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.

Comments

Dvorak

[gEvil (beta)]

Is that old blowhard at it again? Why do you keep posting stuff about this bozo?

Re:Dvorak

[jonasj]

Blaarrh.... old joke.

Though I wouldn't want to type on him.

Re:Dvorak

[reboot246]

Hey, I like Dvorak! His New World Symphony is awesome.

Re:Dvorak

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed your handle was about sexual intercourse with ancient computing equipment. I've descended to inform you that no electronic machinery will surpass the conventional branches of sexual intercourse, and doing what you do could be a danger to your health.

Thanks.

Re:Dvorak

[martin-boundary]

Poor guy. So young, and already typecast...

Re:Dvorak

[SlashWombat]

Well thats plainly wrong! Beta has/had a higher bandwidth, thus it was capable of a better picture (more lines).

See http://www.geocities.com/videoholic2000/BetaBetter.html or even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-VHS

So betamax was better. But VHS won the format war anyway.

Re:Dvorak

[squiggleslash]

So betamax was better. But VHS won the format war anyway.

No, so Betamax had slightly higher image quality (they both sucked, FWIW), but VHS won the format war anyway.

Betamax was not better than VHS from a "usability for application" standpoint. The short recording times per tape meant it had limited use as a movie distribution format or a system for recording more than one show unattended. By 1977, VHS could typically squeeze four hours onto a single T-120 video tape, while Betamax was limited at that time to one hour per tape. When considering whether one thing is "better" than another, you have to look at the whole picture. Betamax's picture was higher quality, but in every other respect, it failed every test. Consumers consistently chose recording length over picture quality, because it's better to get a fuzzy recording of a movie than only the first half.

And yes, I'm aware later versions of Betamax "solved" the recording length issues, but by that point the war was over and done with.

Re:Dvorak

[julesh]

Actually, the whole thrust of the article was how myths get repeated enough that they become accepted as facts. In the case of QWERTY vs DVORAK, that while many people believe DVORAK was superior; properly conducted tests show no inherent advantage to the DVORAK keyboard. As a result, there is no reason to switch.

The artice, and the research it was based on, were both written by employees of a thinktank which set out to prove that the market always finds the best solution, and on misreadings of earlier research. They tried to "debunk" the idea that Dvorak is better than QWERTY because if it is true and the market-dominant QWERTY system was inferior, their thesis was wrong. With such a biased starting point, I'm not sure I trust anything they say or that their research was in any fashion neutral.

There's a very good article here which debunks the article we've been linked to here.

Re:learning curves

[x78]

clearly never played EVE-online

Re:Not good enough

[Ethanol-fueled]

Taking a peek at the Dvorak layout and then imagining typing in it, I prefer qwerty because I'm not a "proper" keyboardist.

I can type fast because of experience and muscle memory but I don't allocate one finger to a few keys, then allocate another finger to another set of keys as learned in a rigorous keyboarding class.

Part of exercising a set of fingers is ensuring that they get the full range of motion and not just the cramped(but reportedly more efficient) "most commonly used in a single row" idea behind dvorak. But Your mileage and experience may vary.

Re:gotta say

[ChienAndalu]

Still learning the new layout?

Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype

[jythie]

Depends on what you have to type.
 
chorded keyboards, just like most technologies that try to make life 'easier' on users are built around usage assumptions, making those uses easier but making other uses more difficult.
 
One of qwerty's strenghts over these special-purpose systems is, well, it is general purpose. You can do more with them but nothing all that well.

Re:Palantype, Velotype, Stenotype

[SanityInAnarchy]

dvorak is fine for coding, especially when you type verbose variable names and comments -- usually in English, because that is the defacto language for code.

You're absolutely right about thinking keeping up, but this is also like the question of burst vs sustained bandwidth. I probably type very slowly most of the time, spend more time thinking. Occasionally, though, I get a burst of insight, or I find myself doing something repetitive, like unit tests. Then, it's useful to be able to type fast -- and again, English does help.

I would also argue that substitution outside of unit tests hints at broken design, just as reliance on copy and paste would.

I use dvorak not for the speed

[Simon (S2)]

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.

Re:I use dvorak not for the speed

[MartinSchou]

140 wpm? O_o

WPM is standardized at 5 keystrokes, so that's 700 keystrokes/minute or almost 12/second. I can barely do that if I'm just mashing the keyboard at random.

