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The Myth of QWERTY
Eric Hillman writes
"I've been telling people for years that the Dvorak
keyboard is mostly hype. Contrary to popular belief, and
unlike certain "standards" I could name, the QWERTY
keyboard won its market share fair and square.
Now, that bastion of (mostly) unbiased reporting,
The Economist, has come to my side of the fray.
" I've been telling people forever that that tale
is urban legend, glad to see I'm not the only one.
I am wondering on this: Is there a keyboard better than Dvorak/QWERTY?
If by "Uh?" you mean, "But didn't they?" then the answer is no, they didn't. Yes, one or both of the Steve's did go to Xerox and did see the GUI's they were using. However, some of the engineers who worked on the design of the Mac did master's theses in the 60's on Graphical Interfaces. There was an interesting email from one of those engineers on the EvangeList about 2 years ago. You might look it up if you're interested. I believe that mackido.com also reprinted it at one time.
It's an economic magazine. Its purpose is to make you think it's an objective and fair story. In truth, every word of that was FUD.
Dvorak users consistantly type faster than Qwerty users. That's a fact, and I'm testomony to it. I typed Qwerty for years and go to 80 WPM, but it's impossible to avoid mistakes beyond about that - 80 WPM.
Dvorak types vastly faster, and shifts the bottleneck from the keys to the mind. Most people's minds think at a rate of about 180 WPM, but can't write that fast, since writing requires translation from thought to text.
Studies have found that the reason Dvorak users don't often type at the phyiscally possible rates of Dvorak (200 WPM+) is that their minds can't work that fast. I, for example, when I type in my journal, type at about 120 WPM Dvorak easily.
Also, muscle syndromes associated with typing aren't associated with typing: they are associated with Qwerty - a lay-out scientificly engineered to be inefficient and throw your thought off.
Dvorak is better, all around, and that article was defending (actually, denying) capitalism's inability to develop good standards. When it comes to keyboard layouts, folks, listen to science, not an economist.
Mouse?
Well, the Economist has to sell issues to make a profit, and an article, to garner interest has to tell you something you DON'T know, or challange your current beleifs.
Actually, this is wrong. The publishers of the Economist actually lose money on each issue. The Economist is sold as a loss-leader to convince think tanks and governments and businesses that the Economist Intelligence Unit's special reports are worth paying big bucks for. There is therefore a strong incentive to make the articles in the Economist as accurate as possible -- otherwise no one would buy the special reports, which is where the real money comes from.
About 6 months ago, I turned to the Dvorak style. I didn't change the keys on my board, so I was forced to touch-type or look at a map.
For the first two weeks, it was pretty much hell. Then things took of. I can now type at about 70 words/minute. I think that's pretty good for 6 months, and I don't even type that much.
Now when I go back to school or work and have to type in the QWERTY style, I hate it. I can almost touch type in QWERTY as well, but it is not nearly as nice. My hands hurt just typing this from school!
Really, I don't know about all the "studies" or the "market failures," but I do know that Dvorak is much better for me and it is lterally a pain to go back and type in QWERTY.
For anyond that is willing too learn a little, of has some patience, then I would really reccomend trying Dvorak.
The writer probably never studied calculus (thereby learning about the
concept of the "local optimum") or evolutionary theory (thereby never
learning about optic nerves getting wired backwards).
And the sad fact is that they are probably considered mainstream thinkers.
As usual, linux moron passing a rumor.
For the record, let me talk a bit of personal experience for those interested. I've been typing on Dvorak for about 5 years. I have also retained or relearned my Qwerty skill in the past year. The number one advantage of Dvorak is comfort. Speed advantage is secondary. And by the way, I am a programer by profession (I program in Mathematica (and Perl for work -- unfortunately.)). I also write a lot. I use Emacs. I try not to support stupid things, such as Qwerty, vi, unixism and perl. As an example, better are Dvorak, emacs, GNU, and lisp.
For those unix weenies: take a class in critical thinking before you open your mouth again.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
I know I've seen this worse-is-better paper before, but I don't
remember. Unix-haters handbook or something like that?
I'm not sure if anyone else noted this, and frankly I'm too lazy to find out (call me an Anonymous slug, thanks, not a coward) but one of the prime selling points of the Dvorak keyboard is that it is *more efficient*. And it _is_, if you happen to be right-handed. In fact, a move for a left-handed person such as myself to a DVORAK layout would be a major downgrade, since about 56% of the most used keys on a QWERTY keyboard are on the left hand side, while the reverse applies to a DVORAK. This comes to my mind very quickly when people talk about the more 'natural' DVORAK layout... but don't get me down this path.
Oops, I was a bit unclear. I meant to brag :)
about never using Caps for its intended
purpose, which is what the above replies
do as well
--ac
If the OS doesn't ALLWAYS use the keymap, or allows software to go directly to the keyboard keycodes, it still isn't any good. There are still too many bad programmers writing software where they go directly to the hardware because they are too lazy to learn the proper interface. The old "they went directly to the hardware to get the best performance" doesn't hold water any more, processors are just too fast.
well good for you
Man just look at the dvorak keyboard! Vowels on one hand consonants on other, frequently used close, z's and shit far away. qwerty looks like it was designed by MS, half assed and inefficient, but gets the job done :) Now if I could just get the time to learn more than the home row...
The point of the QWERTY vs Dvorak story is that the first one wins. If the typewriters had put Dvorak on the keyboards first, we would still be using it now.
Noone who was born in a country where the metric system is used in daily life would forget the difference between dm and cm. And no, dm isnt used just rarely.
Stefan
We should lose Caps Lock. When was the
last time you used it?
--ac
I wish people would get their facts right
Yes, that's my point. QWERTY may be "good enough" for most people, but it is still inferior. That means inferior technology won. It does not matter if dvorak is only a little bit better.
The article has not proven that the original argument is wrong, it has merely stated the same thing is slightly more flattering terms.
It does take a little while to get used to it, so some people will just give up before they have chance to reap. What i think he means is the people who got past the retraining period.
Yes - but what are you using the OTHER hand for!
sorry - couldn't really resists.. apology in advance, LOL...
smartass :) actually iirc Dvorak created a family of related keyboard layouts. I believe the left and right hand layouts were designed primarily for disabled people with only one usable hand.
i wanted to submit this to /. a year or so ago
when i heard about the 1990 'journal of economics and philosophy' article
that basically pointed out that Mr. Dvorak had done no quality research
into whether his keyboard was actually faster or not. He did a few
extremely biased studies on his own (the fact that he was in charge of them was the least of the problems).
there are several interesting articles out about this issue, unfortunately some of those
authors also have 'conflicting interests' , in other words their pet Economics theory about marketplaces is 'proved' by
"breaking the dvorak myth". what is really needed is some extensive objective studies that compare
speeds, otherwise you are just pissing in the wind. its worse than trying to optimize a program without doing any sort of profiling.
btw, my friend is studying to be a court reporter, and those court reporting machines make dvorak/qwerty look like utter shit. can you say 260wpm?
And ever since switching, my typing is faster (not tremendously, but there is an improvement...), has fewer typos, is much more comfortable, and I can type for longer periods of time without muscle strain. It works for me. That's all the proof I need.
A lengthy typing session on a QWERTY leaves me fatigued and my hands sore. Not so on my trusty Dvorak.
I have no need to ever spend money one of those silly "ergonomic" keyboards.
-Josh
$430 keyboard everywhere you go...and when it fails in a emergency you will have to use qwerty....
I prefer my ergo keyboard with builtin trackpad (from Cirque, even). But yeah, MS has been making good hardware, and they're nowhere near a monopoly there - so I reward them for competing on their merits for once.
Do tell what you use your other hand for.
I learned touch-typing on a mechanical typewriter when I was a little boy. My left-hand little finger very soon became sore, and my typing speed soon dropped to zero :-)
Economics is called the dismal science for good reason. The cited paper which started off this discussion does not even seem to distinguish between the several stages of keyboard technology. Certainly the modern computer keyboard is very different from the old mechanical typewriter.
Also, the profile of people who use typewriters has probably changed significantly over time; e.g., computer programmers are a large class of people whose abilities and IQ tend to fall in certain ranges, and who use keyboards; this class of users did not exist when the typewriter was invented, nor for a large period of the time over which the typewriter ergonomic studies cited were conducted. Also, is not carpal tunnel syndrome something that has only relatively recently been recognized ? Whether CTS existed or not in the old mech. typewriter days, does not it show a difference in attitude towards the ergonomics of the keyboard ?
Don't tell me that the above factors play no role in what the "scientific" finders find. One cannot "average" over the results on the typewriter keyboard found over a century. The correct thing to do to prove or disprove lock-in is to conduct a proper study now. In fact, if the study proves to be difficult and expensive, that in itself proves a form of lock-in -- how is the market supposed to find better alternatives if experimentation is difficult ?
-arun gupta
I certainly have no idea which ever of the Dworak or QWERTY layouts outperforms the other, but I do know that none of them can compare with the Velotype when typing normal text (programming is different though).
With the velotype you increase your typing rate with approximately 2-3 times and it is actively used to add text-stripes to live TV broadcasts (the signal is delay for about 10 seconds, which is enough) since you have no problems keeping up with the speed of normal speech.
The trick is that you push whole sequences of keys at once, typically one wovel and all its surronding consonants. A program in the computer is then used to figure out what you actually wrote since there are a few alternatives.
The keyboard has all the wovels in a line in the middle (reachable by both hands) and all the consonants on both the left and right side.
I've seen it demonstrated and it works great. It looks like the person writing is doing it in slow motion, but the text pops up word by word really fast.
Good for you.
It worked for you.
Notice a pattern? This is one of the differences between science and crap. A sample size of one, or three, will typically not survive peer review. At some point, some poor soul got leeched, and then recovered. Presto--leeching is effective. Same with Dvorak. Further, as for Doctors prescribing the Dvorak, that certainly doesn't mean that it helps, maybe they too have been misled by the urban legend. The only way to tell is by controlled experiments. That is what the economist cites.
