter would prevent costly project overruns years down the road...