Re:I use dvorak not for the speed

[QuantumG]

hehe.. actually, it was sarcasm. Hovering your hands over the keyboard and moving them as little as possible is exactly how you get CTS. This is why kids don't get taught the "home row" method of typing anymore. Correct posture is to rest your wrist in front of the keyboard and reach for the keys. This is called, among over things, the "reach method". The purpose is to encourage as much movement as possible. Exercise, it's not just for your legs.

Re:I use dvorak not for the speed

[LateArthurDent]

Hovering your hands over the keyboard and moving them as little as possible is exactly how you get CTS...Exercise, it's not just for your legs.

Well, first of all there's plenty of debate on whether CTS can be caused by any activity (or lack thereof) at all. It seems to be mostly a genetic thing. There's real injury to be had through bad posture and repetitive motion and people usually confuse that with CTS.

As to the real injuries that these new methods are trying to prevent: The "hovering" part probably has more to do with them than the "moving as little as possible" part. It's a repetitive motion injury, so minimizing motion is definitely beneficial. Same for your legs too. Minimizing leg exercises will prevent a whole bunch of injuries that can only occur through over exercising.

Of course I'm not saying exercise is bad for you. Over exercising most definitely is, though. Especially if the motion is repetitive over many hours. I don't think anyone who can get injured from typing is having a problem with not enough exercise of their fingers. Having a high wrist pad that will allow you to always have your hands rested and never hovering as well as minimizing movement is probably a whole lot better than not hovering and increasing movement. Both are better than hovering AND increasing movement.

That said, I'm not a doctor. Just a guy who had repetitive motion injury on his wrists that seemed to get better after I switched to dvorak, as well as somebody with really bad shin splints that require me to not run as much as I would like to or risk really bad fractures.

Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert

[repvik]

Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.

There's more to Dvorak than the two-handed layout

[dexotaku]

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.
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.
..Just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for other keyboard layouts, accessibility for the disabled among them.

Editing

[mpyne]

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)

Re:gotta say

[LingNoi]

Here's the tl;dr version as a public service for everyone but me that didn't RTFA..

There is no evidence that Dvorak is faster. The only evidence is from Dvorak's own book.

Many places cite an old navy study as confirming that Dvorak is better/faster however upon trying to obtain a copy they couldn't find one, leading the author to believe that the people making the claims didn't even read the study but quoted from each other.

When he did find a copy in some persons house it warned that the study wasn't a fair one. The author then describes how the two tests performed were unscientific and found evidence of data tampering to make Dvorak look better in the results.

On Markets

[Chandon Seldon]

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:

1. Not all markets are healthy. Oligopoly and misregulation commonly screw things up.
2. Getting the best results from a market require that all participants have perfect information (which implies they've spent the time to do a full analysis of all their options). This never happens.
3. Network effects really can result in entrenching technically inferior solutions. The barrier to entry can be so high that the market can't overcome it in a reasonable amount of time.

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.

Re:Not good enough

[Scott Wood]

I'm not a "proper" keyboardist either, and I greatly prefer Dvorak. It wasn't very long after switching that the experience and muscle memory effect kicked in with the new layout -- and I no longer feel like my fingers are being tied into knots.

Bias much?

[Angst Badger]

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".

The problem solved by QWERTY makes faster typing.

[Kaz Kylheku]

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! :)

Use Emacs or vi, not Dvorak

[joh]

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...

Also thwarted by changes in symbol frequencies

[Confuse Ed]

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.

Re:Dvorak is better, but how much better?

[WeirdJohn]

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.

Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert

[edittard]

Qwerty is a romance language specific layout geared towards english.

That's as logical as saying it's a reptile specific food geared towards mammals. And about as true.

Re:Not good enough

[Firehed]

What about bouncing between Dvorak and QWERTY? I assume that you've had to type on a keyboard other than your own on more than one occasion. I tried to use Dvorak for a short while but gave up because of that more than anything else.

Wrist ache (ahem)

[calzakk]

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.

Re:Not good enough

[SanityInAnarchy]

What about bouncing between Dvorak and QWERTY? I assume that you've had to type on a keyboard other than your own on more than one occasion.

Well, at first, I figured out just how easy it is to switch keymaps on most modern OSes. Unfortunately, when I forgot to change it back, I left a wake of "My keyboard is broken!" computers in my wake.