Did you notice that in the "TYPING ERRORS" article, the author repeats the urban legend that the Mac was based on Xerox's design, immediately after he slams people for believing urban legends! Ugh!
The only time I have a problem with my Dvorak keyboard and brain shift is when I am tired. Some keystroke combinations are practically hardwired in my brain. 'cd' and 'dir' are the two big ones. I also find I have a bit of a problem using 'z' intead of '.' when typing addresses.
Otherwise I love the dvorak layout. Took a little over a month to properly learn. Well worth the effort.
Bishop @ a public terminal
I got my xmodmap from somewhere else, so wasn't my idea, but the mapping I use, available from here has a fairly full set of international mappings and includes a language shift key. It's pretty cool.
They're used by people using wearable computers...IIRC the MIT media lab wearables group uses a type of chorded keyboard called "The Twiddler".
Why don't I recommend a keymap that is easier and faster? Because I have yet to find a dvorak keyboard, and software keymaps don't hack it. Shure, those of you who type querty THINK that that dvorak keymap supplied with NT works just fine, just wait till you use it and find you have to know how to type your password in both qwerty AND dvorak. The initial login in NT is ALWAYS in QWERTY but screen blanker passwords are in DVORAK if you are using that keymap, and switching keymaps so someone else can use your computer is on a per window basis. Now suppose you wan't to use someone elses computer, are they going to be thrilled when you install another keymap on their system? I end up having to know and use both dvorak and qwerty, and people wonder why I sometimes type random charactor strings.
No, I won't recommend anyone switching to DVORAK until most keyboard have a switch on the front (like a numlock key) to switch between dvorak & querty. I have yet to even SEE a dvorak keyboard.
260wpm
I still think they're wrong, of course.
This does have a lot of truth to it. I switched to Dvorak a year ago and there is indeed a certain degree of feeling "eleet" to it. But, people have said to me that you only use Linux because it makes you feel cool etc. And I admit 2 years ago when I started using Linux that did play a role... But would I still be using it, after so long, and having spent so much time learning all about the system, if it really wasn't far superior??
ps, sorry I didnt say anything overly informative but my real purpose of this post was just to show that there is yet another proud & satisfied Dvorak user out there!
I can type 80 wpm with 95% accuracy. But my hands
hurt when I type for long periods of time. I'd
rather switch for that reason alone.
Joseph Chandler
chandlerjw@linuxmail.org
I type 100-120 wpm in QWERTY. I don't need to type any faster. As a programmer, I spend a lot more time thinking than typing anyway.
ISTR hearing that Sony were being real buttheads about licensing Betamax, and the tapes were just too short early on (especially compared to VHS' crufty but useful long-play settings). I like to think of it as a victory for "worse-is-better" engineering, that is, making the important compromises (at the time) correctly. Now if only we weren't stuck with such primitive standards for so long....
Anyhow: Although I'm still using several fingers and looking at Hooleon stickers (not happy!), my speed is decent, I make about 1/5 the errors I did with QWERTY, and it's simply a joy to have the letters "fall into place". I rarely use QWERTY, and when I have no choice, one thing is brutally evident: You simply have no idea of how bad QWERTY is, unless you have been using Dvorak only for some extended period, and have to go back.
Many of us, I suspect, learn QWERTY somewhat incrementally, so we know it to some degree before we become serious users. Complete novices have no standard of comparison.
At times, I do wonder whether the letter positions are as optimal as claimed. I agree that an I/U swap would be good. Also, visually, G and C are similar, as are M and W. I tend to swap those. I also have problems with wrong vowels. (Did Dr. Dvorak own a BMW? :)
Microsoft's GA0650.EXE package (for DOS) works extremely well; it fails only when the programmer uses raw keycodes. It contains both one-handed layouts (with what seems to be an interesting bias toward righthandedness!).
The DvortyBoard (Dirty bird? :) is a switchable QWERTY/Dvorak commercial keybd.; no conversion software needed. Runs about $60 w/ shipping. DvortyBoards (Note that they can't spell their own tradename!)
Hooleon (sorry!) makes stickers that *seem* wonderful, and they would be great, except for one thing: The wear layer on top has edges that catch on your fingertips and drive you nuts. Attempts to trim off the edges failed, on the home row. I finally peeled off the top layer. My home row is now all white, save for the engraved letters I've made in the white layer. Printed layer wore off. Really wish they had worked out a fix, because otherwise these are great. (Clean your keytops (99% isopropyl alc.) before applying! I spent about 1/2 hour applying; used jewelers' tweezers.)
I picked up an old, heavy, real IBM PS/2 keyboard with removable keycaps (they snap onto the keytops). Seemed great for a while, keyclicks, "breakover" (?) feel, etc., but after some use, the really hard limit at the end of each keystroke hurt my fingertips. Currently using a KeyTronic FlexPro, but I rarely raise the demi-boards; wrist/hand support isn't really worked out, it seems to me, so far. I do like it, otherwise.
Nicholas Bodley // nbodley@tiac.net (Sorry, I logged in just before typing into the form, but am still called an A.C.)
Devastated, exacerbate, exaggerated, desegregated, stargazers, stewardess, streetcars, sweetbread, aftertaste, reverberated, uphill, killjoy, million, minimum, opinion, pumpkin, lollipop, monopoly.
Papaya.
'Nuff said!
Those movement keys are right there under your right hand! Where the hell is the j key on a dvorack?
what about the bad keys on a qwerty keyboard?
:)
it seems like htns are used far more than jkl; and e is definitely better off on the home row since it is the most used letter in the english language.
what about the number of words that you can type on the home row? take 'the' for instance. you don't have to take your hands off the home row with a dvorak layout. I ran a regex through an old dictionary and I came up with (it was a while ago so these are rough) 96 words using only asdf jkl; and around 700 using only aoeu htns.
And have you ever noticed what kind of words qwerty typing tutors get you type when you first start? things like 'ass' 'ff' 'fdf' 'jaf'. hmmm. on the otherhand a dvorak typing tutor has words like 'the' 'eat' 'hats' 'that'. we can at the very least agree that the home row is done better on a dvorak than on a qwerty layout, right?
I was rescently watching a qwerty powerhouse type (he transcribes our lectures) and at rest his hands weren;t sitting on the home row, they were all over the place with fingers on letters like s,t,e,i. Whereas when I type on a dvorak my hands remain close to the home row. In that respect I think the dvorak keyboard is more comfortable. or maybe he just doesn't know how to type
if it turns out that qwerty is as good or better than dvorak, then I think there is lots of room for improvement in keyboard layouts.
all the economic rhetoric and bable about this or that study is valid or whatever aside, i don't really care what other people say--i'm more concerned that if you actually go and try it yourself, what are the results? does it actually make a difference?
i switched from qwerty to dvorak several years ago because i've always hated design inefficiencies, and if you're typing all day, why should you by using a crummy system? so i tried it.
my average speed in qwerty was ~50-55wpm, and my average speed after getting used to the dvorak layout is now about 55-60wpm. i myself have seen not only a speed gain, but it also feels more comfortable for typing. i just love the way the most commonly used word "the" rolls off the fingers under dvorak. after trying it for myself, and realising both a speed and comfort gain, i have not regretted switching.
regards,
johnrpenner@earthlink.net
Economically it makes sense, at least from his perspective.
I've got a friend who types dvorak and he's INCREDIBLY fast in vi, and he uses Dvorak. For me vi in Dvorak is just as easy as in QWERTY, you just have to spend a little cross-training time, like everything else.
everyone i've ever talked to who's taken the bother to learn Dvorak has said that it made them much faster.
I'd be more inclined to believe people i actually know than a random, semiflimsily supported article in a magazine i don't read.
It's the same thing.
Who have you seen messing up moving the decimal point with the metric system? Small children maybe. Kids soon enough learn what the prefixes mean.
The main advantage of the metric system is that the same rules apply to all units of measurement: weight, volume, length, whatever...
We don't have to mess with lots of different relationships between units: whether it is mass, volume, length etc., the units all have the same set of prefixes to denote the size, of which the most commonly used (for you metric-iliterates ;):
So the prefix alway tell you how much to move the decimal point, which helps avoid errors... Of course people generally shorten, so kilo has also ended up being short for "kilogram"...
And what's up with Fahrenheit vs Celsius? 0 at the point of freezing of pure water, and 100 as the boiling point is so much more convenient.... ;)
Again, with Celsius, you can use the metric prefixes... Centigrade is perfectly acceptable, and used, though not that frequent in daily life.
Beta vs VHS was not a market failure, but a marketing failure. Sony failed to realize that the consumer market was for movies, not for tapes, and failed to push the format into rental channels. The consumer market placed a premium on content availability and discounted technical factors of the delivery mechanism and so chose VHS over Beta. In the video production market, the reverse was true and Beta won out. Two different markets with different demands resulted in two different winners. Technical superiority is only one aspect of a product.
I have been typing dvorak some time now. I switch back and forth between qwerty and dvorak each day because the keyboards at work are qwerty but I like dvorak better... The major downfall is my inability to type dvorak in a place where I ordinarily type qwerty and vice versa. I am trained per environment I suppose. Anyone else the same way?
RTFM, please!
XModMap is probably what you're looking for. It's a bitch to figure out, though.
That should be...
"The metric system is the tool of the devil.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and thats the
way I likes it."
Thank you, come again...
As a Brit, I use a Qwerty keyboard as the Dvorak type is almost unknown here. If you guys think changing between keyboards is a pain, think about this. I had to manage a team of people performing a Win to Win95 migration for a large American coorporate in their European offices. Unfortunatly, the guys in the states who made the Build put no support for different languages/keyboards/spelling checkers into their Win95 build. You just try getting a French person to type on a French keyboard with US keyboard mappings. Of course, we fixed the problem but then the guys who made the Build were annoyed because we had modified their work. Just so you know, there are other countries with their own standards! Please don't get me wrong, it's just that this kind of thing has happened at every US company I've contracted for so far...hope you all had a good Easter!
In theory, you should be able to keep all your hot-keys in the same place... I know there are several layouts for the Macintosh that change the keyboard to Dvorak, except for command key combos... It must be possible to do the same thing under linux...
In "The Fable of the Keys", foot note 59, the authors state there is no "scientifically acceptable" proof.
The same thing happened to me when I first switched. My fingers pretty much "forgot" qwerty. The key is to make sure you use QWERTY occasionally, or you will forget. At home, I type all Dvorak. I have two machines at work, one I use much more than the other. The main one is Dvorak, the other is QWERTY. The thing is, I'm still faster at QWERTY (about 80 wpm) than Dvorak( around 50). But Dvorak feels so much better, the speed is worth it.
Okay, but what about those of us
that use real operating systems?
(IE: Everything Else)
Dvorak may be way better than Qwerty, but both will die soon. Bulky and inconvenient laptops will give way to wearable computers very soon now, and keyboards in general just don't cut it. New technology keyboards like HANDYKEY are the future. Once everybody starts using "walkman" computers, handykey-like devices become necessary, and all keyboards will then be on the way out.
i based it on my personal preferences, letter frequency, and such. it's really not much work. why be a slave to a broken keymap? it only took about 2 weeks to get used to it.
HEY! I use the Microsoft Natural keyboard and Dvorak. That is the best combination imaginable! It is wonderfully comfortable. Yeah, the MSNatural keyboard also takes a little getting used to, but it's worth the time and the money.
I HATE it when people think that EVERYTHING with the microsoft name on it is bad by default. Their mouse and keyboard are the best money can buy! If their keyboard had the reprogrammable features of Gateway's keyboard, it'd be perfect...
According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the fastest typist in the world types about 211 words a minute. She does this on a Dvorak keyboard.
She has had problems learning and typing on a QWERTY but exceled using the Dvorak layout.
The creater of the QWERTY keyboard was Christopher Latham Sholes. Look him up in just about any encyclopedia, this was exactly the reason we have the QWERTY keyboard. I have done extensive research on this topic. There were several people "inventing" the typewritter at the time, all with the standard "ABCD" type of layout. Sholes found that this jammed up his typewritter and placed common letters away from each other. At the time, no one even though touch typing was possible, they thought the third and fourth finders were to "weak" to use, so this did not seem like a big deal. He sold the rights to his machine to James Densmore, Densmore and his partner George Washington Yost then sold the invention to Philo Remington. (Yes of the famed company Remington) Remington wanted the typewritter to look pretty and so he hired William K. Jenne an "artist-mechanic." Jenne's expertise was in sewing machines however, and the first mass-produced typewritters actually had a floral design and foot pedal. They have since been replaced, however the QWERTY keyboard remains despite the fact that it could be replaced by a more strategicaly placed keyboard. Mostly because most people know how to use the QWERTY keyboard and getting the public to change, is not an easy task. For more info go here.
[This is the original poster again.]
...ignores the ergonomic benefits that many claim for Dvorak.
c acy/dvorak.html" d vorak.html
> > it does not present any new facts, or any direct evidence that QWERTY is
> > better or even as good as Dvorak.
>
> Well, they go even further than that. They argue that even if Dvorak is
> superior, it's still not effecient to convert to in the ABSENCE of proof.
Excellent point. If you were an institution making a decision about typing
training, and you limited your accepted evidence to scientifically conducted
studies (a reasonable approach), this would be a plausible conclusion.
But none of this makes the putative superiority of the Dvorak layout a fable
or myth! It merely casts doubt on certain evidence. Lack of good studies
notwithstanding, there is very strong reason for suspecting that Dvorak may
be better, including quantifiable characteristics (home row frequencies,
hand alternation frequency, total finger travel) and numerous individual
testimonies. Urban legend, my foot! I would gladly wager that, if better
studies are performed, the Dvorak layout will be found objectively better
for anyone who touch-types regularly.
Particular studies may have been debunked; the theory has not.
> >
>
> The paper DOES address these (more recent) claims. It finds no evidence one
> way or the other. You don't assume something to be true without evidence.
I may have used the wrong term. The ergonomics section of the paper
discusses only typing efficiency. I specifically meant health and comfort
issues. Again, there is a plausible case and anecdotal evidence for this.
Lack of a conclusive study, while frustrating to Dvorak partisans like
myself, does not devalue common sense and personal experience.
> > In the absence of conclusive scientific evidence, try the Dvorak layout
> > yourself or talk to people who have.
>
> And you will certainly find that the people who TRAINED for speed found they
> could type faster...
Another good point. When you talk to people, be sure to ask them about
this; and if you decide to try Dvorak yourself, perhaps spend a few weeks
re-learning QWERTY to see if that gives the same benefit.
Andrew
PS. I forgot to plug my humble Dvorak advocacy page: a
href="http://www.math.harvard.edu/~pimlott/advo
>http://www.math.harvard.edu/~pimlott/advocacy/
It's pretty easy in linux to do for the console. I have my C-x, C-c and C-z mapped in the same place as qwerty because it makes it easy to do emacs stuff. It was just 2 lines of change in the keyboard map file to do it read the Keyboard-Console HOWTO to see how. I can't find a way to do it in X though anyone know how?
I agree with all the other posts the dvorak kicks qwerty's butt. I'm about 4 weeks into learning and I can type as fast as a I used to in qwerty and it just feels better.
wow, some ppl sure go to a lot of effort to justify their laziness.
I've been using q-ty for a couple of years and I type rather fast, but I do not seem to make progress in my typing anymore.
For me that's reason enough, changing to Dvorak. And what I have read/heard so far, Dvorak has got more advantages than the "regular one".
Anyway, Swedish characters are missing in the dvorak-standard and therefore I had to put together one of my own, as I'm using Linux...
Interested?
kindberg@home.se
I learned dvorak, but my qwerty skill quickly went downhill. I abandoned dvorak since I figured qwerty skills would be more valuable. I don't know how you can be bilingual when it comes to keyboard layouts.
Saying QWERTY has an unfair monopoly over Dvorak is like saying the English language has an unfair monopoly over the US. Comparing keyboard layouts and things like software is like comparing apples and, ugh, oranges. I didn't want to use that analogy.
This message was typed in fabulous QWERTYvision!!!
The only way the twiddler is "relaxing" is that you only use one hand, you don't use the other hand at all. The "clenching" you do when typing with it is a harder motion, there's less (no) *wrist* activity but plenty of finger stretching.
:-) and I've tried to make heavy use of the Twiddler, Dvorak, and the Kinesis keyboard. I gave up rapidly, because I'm a heavy emacs user, and I do a lot of things by reflex, which is much harder to retrain...
I still use QWERTY - trained in grade school, I do 100wpm now on text (I've never seen a code speed typing metric, but then again, that's not the hard part of coding
I found this tutorial nice, which I found by way of Dvorak International
i like dvorak cause i can type "toast" without leaving the home row
that is very important to me, as thats my user name
toast
http://table.jps.net/~toast0
(A 2 yr. Dvorak typist.)
Dvorak might be a little bit faster, but from what I've heard, not too much. But when I was doing Dvorak, the real advantage was that it felt much more comfortable. The article says that QWERTY's ergonomic drawbacks are balanced by its benefits, but I thought Dvorak was noticeably better. Unfortunately, I found that I was losing my QWERTY skills (and that my vi command letter reflexes jarred with the new key locations), so I had to abandon Dvorak.
I'd agree with the first sentence, but the second? They're confusing "it's good to have a standard" with "it's good that this is a standard", and they ought to know better when writing such an article.
This nonsense has got to stop. While the Dvorak case may have been misused
,
(or overused) as an example of market failure, it is now being even more
rudely abused by the laissez-faire cause.
I don't have time to offer a lengthly analysis, but let me offer four
points:
- All of the current anti-Dvorak hype stems from a _single_ paper, "The
Fable of the Keys" (http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html)
whose authors have a vested interest in debunking Dvorak. First, it's not
a very good paper--both the evidence and the reasoning are weak (I wish I
had more time to support this here; maybe I will later, but read it for
yourself). Second, the paper merely points out flaws in some past
studies; it does not present any new facts, or any direct evidence that
QWERTY is better or even as good as Dvorak. The chief lesson is that the
matter has not been studied carefully and thoroughly.
- An excellent collection of counterarguments is at
http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak/dissent.html
- The anti-Dvorak camp focuses entirely on typing speed and ignores the
ergonomic benefits that many claim for Dvorak.
- In the absence of conclusive scientific evidence, try the Dvorak layout
yourself or talk to people who have.
Andrew
pimlott@math.harvard.edu
I hear a lot of debate on how Dvorak improves typing speed for typists. But I'm not a typist. I'm a geek and a decent percentage of my time is spent coding, with all the typing of symbols entailed. (I also don't really have much desire for raw speed... but I'd prefer a more comfortable keyboard.)
So, the question I put to the dvorak users out there is how comfortable (in terms of finger movement, I guess) is programming? How does the placement of things like parenthesis, braces, and the semicolin compare to that of the qwerty keyboard.
(Hm... I wonder, as an aside, if C was designed, in part, to use the characters that were conveniently placed on the qwerty keyboard.)
Uh?
Irina Romanov
Okay, I'll check it out. The Xerox story is just the one I've always heard..
Irina Romanov
Truthfully, it seems about the same to me...
the brackets []{} are slightly farther away, and the punctuation is slightly more convenient. The words you're typing for control (if, else, etc.) are so short that the difference in that respect is probably not all that much.
I would say it's pretty much even.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
There are valid uses for having CAPS LOCK set. In engineering drawings (CAD), most agencies require that all lettering etc. be all caps because it is more legible when they put the drawings on microfilm.
This will eventually not be a problem, since more and more agencies require CDs with the digital drawings themselves now.