I've actually gotten to the point where I can use both, and QWERTY is reasonably fast, though still not as comfortable. It takes a bit to get used to, and my error rate goes way up, but the difference is basically kicking me back to 30-40 WPM -- I'm typing this sentence in QWERTY to prove that point.

But, since I have a laptop, I can pretty much type the way I want most of the time. It also is yet another customization of said laptop that discourages others from using it without supervision.

Re:Not good enough

[Skreems]

I use Dvorak on all my accounts, but have to switch back to Qwerty when I'm on someone else's machine. It's not too bad. I'm faster in Dvorak, but I can still touch-type reasonably well.

I spent maybe 4-5 years touch-typing in Qwerty, and the past 5 in Dvorak, and I much prefer it. The amount of motion necessary to type is much smaller. I'm probably not significantly faster than I was in Qwerty, but the conservation of movement makes my hands feel a lot more relaxed. Even if it's all just mental, I think it's worth it.

Sure, it's not for everyone. And it's not worth this back and forth battle of "proof" about which one is better. It's just an alternative, there for you to try if you want.

Re:Not good enough

[Scrameustache]

Part of exercising a set of fingers is ensuring that they get the full range of motion and not just the cramped(but reportedly more efficient) "most commonly used in a single row" idea behind dvorak.

You seem to be implying that qwerty exists for ergonomic reasons, rather than minimizing the tangling of mechanical components of type writers.

Re:Not good enough

[TheRaven64]

This was what killed it for me. I switched for myself for a few months, but I spent a lot of time typing on other peoples' computers and then I ended up having to switch back to QWERTY. Dvorak is a nicer layout in terms of comfort, but switching between the two was just irritating.

Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert

[SteveWoz]

Italian doesn't have a 'y'? Well, at least Italy does.

You left out the pro-market spin

[Fred Ferrigno]

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.

OMG HaXX0r!

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Re:Dvorak is better, but how much better?

[SteveWoz]

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.

Re:Depends on the Language

[Veggiesama]

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.

Re:i like dvorak but stick with the standard qwert

[Sique]

But Italy is called Italia in Italy ;)

Re:Not good enough

[digitalchinky]

I quite literally scraped off all the key labels from all my keyboards both at home and at work. It doesn't just discourage the keyboard illiterate, it actually leaves them questioning your sanity, so they tend to stay well away.

Re:Not good enough

[Skater]

I used to use Dvorak - did for about 10 years. What made me switch back?

First, I wasn't really any faster with Dvorak than Qwerty.

Second, Windows is messed up. When I had the Dvorak keyboard loaded at work, if I called the help desk and they tried to log into my machine, their typing would come out as though they'd typed Qwerty on a Dvorak keyboard - gibberish. I would have to reboot before calling the help desk. There were other weird things, too - if I logged in then changed the keyboard layout, Windows' password prompt would still be whatever the keyboard was when I logged in.

The headaches of dealing with it got old.

Reposting an old comment of mine

[mnemonic_]

Dvorak is a more efficient layout, allowing a typist to type more words with less finger movement. The advantage has been quantified:

• Java Demonstration of Dvorak and Qwerty Finger Movement Distances Dvorak almost always reduces finger travel.
• Letter Frequencies in the English Language - How many of the more frequent letters are on Dvorak's home row, and how many in Qwerty's? Did it ever seem strange that "e" isn't on the home row in Qwerty? Dvorak fixes that.
• Words Possible on Certain Rows - One snippet: in Dvorak, using the home row alone one can type 99 of the 1000 most common English words. Qwerty's home row allows for only 15.

Re:!speed

[STrinity]

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.

I think a glance at the top row is enough to disprove that -- qw/wq and yu/uy are the only uncommon two-letter combos, while extremely common ones like we, er/re, rt/tr, io/oi, and ty are present. There are even several common three letter combinations -- wer, tre, ert, rty, and poi. If you expand to include vertically adjacent keys, you'll find even more.

Re:Not good enough

[grumbel]

Thats a myth, QWERTY was not there to slow the typist down, but to speed them up. Letters that would jam where places further apart, so less jamming and more speed as the result. As a result QWERTY is simply the solution to a problem that no longer exist.

I would add another problem

[bjdevil66]

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.