-=Mongr=-
I don't see any "difficulty" in using Dvorak. Sure, it may not be worth it to demand that an entire company use it, but for individuals, it's a fine idea. I find that I can type a lot faster. Interesting point - yeah it was hard to get used to the new key combos like Ctrl-C and stuff, but you get used to it eventually. One thing that got me in the beginning was the smily. And laughing: hehe comes out jdjd when I switch back to qwerty. But basically, after a few minutes of thought, I can type on either dvorak or qwerty without any problem. A lot of people tell me "Why learn Dvorak, you'll just have to use QWERTY at work" - so? I use QWERTY at work and Dvorak at home. What's the problem there?
It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
I've become reasonably fast at one-handed QWERTY (although the shift keys are somewhat difficult to use). This comment was typed with my left hand (I'm right-handed) while I rested my chin on the other hand, except for the part I typed with my hands reversed.
Anyway, it's a good thing I looked, or I might have dissed the Economist. I nearly accept an assertion on the authority of a /. reader! Yikes!
I mean c'mon, if someone regretted trying out Dvorak, would they have stayed with it?
Er sorry, that is a bit badly phrased. What I was really trying to say that you shouldn't discount the MANY personal testimonials (including my own) in favor of the dvorak layout and instead cite some stodgy economist saying "it isn't worth it TO BUSINESSES to retrain a bunch of people to type differently for a 5% gain in speed" [even if the better keyboard layout reduces the risk of carpal tunnel or similar RSI...]
No, the two men are completely unrelated, as far as I know.
I type one-handed on QWERTY quite often, and with either hand... generally I'm running a mouse with the other hand, or holding the keyboard with it because I'm standing in front of a server that's got no place to set the keyboard down. It's not as fast as using both hands, obviously, but it hardly falls into the "Yah. Right" category. Ctrl-Alt-Del is the only one I have trouble typing, and then only when required to use the left Ctrl and Alt (and I doubt that that combination is much easier with Dvorak). But then, I've got relatively large hands and 20+ years of experience typing QWERTY...
Posted by Army Ant:
Buh? what on earth are you talking about? Let's see.. I don't carry anything with me. Most of the machines I use (NeXT, HP's, and Sun's) switch the kbd automatically when I log in.
The Macs at work switch with a simple keystroke.
The PC's require some futzing with the control panel, but will (reluctantly) switch for me.
And I always keep a spare copy of the keymaps on the fileserver, just in case.
Posted by dwarin:
From what I've seen, the Economist is generally biased toward defending free market capitalism, and this article was no exception. First it offered some anecdotal evidence that Dvorak's failure to replace QWERTY as the market standard isn't really a market failure. Then it gloatingly proceeded to generalize from this that all examples of market failure are also mere myths, which some economists seem to like quoting anyhow for some reason. All in all, a pretty shallow, transparently biased article.
Posted by Alonzo The Great:
:( I LOVE DOS!!!
yep, I'm a dvorak uzer too.:) This is one area in which 'doze 9.11 (wfw 3.11) vastly outperforms LiNuKs, with 'doze I was able to switch it in less than 30 seconds without reboot. Linux took a bit longer and because the kernel is shit, It should be possible to do one mapping per user but there seemed to be only one for the entire system and the thing maps it differently in each environment such as X or possibly any game but I can't play games on linux because the soundcard doesn't work and I can't find or install any games. DOS does it okay but any program with its own keyboard driver gets hosed.
Posted by The Famous Brett Watson:
Who needs QWERTY/Dvorak as an example of bad technological choice when we have Beta/VHS?
Posted by lu-darp:
I was sold on all the stories of how good Dvorak was compared to QWERTY, so I gave it a go.
But it did seem far more logical. You can't deny the fact that you can spell "TYPEWRITER" on the top row of keys on a QWERTY - it was designed as an amusing marketing gimic!
You also can't deny the difference in learning-rate between the two.
The bottom line? On QWERTY I got to the speed of 65 words/minute corrected (according to Mavis Beacon) I had used QWERTY for 16 years (since my ZX81, if that counts) After less than 2 years since my switch to Dvorak, I am finally back up to 65 words/minute. Yes it was painful at first, but luckily I was a student and had time to fritter.
As an added bonus, I can now touch-type perfectly! I don't have a choice, my keyboard is still QWERTY, so I physically can't peek at the keys. Thankfully Windows 95 comes with the facility to switch between keyboard layouts with a quick keypress. It eases the pain while learning.
I'm sold on Dvorak, and I'm glad I've changed; but as the article says - It's probably not worth the effort to switch unless you: (a) are learning to touch-type anyway (b) have time to kill & lots of patience, or (c) have a general desire for the world to be an easier, more logical place. [Lets not start on the question why Americans can't get out of the dark ages & into the metric system]
People always make the assumption that metrics are better, but in fact the other systesm do have advantages. For one, fractions work out very nicely in most non-metric systems, in particualr the third. Try taking 1/3rd a meter, it can't be done with any accuracy, but both the foot and yard can be divided into thirds readily.
And although moving the decimal to convert units is easy, in practice enough errors are made that it isn't done. (People forget the rarely used decimeter is between the centimeter, or they move one to far between the centimeter and milimeter. Stupid mistakes, really. (don't read this too closely, it slightly contradicts the top statement.
I'm not saying that metric is a bad system. Indeed having a universial system around the world has advantages. The advantages we were taught in school (decimal system) are not nearly as great as promissed.
Ummmm, heh, I tried to order an ergonomic keyboard from siemens for my desk the other day, and the response was: "We do not find it neccessary to buy you a ergonmic keyboard as you were not trained to use one according to your job description and resumae." If this is the response I get for that, I wonder what it would be like ordering a DEVORAK keyboard =)
I'm like that with the sun / pc keyboards... (for those who are unfamiliar, sun keyboards have control / caps lock switched relative to the PC locations, and esc where the tilde is on a pc keyboard)
;) Outside of work, I always revert back to PC, however.
Whenever I'm at work and switch to a PC, I start typing as if I'm on a sun keyboard. And people look at me like an idiot when I start typing the ` key at vi..
I decided to teach myself Dvorak last summer because of the potential it had to increase my programming productivity. After 3 to four weeks of frustrating slow typing, I've managed to get myself back up to my QWERTY speed of 120wpm.
:)
120 WPM seems to be my mind's limit, not some inability to physically hit buttons. What have I gained from Dvorak? I make about four times less errors. Also, my hands are often focused along the home row. I find I can sustain 120WPM for longer periods of time without my hands getting tired. Surely, for people like me who enjoy CLIs more than GUIs, Dvorak has been a positive switch.
I am troubled by a point that the article makes near the end. "Ergonomists point out that QWERTY's bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits (notably, that alternating hands sequences make for speedier typing.)
One of the features of a Dvorak keyboard is that both hands do as close to equal amounts of work, as far as being reasonable goes with the diversity of the grouping of characters in the english language permits. The largest number of letters used in a single right-hand word is five. The largest number of letters in a left-hand word is four. I cannot remember the atrocious number that was presented to me for QWERTY, but 'sweater' comes to mind almost immediately.
It would seem to me that the author of this piece is using pro-Dvorak logic to back up his thesis. The 'accidental benefits' of the QWERTY keyboard really are fabricated for this article.
I realise that this article focuses on the marketing side of things, but I see people interested in actually choosing keyboards reading this as well.
On a different note, one of the most bothersome things to any gamer is the raw keyboard mode when they have a software remapped Dvorak keyboard. Thanks to Open Source, I modified the svgalib sourcecode and changed my Quake/Quake 2 config files button choices, and now I can use Svgalib in Dvorak.
There is a certain amount of nerdliness to knowing Dvorak. How many slashdot readers have HP calculators? Those of us who do know how fun it is to loan our calculator to someone else and have them hand it back with the "+: Too few arguments" error message at the top of the screen because they couldn't use it.
It's the same thing with Dvorak. Sure, it's more comfortable and more efficient (RPN saves 30% of the keystrokes over algebraic entry), or at least we want to believe it's more efficient, but we like it because it lets us be different and eccentric.
So, we'll see the true nerds. They'll have RPN calculators and QWERTY-keyboards remapped and repainted to be Dvorak ones.
My major qualm with it is that no platform I've worked with has a template for Dvorak that will also let you do international characters (such as the accented characters in Spanish). I would hope that someone would come up with a Dvorak-International layout. All other problems people have with it (switching back to Qwerty, learning hotkeys, finding less commonly-used symbols used in programming languages, etc.) I have overcome in the year since I started to learn it.
The reason you did not see any mention of your take on the "origins" of the QWERTY keyboard layout was that the article linked in this story covered that myth very completely and succinctly.
In the future, please take the time to actually read instead of just looking at the comments and posting your own thoughts.
God forbid you should have to do any research of your own...
So are all print publications just pulling fabricated crap out of their asses when they do quotes like this?
It would certainly be NICE if there were hyperlinks to appropriate publications, but what makes you think those other publications are available online?
I was doing QWERTY for a while, and then switched to Dvorak, and after a bit of retraining, I can type faster than I could with QWERTY.
Consider this:
- If you desire to work at something (like a Dvorak conversion), you're going to work harder at it.
- If you spend time learning something, you are going to be better at it than you were the month before.
- If you stop learning something, you are not likely to get much better at it by this time next month.
Everyone making these types of testimonials should (in most cases) at least concede the possibility that they worked their way up to a high level of proficiency with Dvorak. The fact that they type slower with QWERTY could easily be because they don't *use* QWERTY all that much anymore, or that they work harder learning Dvorak. I've yet to see a truly "objective" testimonial (if there is such a thing) that was able to convince me of that person's obvious success with Dvorak because of the LAYOUT (vs. the person's own will to learn).For those of you that want to put your faith in testimonials, all the power to you. For the rest of us, please look at everything with an objective eye.
Now, I'm NOT saying that Dvorak isn't a better layout than Qwerty. For typing English text, I will agree that Dvorak is much better, and if people are consistently typing up that sort of thing, it might be in their best interests to learn that layout. I, however, am a programmer. I hit perhaps 20% of my highest typing speed (~140WPM with prose) while I program, so layout here isn't a huge concern, and to be honest, I make more use of "obscure" keys (for obvious reasons), which makes QWERTY more efficient for me.
I do still tinker with Dvorak every once in a while (I have the machine set up so it's very easy to toggle layouts on a per-application basis), but I have yet to see a serious advantage to using it for things like this.
Lastly, ask the average person who has taken the plunge and stayed with it and they will tell you they havn't regretted it at all.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you at all. I occasionally flirt with the Dvorak layout at home and at work, but your argument was just totally blown to pieces when you wrote that sentence above.
I mean c'mon, if someone regretted trying out Dvorak, would they have stayed with it?
Dvorak users consistantly type faster than Qwerty users. That's a fact, and I'm testomony to it. I typed Qwerty for years and go to 80 WPM, but it's impossible to avoid mistakes beyond about that - 80 WPM.
What statistics are you quoting? If there were actual trials done, consider this as a possible explanation: QWERTY typists account for all types of people from the computer veterans to the just-introduced high school mac user. Dvorak typists account for a small yet "elite" percentage of those that take their typing and computing seriously. These people WILL type faster on average than the average QWERTY person because most QWERTY people type slowly and most Dvorak people type quickly. Now if the time trials were done truly objectively, they must take this into account and get an appropriate cross-section of typists with similar typing abilities, independent of layout.
With respects to your 80WPM ceiling, I transcribe at ~140WPM with the QWERTY layout. I regularly go at 80-100WPM with few (if any) mistakes, but when my brain switches to a linear transcription mode, there's less thinking involved and I can hit 140WPM while correcting errors. Perhaps you are exaggarating the problem to help make your point? Or maybe you just aren't a good typist...?
Studies have found that the reason Dvorak users don't often type at the phyiscally possible rates of Dvorak (200 WPM+) is that their minds can't work that fast.
I'd appreciate URL's to statistics (unless you're just pulling some of these numbers out of your ass -- no offense). It's "physically possible" to type 1,000WPM using QWERTY, or 1 million WPM. I don't see where you get this ~200+WPM figure. When I'm transcribing, it feels like the bottleneck is in my hands, but when I'm just typing normal things like e-mail and this comment, the bottleneck is in my mind as I work to compose my thoughts and work out a nice way to say what I'm trying to say. This could be interpreted as an argument for the Dvorak layout, but I've not yet reached any form of proficiency with that layout to be able to say for certain that it is indeed better in this respect.
Dvorak is better, all around, and that article was defending (actually, denying) capitalism's inability to develop good standards. When it comes to keyboard layouts, folks, listen to science, not an economist.
Firstly, I do listen to science, and the first sentence here is an opinion, not a scientific conclusion, so you'll have to forgive me if I dismiss it as such. The article was not saying Dvorak was bad, and if that's the conclusion you drew, perhaps you should re-read it. They were saying that there hasn't been any conclusive evidence that the Dvorak layout is indeed conducive to fast typing.
Again pro DVORAK.
I've been typing for around 12 years now 10 of those 12 years was spend in the QWERTY world so I was pretty fast.
Here is just a few things that I noticed when switching over. This after almost a year of using the dvorak layout and still typing faster on the qwerty layout.
1. With Dvorak you tend to make more mistakes.
2. Dvorak have to be setup and this causes problems when youn need to fix your computer.
3. Nobody else can use your console and this is sometimes an atvantage (yes they can and do telnet/ssh/rlogin in).
Advantages:
1. Keys are placed in more logical arrangement. (A new typist must start looking at the hame keys and then move to the outside)
2. To reach the same speed with the Dvorak as the QWERTY you type much ligter (not as much noise).
3. It's ligter on the fingers I spend 8 hours in front of a computer after 8 hours with a Qwerty keyboard you hurt really bad Dvorak solved that for me.
4. You learn to touch type with Dvorak that I could never really pick up with the Qwerty. (Yes I could type faster than most secretaries. But I still use 8 fingers and only occasionally my pinky. I'm starting to touch type aftter about 2 years of fultime usage.)
5. The most impartant reason to use a dvorak keyboard is of course the coolness factor. Very few people can use the dvorak keyboard and feel really uncomfortable using it so they tend to leave my computer alone when I'm not there.
I'll have to test my typing speed again but I think I'm still under my Qwerty speed but that doesn't really matter because I have increased the quality of my Linux experience by switching to the dvorak keyboard.
Some friends of mine decided they were going to switch at the beginning of the school year, and I followed a little behind them for a little while, but I didn't make the entire plunge. I kept my QWERTY knowledge while gradually building up my Dvorak. I slacked off for a while, but then during Christmas break, I took the full plunge, which took me a week before I felt up to speed in Dvorak. (During that time, however, my typing speed suffered. That's why I switched over a break in which I had enough time to spare.) My friends tell me they spent two weeks the cold turkey method before they were up to speed.
And let us not forget that Dvorak is perscribed by doctors (I do need a reference for this) for patients with RSI. Of all of the computer users out there, we are the ones who need to worry about it.
My point: the cost of retraining is worth paying. If I had to do it over, I probably would have switched years ago. (However, it is convient to have a group of people around you also switch, so you can build up infrastructure. In the local computer lab (albeit populated by evil win 95 boxen), one of my Dvorak friends wrote a Delphi program to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)
Power to Dvorak. Death to QWERTY.
that the 'qwerty' kbd was designed to make u type slower!..back when the original type-writer was designed (what was it again..remington?) the fan layout of the hammers jammed if the typist typed fast. so the 'qwerty' layout was chosen as default...never tried dvorak..where can i get a kbd with it ? :)
the feedback loop of adoption meant that the qwert kbd has reigned ever since...sorta like MS on the desktop
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Actually, the ORIGINAL design did not allow the word typewriter to be written with the top row. There were two keys transposed to make this happen, but I believe this change was made prior to 1900.
:)
Cheers
As the Economist editorial frames the debate, the QWERTY layout won out over the Dvorak layout because a study proved that there was no significant speed advantage of Dvorak over QWERTY. One could respond that this ignores the other advantages of the Dvorak layout. (This is probably a good reason to avoid arguing excessively about whether one thing or another is a "market failure." Such arguments inevitably tend to devolve toward arguments about taste, appeals to the "bandwagon effect," etc.)
However, I think it would be more profitable to ask why there have not been more alternative keyboard formats than the Dvorak, given the widely -held beliefs in the deficiency of the QWERTY layout. So much else has changed in society in the 100+ years that the QWERTY keyboard has existed; why hasn't the keyboard?
-----
I agree that dvorak is much more comfortable to work with. I can type all day with the dvorak layout without a complaint. Qwerty feels like pounding rocks with my bare hands after several minutes. I can type faster and longer with dvorak than qwerty.
does anyone have any recommendations for a good Open Source typing trainer?
Here is a good dvorak typing tutor program in a tarball. Enjoy!
We should lose Caps Lock. When was the last time you used it?
The caps lock key makes a great ESC key for vi... Its one of those keys that can safely by remapped for personal use.
I have little doubt that many people experience real improvements in typing speed and so on with Dvorak. I also have little doubt that winners of typing contests get an edge from the Dvorak layout. But it only takes a slight edge to win - how much real performance advantage do Speedos really make for swimmers? All Olympic swimmers wear them, but for recreational swimming, the difference is lost in the noise.
I think that the win that people get from learning Dvorak is that they are forced to spend time learning to type correctly. I (and many other hackers I know) have a very sloppy keying style, including moving the hands arounnd and using whichever finger is closest at the time. When I learned Dvorak, I tried to learn it right, and it wasn't possible to go back to being sloppy just out of habit, because then you hit the wrong keys (or, in Dvorak, yd. ,prbi t.fo). Training for speed typing would probably be just as effective, but who's motivated to do that?
The irony is that if Dvorak had taken over in the early days, most present-day hackers would get a similar benefit from learning Qwerty :)
The main reason I went back is that I'm often having to deal with other keyboards that haven't been remapped. The cognitive dissonance of having to go back and forth between the two layouts just wasn't worth it, and almost certainly decreased my total performance, even though the burst performance may have been higher when I got into the Dvorak "flow."
The reasoning in the editorial is pretty bogus, though. Just because the value of Dvorak doesn't exceed the cost of retraining does not imply that there's no economic lock-in effect - quite the contrary. It's only if the benefit were exactly zero that this would be the case. The authors have a point that the benefit of Dvorak is not as great as sometimes assumed, but that's not at all the same as claiming it's zero.
Raph, who's glad not to be locked in to either Speedos or swim trunks ;)
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Mr. Brooks has some good comments about Dvorak vs. QWERTY, including comments on why the Liebowitz and Margolis article isn't exactly proof that dvorak isn't better. He goes over each of the major points of their article.
Regarding the Economist's editorial, I can't say I agree with their analysis: They don't take into consideration ergonomics, the cost if dvorak or qwerty is learned from the start, and the fact that there are no unbiased studies showing one is better than the other. (The GSA study was biased, Mr. Strong had an investment in QWERTY, having put lots of effort into improving/using it).
It is easily shown that that the dvorak keyboard moves the more commonly used keys under the stronger fingers, important to prevent RSI. In addition, the alteration of keys is much better than the QWERTY keyboard, important for speed. (The QWERTY keyboard has this property too, but they keys are on the weakest fingers. This is the accidental benifit mentioned by the economist, tho it possibly risks injury.)
Even Sholes thought that the original keyboard needed improvement, having taken out a patent on this keyboard:
X P M C H R T N S D G K
J B W F L A E I O U Y
Q V (punctuation goes here)
Notice that the vowels are under one hand and that most common words would alternate well.
Regarding Dvorak being baised; I think not. The book, Typewriting Behavior: Psychology Applied to Teaching and Learning Typewriting , is authored by four people (Dvorak being only one) and consists of information pertinent to all aspects of typing. In fact, the Dvorak keyboard is only called the simplified keyboard at this point. The book cites several hundred case studies. This book is the result of the $130,000 dollars from the Carnegie Commission for Education.
This is the quintessential book for understanding how humans use keyboards. There isn't anything like it since (tho some have built upon it).
Finally, I have to state my opinion on Economists in general; Most don't know simple math. A good explination of what I mean can be seen on AdBusters' Economists Must Learn to Subtract . This wouldn't be the first time an economist was unable to see past the obvious dollars. Why should they worry about the pain a person will have, later in life? Especially if they can fire that person first?
Economics is currently where physics was in ancient greece. We know a few concepts, one or two working formula, but we're missing huge chunks. Human health, long term viability and quality of living are all left out.
Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. I'm sure I'll get at least one colorful response. Oh, BTW, CmdrTaco, what irks you about the QWERTY origin story/mythos? That dvorak is touted as better for speed? That dvorak is possibly better for your hands? Or that it acts as a possible exception or counter-proof for current economic theory?
Personally, I'm only interested in ease of use and my precious wrists. And since dvorak makes my wrists feel better (even now that I'm back to my QWERTY speed) and switching most systems to dvorak is trivial....
Ciao!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
God forbid they should have to make the effort to put a few pages up on the web. If people want to read that stuff, they can just dig up a print version. When I was young we didn't need no fancy schmancy hypertext systems. We walked seven miles to the library in the snow, barefoot! And we were GRATEFUL!
PS. I'm not saying they made it up. To take what I said that way is a bit of a stretch.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I'm not the previous poster but for me, if it ain't hyperlinked, it ain't there.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I use caps lock for Multi_key. CAPSLOCK-"-i -> ï, etc.
These lines in .Xmodmap will arrange that: clear Lock keycode 66 = Multi_key
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
clear Lock
keycode 66 = Multi_key
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Hmm, I was born in such a country and I don't recall ever using the dm except in math class. Decilitres are another story. On the other hand, *what does that have to do with anything*!?
I find the imperial system quite silly, the metric system perfectly logical. An added bonus is that it's easy to remember the Earth's circumference in metres.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
There is absolutely no proof of this, and can't be unless a statistcally significant population of Dvorak users can be found. But, isn't there the possibility that while speed might not improve, repetetive stress injuries might be reduced by the Dvorak keyboard?
yes, but the article was refuting this belief, at least wrt qwerty.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
... is the hpcalc..
;)
I find it pretty rude to slander someone by saying their work is fraudulant without good proof. You're going to have to go farther than poor scientific procedures, financial intrest, and misreported numebers to prove it.
FACT: Every national typing contest since 1931 has been won by a typist with a Dvorak keyboard.
Typing contests are NOT random samples, but rather self-selected samples (generally of those with an incentive to prove that their method is best).
No, but these typing contest were not method debates, they were speed contests. The typists were not out to prove their method, they were out to prove their speed. If every Indy 500 was won by the same model of car, I might take it be indication about the quality of the car, despite the fact it's not a random sample.
The article states August Dvorak developed the Dvorak keyboard in the 1930s.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
I'd like to see a study on the cost of carpal tunnel syndrome due to qwerty vs dvorak. To me, that's much more important than the benefits of a higher typing speed.
---
I tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout for awhile. Why didn't I? I was busy working 12-hour typing days at the time. I've never really had the week or two to set aside to really retrain myself. But from what I used, I was impressed.
I can see the Economist arguing against Dvorak strictly on economic merit (retraining costs etc.) But I also hear similar arguments against Esperanto -- even though it's an extremely simple language to learn (15 grammatical rules), nobody wants to touch it because everyone uses something else.
For that matter, I hear similar arguments against Linux - "not enough apps right now", etc.
Nobody makes a buck off selling the Dvorak layout -- unlike the "Microsoft Ugh-ohnomic keyboard". I can reprogram X etc. to process Dvorak at no cost; I can do the same in Windows with a little more effort.
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
I tried to switch to Dvorak a couple of years ago, and gave it up. I was doing sysadmin work which forced me to use a lot of different machines, and it was impossible to completely avoid QWERTY, and switching back and forth is just a huge pain.
However, I now control all the machines I use, and so I'd like to give it another shot. I remember the lovely way words like T-H-E rolled off the fingers in Dvorak, and I can feel how much travel my fingers are doing now and would like to reduce it. The big problem is programs that depend on physical location of keys.
For instance, emacs uses Control-X heavily, and Control-X is a pain to reach on a Dvorak keyboard. All you Dvorak fans, what do you do for C-x? Grin and bear it, or do you have elisp to globally swap C-x and C-t, or what? It'll still be a huge pain to reflash my fingers with the new chord locations, of course...
For another example, countless games use IJKL or equivalent; and sure, I can usually reconfigure the keys within the program or with X resources, but man would it be a pain to have to do that manually for every single game I play. Being able to use the defaults occasionally is nice. Is there some way to click a window and say "QWERTY in this window" when you're using Dvorak everywhere else?
Suggestions, or pointers to web resources, would be most welcome. Thanks.
Alan
(That said, I personally use QWERTY, and feel that Dvorak is overrated. The speed increase is minor, and takes a long time to develop if you're already experienced at QWERTY; and recommending it as a primary treatment for encroaching RSI symptoms, which far too many Dvorak advocates and ignorant doctors do, is nothing short of insane. I'd be surprised if it weren't a superior layout, but it's far less important than many other aspects of ergonomics and typing technique.)
Alan
After reading this discussion, I decided to give up QWERTY cold turkey... after all, I'm going to be typing for decades, I might as well invest some time in learning a more comfortable layout.
Unfortunately, I've had recurring trouble with RSIs. One of the first places I notice it is in my pinky fingers. And right now, my right pinky is howling.
No surprise. Insanely, Dvorak puts two of the 10 most common letters in English text (L and S) on the right pinky. Maybe this wasn't so bad in typewriter days, but on a keyboard, the pinkies are already burdened with Return and meta keys and a whole slew of punctuation. QWERTY gives the fingers an unbalanced load, but at least the extra burden is on the relatively strong and flexible index fingers.
I suppose I could design my own layout; I did a long time ago, and even swapping L and K in Dvorak would be a huge improvement; but then I'd be really screwed trying to use anyone else's machine. (At least with standard Dvorak, "loadkeys dvorak" works on any Linux box, and most Windows machines have it as an option.)
The hell with it. I'm sticking with QWERTY.
Alan
So, how does this article explain that the people who win the speed-typing contests are always Dvorak typists?
It doesn't - which is OK, because that's totally irrelevant to the point of the story.
It is not claiming that QWERTY is better than Dvorak. It only says that QWERTY doesn't suck as much as economists seem to think it does.
I miss Meept.
Nobody seems to be remembering why we REALLY have QWERTY keyboards. Yes, it had EVERYTHING to do with speed. See, the decision on a standard keyboard layout was made in the TYPEWRITER age. The Dvorak keyboard was faster - but that was a problem. Anyone who remembers old typewriters remembers the old metal bars that were flipped up to strike the ribbon and put the letter on the page. Sometimes if you hit keys close to each other a little to fast, the typewriter would jam and you'd have to reach up and pull the bars apart and then continue on. the Dvorak keyboard was too fast - it made the bars jam all the time. In short, typing needed to be SLOWED DOWN to keep from jamming the machine. Tradition and plain old resistance to change has kept us using them long since the days when it was necessary.
-Ken
One of the points in the article is that tarining is worthwhile, whether continued ttraining in QWERTY, or retraining in Dvorak. The very fact that you spent time training is responsible for speed increase, regardless of which keyboard.
And let us not forget that you are a sample of one.
And as for doctors, have they actually done studies on the RSI effects?
--
Infuriate left and right
Which is all very interesting, but the point is this: if you have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the cost of retraining for Dvorak (however modest) is not worth paying. This implies, in turn, that the QWERTY standard is efficient. There is no market failure.
the cost of retraining might be prohibitive but this doesn't mean that we shouldn't train the next generation of keyboard users (all the children who have yet to start using keyboards) to what might be a better way of doing things...
for all the Economist says about economists using anecdotal histories, this article has its own logical problems...
If you're interested in reducing hand motion, have a look at http://www.maltron.com/ - the Maltron keyboard has both an improved key layout and a physically sculpted two-dish design (hard to describe but also reduces hand movement by moving keys closer to fingertips at rest).
The Maltron layout was designed based on a corpus of English text and is claimed to greatly reduce hand motion. I use a Maltron keyboard with Qwerty layout but even that is a huge improvement over flat keyboards.
For anyone interested in RSI (and you should be, it's not uncommon, painful to treat, and easily prevented), there are some links at http://www.bigfoot.com/~rdonkin/
I really think you missed the point of this article. They are not saying that just because something is in use means it is better by default. They were referring to using QWERTY as an example of market failure.
It also has nothing to do with the quality of a keyboard. Quality is not a "different input" as you said, just a variation on the current method. Just because the IBM keyboard is better because of quality (not better because is more efficient, etc.) does not mean every body will use it. I think a better example is the comparison between gas and steam powered automobiles. There is a real difference here, not just a quality difference.
The fact that we are continually searching for something better is a part of human nature, not necessarily because the current method is so fundamentally flawed.
Also, ergonomic keyboards are becoming more and more popular because they are better and solve certain problems. But it has nothing to do with the QWERTY layout. Putting your hands in that position with any layout is eventually going to cause problems.
--
I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed...
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, so I will fill you in on what I was told was the reason for QWERTY. I was told that prehistoric wordprocessors had some sort of mechanical workings that actually smacked some carbon off of a ribbon and onto your paper. They apaerntly had individual mechanical workings for each letter. If you were to type to fast or hit letters that were close to each other the mechanical workings would literally lockup. To prevent this prehistoric mand developed a "slower" key layout. This layout also made ajacent keystrokes less common. When these devices improved to have one ball shaped mechanism that turned to the apropriate letter befor smacking the carbon, the previous problem was solved, but prehistoric man was already used to the slower "QWERTY" layout.
At least that is how I heard the story. As far as I am concearned Devorak is faster, but who cares. I can type in both at about the same speed but I could see where I could type twice as fast in Devorak (like a freind of mine can)
I code about 8-10 hours a day, and I never have problems with my wrists. The one time I did begin to develop some soreness was during a two or three-week span where I was playing a lot of xpat2. All the mouse-clicking was killing my wrist. I dropped the game and my wrist healed up.
By way of observation: the only person in this office who has a case of carpal tunnel syndrome sits lower than her keyboard and rests her hands on one of those keyboard-wrist pads. Ridiculous! When you're typing you shouldn't be resting your hands on the desk, and you shouldn't be sitting in a hole in the ground. All you end up doing in both cases is torquing your wrists.
(Okay, I might be wrong about the pad; I've been trying to analyze what I do when I type, and I can't be sure about that. But sitting in a hole is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm convinced that better practices with one's typing posture would alleviate this problem.)
IMO,
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
For an explanation of this phenomenom, try reading:
http://www.jwz.org/worse-is-better.html
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Ahhh Esperanto ... German has a fairly short list of grammatical rules as well, which is why you end up with some fairly ridiculously convoluted sentences unless you deliberately break those rules. Try translating "The dog that chased the cat that ate the rat that lived in the house that Jack built." into German. All the verbs pile up on the end. Computer languages: perl is adored (and reviled) by many because it has *so many* grammatical rules. No one wants to have to use a spoken language that feels like a computer language.
And people DO make money from selling Dvorak keyboards. Considering the exhorbitant price for some of these "ergo" keyboards they sell, one would think they make a killing for just moving the keys around and popping a different keymap into the controller.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Well, the Economist has to sell issues to make a profit, and an article, to garner interest has to tell you something you DON'T know, or challange your current beleifs. When I learned to type, it was qwerty or nothing. Nobody offered, "Hey, you may want to try this other system". It's almost like your system of weights and measures or currency handed down w/o choice. The US made an attempt at converting to metrics in the 70's but didn't follow thru. Is this because the avoirdupois system is market chosen as inherently more economically efficient than the metric or because of the formidible changeover cost?
"My car gets 4 cords to the furlong and that's the way I like it" - Abraham Simpson
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Obviously, the Dvorak/QWERTY debate won't be settled by this, or any article, study or personal opinion -- like choice of window manager, text editor or automobile transmission, it's simply up to the unique preferences, prejudices and experiences of the individual.
But, a number of people have politely inquired whether I've ever actually tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard.
So, here is my story:
Long, long ago, I owned a "Laser" computer, which was an Apple II clone. It had a switch on the back to go between Dvorak and QWERTY. Having only recently heard about the Dvorak keyboard, from none other than sci-fi/fantasy author Piers Anthony (who mentions it in the preface or postscript to one of his Incarnations of Immortality books, which I was avidly devouring at the time), I decided to give it a whirl. I magic-markered the new characters on the keys, and got my typing speed up to a pretty respectable level after a while.
As fate would have it, this was just before I started taking typing and computer classes in school, where the keyboards were, of course, QWERTY. After a few exceedingly poor typing test scores, I gave up trying to be biclavial and went back to QWERTY for good. Before very long, my QWERTY typing speed was as good as my Dvorak had ever been, and over time greatly exceeded it.
All in all, my experience with Dvorak, however brief, did nothing whatsoever to convince me of its supposedly evident superiority. I now type with great speed and accuracy with my QWERTY keyboard, and the simple expedients of good typing habits, regular breaks and a wrist-rest have saved my fingers from RSI's so far. My preferences, prejudices and experience tell me that Dvorak is an inconvenient solution to a problem I just don't have.
Also, I now think Piers Anthony is a boring, no-talent hack. But that's a subject for a whole other flamewar.
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
I used to type on Qwerty, but I switched about 3 years ago. According to Mavis Beacon, my speed went from about 40 wpm to about 65 wpm. Not setting any records, but it's good for me. I have a friend though who went from 90wpm to 150wpm after he switched to dvorak. I'm pretty sure he's on crack, cause he types so fast it's scary.
cya
The studies cited would not be very current, in that manual typewriters would benefit much more from alternate-hand typing. Nowdays I believe, with computer keyboards and N-key rollover, a strong case could be made for Dvorak. In my experience, Dvorak is quite efficient, though like QWERTY it does take quite a bit of practice to make it work well for you.
The problem is maybe not a market failure....there are inherent limitations to what a market can do. If no one asks the right questions, the answers don't automatically spring from the ether.
--Tom
Tom Geller
Liebowitz and Margolis are well-known Microsoft
mouthpieces, and the article of theirs cited in
the Economist piece is old, old, old. Why would
the Economist suddenly bring it up now? Shouldn't
be hard to guess. Anyway, I'm a QWERTY guy, and
obscenely good at it to boot, but it takes me two
seconds of study to see that Dvorak rocks.
This one is from Reason magazine. It has some political commentary as well, but I found it interesting. It is kind of old.
No. He did say we should lose the Caps lock. That guy sucks.
It _is_ slow. I tried dvorak for a while. Horrible to learn by jumping into it. I'm saving all of that effort for the Maltron keyboard, which is far superior (and $430). Coolness comes with a price.
I had always thought that QWERTY keyboards were set up the way they were because early salesmen wanted to be able to amaze consumers by typing out "TYPEWRITER" with amazing speed. This, of course, was done by placing all the requisite letters in the top row (go ahead, try it). The jamming thing makes sense, but so does the explanation I heard before.
Mycroft
> For those unix weenies: take a class in critical thinking before you open your mouth again.
Is this an example of your critical thinking?
> For the record, let me talk a bit of personal experience for those interested.
Critical thinkers do not generally rely on testimonials. Controlled experiments and thoughtful consideration of the literature are hallmarks of critical thinking. Name calling, alas, is not.
> I try not to support stupid things, such as Qwerty, vi, unixism and perl.
Critical thinkers, I fear, do not believe that one can "prove" an opinion.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
It's not a limit of "thinking" but of converting thoughts into finger movement.
Stenographers aren't typing every letter of every word, which is why they can type faster. They don't have to convert every letter of every word into a neurological impulse.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Yes, QWERTY was originally designed to prevent key jams. But it wasn't adopted as a standard until after the mechanical failings of earlier typewriters had already been overcome. It competed fairly and openly in the market and won its place as a standard based on its merits.
The notion that we are tied to QWERTY because of the mechanical failings of early machines is the myth that the journal article sought to disprove.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Note that Beta was first, unlike Dvorak. The supposed "market failure" of Beta, if it was indeed a failure, was not the same implied by the Dvorak failure.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Read the article! There was no "retraining" cost before QWERTY was standard because virtually every machine sold involved training the typist. If training time were shorter or speed much greater, they could have easily outsold Remington.
QWERTY was not a standard until after the mechanical limits were surpassed. QWERTY was adopted much later throughout the world, where standardization simply can't be argued.
Although Dvorak was proposed after QWERTY was adopted, similair layouts did compete (and lose) to QWERTY.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The article *refutes* the assertion that we must overcome the ineffeciency of Dvorak. QWERTY, it seems, is not so ineffecient after all and claims to the contrary come from biased sources. Ergonomic literature argues that QWERTY may, in fact, be superior and the true limits to typing speed are neurological and not the physical speed of are fingers.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
QWERTY was not an immediate standard. Few people knew how to type and virtually every typewriter sold to a business resulted in training. Faster, easier keyboards has plently of opportunity to compete. The mechanical drawbacks of the original QWERTY had already been overcome:
The Blickensderfer used a type-bar configuration similar in principle to the IBM Selectric type ball and, so, could easily offer many different configurations.
QWERTY won on its merits. When the rivals failed, QWERTY was not a standard:
The rival keyboards did ultimately fail, of course.53 But the Qwerty keyboard cannot have been so well established at the time the rival key-boards were first offered that they were rejected because they were non-standard. Manufacturers of typewriters sought and promoted any technical feature that might give them an advantage in the market. Certainly shorter training and greater speed would have been an attractive selling point for a typewriter with an alternative keyboard. Neither can it be said that the rival keyboards were doomed by inferior mechanical characteristics because these companies went on to produce successful and innovative, though Qwerty-based, typing machines. Thus we cannot attribute our inheritance of the Qwerty keyboard to a lack of alternative keyboards or the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Finally, with no standards or mechanical incentives, QWERTY dominated world markets when it was initially introduced:
We should also take note of the fact that the Qwerty keyboard, although invented in the United States. has become the dominant keyboard throughout the world. Foreign countries, when introduced to typewriters, need not have adopted this keyboard if superior alternatives existed since there would not yet have been any typists trained on Qwerty Yet all other keyboard designs fell before the Qwerty juggernaut.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The superiority is NOT the myth in question. The fable that Liebowitz and Margolis refute is that the acceptance of QWERTY is a market failure.
In all, it's actually a pretty dry topic outside of economics, but the hacker aspects of Dvorak seems to have really incensed passions.
I would gladly wager that, if better studies are performed, the Dvorak layout will be found objectively better for anyone who touch-types regularly.
Well, I wouldn't take that wager. Dvorak might easily win such a contest. But *until* it does, it doesn't make economic sense for it to be adopted as a new standard.
Further, even if it were superior, the real question is HOW MUCH more superior is it, and HOW MUCH it will cost to convert.
Evidence already exists to suggest that the improvements simply won't be too great over the entire population. QWERTY gained early acceptance while there were plenty of opportunities to produce a "better" system before it became standard, and so it is questionable just how much better Dvorak could be.
Changes in language, the original article argues, are fairly common and do not impose high costs. But changing the definition of an inch could be extremely expensive. To do so, all for marginal and unproven gains, are not economically effecient.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
True, but the journal article did not do that. It was also a critique of the pro-Dvorak studies and a more thorough consideration of how QWERTY was adopted in the first case.
Of COURSE it's a pain in the ass to relearn how to type. It can take up to a month before people are up to snuff in Dvorak.
Before QWERTY was adopted, virtually every typists was a "new" typist. The "retraining" costs weren't there and if there were incentives to develop layouts that could be taught more quickly. Mechanical failures had been overcome and QWERTY won its merits.
Dvorak spent over 10 YEARS developing the Dvorak layout, under the guise of a study for the Navy. He filmed typists, found the common problems, and fixed them. I'd like to see ONE study that supports the claim that QWERTY is as fast or faster. It just doesn't make sense:
Dvorak had a financial incentive to "prove" his keyboard was better. The Navy tests were not controlled and were most likely cooked. The journal article goes into great detail to get the original studies and critique them.
FACT: Every national typing contest since 1931 has been won by a typist with a Dvorak keyboard.
Typing contests are NOT random samples, but rather self-selected samples (generally of those with an incentive to prove that their method is best).
One of the main reasons is ...
Scientific studies have shown that the most limiting part of typing is being able to translate thought into physical action. The theoretical advantages to Dvorak have not been adequately proven.
FACT: With a QWERTY keyboard, only 30% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
FACT: With a Dvorak keyboard, over 70% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
Again, this does not seem to be the major limiting factor to typing speeds.
You can realize for yourself what this means to the average typist.
Nevertheless, it has yet to be proven.
These OSes have a program called xmodmap that makes it simple to switch their keys around.
This doesn't relabel the keys. It doesn't address the fact that no matter what OS you run, you will find yourself at someone else's keyboard. All for advantages that
As for hotkeys, deal with it. It took me about a week to get used to the new keys in vi--they don't have intuitive positions, but realistically, once you get used to them, it doesn't really matter ...
If it doesn't matter where the hot keys are, why does it matter where the other keys are? If the answer is to "get used to it", why bother? Why not "get used to" QWERTY?
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
First, the article goes to great length to argue that when QWERTY was adopted, it had plenty of competition and the mechanical failures had been overcome before it was a standard. This is not a case of "First Wins" because QWERTY had plenty of competition long before it was adopted. It would have been relatively costless in the early days to change the keyboard layout (and many did), but QWERTY won anyways.
Second, the article argues that there is no CLEAR advantage to Dvorak. One should not adopt new technology with evidence that it is superior, and the evidence for Dvorak has been cooked.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
First, the poster that I was responding to was simply restating the myth that QWERTY was adopted based on an unfair test. In fact, there were several competitions and not all of the competitors were as klunky as ones with pedals or separate keys for upper/lower case.
The "Fable of the Keys" does NOT assert that QWERTY is still the "best" choice (others do make that assertion and argue that tests for Dvorak have been mostly cooked). The central point of the article was that, sometimes, it is NOT economically effecient to adopt a superior technology. The costs of retraining, which Dvorak supporters understate, do not "pay for themselves".
Adoption of a superior technology where the cost of conversion are less than the benefits would be a market failure. QWERTY is simply not such an example. It was not a hastily chosen standard, but was in fact adopted based on its merits (at the time). Dvorak's claims of superiority and ease of conversion have been overstated and THAT is the reason it has not been widely adopted. The costs do not outweight the benefits.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
There are several versions of the claim that a switch to Dvorak would not be worthwhile. The strongest. which we do not make. is that Qwerty is proven to be the best imaginable keyboard. Neither can we claim that Dvorak is proven to be inferior to Qwerty. Our claim is that there is no scientifically acceptable evidence that Dvorak offers any read [sic] advantage over Qwerty. Because of this claim, our assessment of a market failure in this case is rather simple. It might have been more complicated. For example, if Dvorak were found to be superior. it might still be the case that the total social benefits are less than the cost of switching. In that case, we could look for market failure only in the process that started us On the Qwerty keyboard (if the alternative were available at the beginning). Or we might have concluded that Dvorak is better and that all parties could be made better off if we could costlessly command both a switch and any necessary redistribution. Such a finding would constitute a market failure in the sense of mainstream welfare economics. Of course, this circumstance still might not constitute a market in the sense of Demsetz. which requires consideration of the costs of feasible institutions that could efiect the change.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
PLEASE read the article. Virtually everything you state is a myth, and point of the Economist article (and the Journal article it cites) was to refute these myths.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The Economist article was a summary of journal articles on the subject. The journal article itself has quite a bit of citations to support the claims.
If you'd prefer to rely on testimonial rather than controlled experiments, I guess you're free to do so...
The article itself never asserts that QWERTY is superior, but it does question the claims to contrary.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The argument is that QWERTY won because it was there first... just like Beta.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The journal article actually states that there are two possible situations: (1) a superior technology exists, but the cost of transition is too high; and (2) a superior technology exists, and the cost of transition is NOT too high.
The point of the article is that Dvorak is an example of type (1) and not type (2).
QWERTY is often used as the canonical example of economic inefficiency where a superior technology SHOULD take over. They refute that and argue that QWERTY won originally on its merits and that Dvorak has failed to replace it because it has not been demonstrated to be cost-effective.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The article referred to in the article is at:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
> "The benefit of Dvorak does not justify retraining of staffs", which is exactly a standard lock-in.
They make a distinction. If the benefit exceeded the costs and they *still* failed to switch, it would be an example of "lock-in" and market failure.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
According to "The Fable of the Keys", there were in fact several early competitions. They argue quite convincingly that QWERTY was adopted on its merits. There main point is not that Dvorak is not superior, but that the costs of switching do not outweigh the benefits.
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Ack! Read the article again. "First wins" is the MYTH that the article refutes. The myth is that the failure to adopt the vastly superior Dvorak layout is a market failure. But the superiority of Dvorak was overstated, the costs are high and the benefits are small. There ARE benefits (or at least there MAY be benefits) with Dvorak, but they simply aren't "worth" it.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
So what you're basically saying is that you didn't read even one word of the article...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
> it does not present any new facts, or any direct evidence that QWERTY is better or even as good as Dvorak.
...ignores the ergonomic benefits that many claim for Dvorak.
Well, they go even further than that. They argue that even if Dvorak is superior, it's still not effecient to convert to in the ABSENCE of proof.
>
The paper DOES address these (more recent) claims. It finds no evidence one way or the other. You don't assume something to be true without evidence.
> In the absence of conclusive scientific evidence, try the Dvorak layout yourself or talk to people who have.
And you will certainly find that the people who TRAINED for speed found they could type faster...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
But when you switched, you were training for speed. Of course you can type faster... you trained yourself to. The real question is what your speed would have been like if you started on Dvorak. If you had retrained to almost any new keyboard, you probably could have beaten your original speed. In fact, I'd bet a four-week refresher course on QWERTY would benefit just about everyone...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The question is NOT whether Dvorak is a superior key layout at all. The article in question is about market failure and economic effeciency. It merely points out that simply because Dvorak didn't take off does not imply that the market is broken. The relative benefits of Dvorak vs. the costs of transitioning are questionable. Dvorak, although probably superior, is not the second coming of Christ and is not in the interest of the vast majority of ecomomic players to convert to. It may well be a good idea for individuals to cutover, but it is not an imperative.
I disagree with the authors unrelated assertion that MicroSoft is not a monopolist (or, more accurately, that they do not violate the anti-trust laws by using their position to lock out competition). The MicroSoft/QWERTY analogy is simply a bogus one. MicroSoft was not the "first", but rather became entrenched because, at one time, they offered a superior product at a better price. It wasn't an original idea, and it wasn't the best implementation, but it worked on the prevailing architecture at a reasonable price. The problem with MicroSoft is not that they can't be displaced because they were there first, but because they engage in unfair practices vis a vis their relationships with OEMs and by leveraging their current product.
In the case of QWERTY, there is no mega-corp forcing that all computers must pay the QWERTY corp for their keyboards (even if not being used); QWERTY does not go around buying out competitors; QWERTY has not expanded its market share by tying the keyboard to a 2-button mouse. The only assertion is that QWERTY won because it was there first and can't be displaced. I say that it's not a valid argument. It won its place in the market in the first case, and has simply not shown to be worth more than the cost to replace it.
*If* the only advantage of Linux were that it stayed up 1 day longer than NT and only costs a few dollars more, would it be worth it to replace NT? Surely no. Linux is vastly superior to NT in both quality and cost. On the desktop, Linux is still evolving (Dvorak is not). There is still a transitioning cost, and that must be paid out over time. The difference between Linux and Dvorak is that Linux actually IS making headway into the NT market, and most people are pretty sure that in the next few years it will do the same on the desktop. But we do still have to fear MicroSoft, not because they were "there first," but because of the lines of attack outlined in the Halloween memos (which unfairly discounts FUD as a valid MS tactic).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Was the Scientific American story based on the work by Paul David? "The Fable of the Keys" is a refutation of David's work, which has been widely cited as authoritative. If Sci. Am. used David's research, there results would also be flawed.
The "Fable of the Keys" article does a pretty good job of doing original research into the adoption and acceptance of QWERTY.
They do not assert that QWERTY is superior (although they don't necessarily accept it either), but are simply arguing that it would not be benneficial to switch.
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
First, the article *refutes* the claim that you can retrain in 2 weeks. Second, the "cost of converting" is quite a bit more than just the cost of the retraining.
The ergonomic benefits of Dvorak remain unproven.
Typing competitions are not random samples of the population but are rather self-selected samples of people with vested interests in "proving" their product is superior.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Have fun!
--
At the time that I switched to dvorak, there had been no studies done to prove that RSI and/or carpal tunnel were reduced by dvorak. However, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence. I know that a major reason that I switched is because every now and then I'd get nasty pains in my wrist and arm. I switched to dvorak, and haven't had that problem since. So, no studies, but, I believe that switching to dvorak averted an RSI for me. ... anyone can do it.)
It -is- proveable that your fingers will travel less distance typing on dvorak. (Take a dvorak layout, a qwerty layout, and a letter frequency analysis chart,
--Parity
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
What I take exception with is calling that an "efficient" market. The notion of "efficiency" is an equilibrium notion. If you try to extend it to non-equilibrium states, economic reasoning becomes circular: anything the market does becomes by definition "efficient", and an "efficient" market would not mean "a market that allocates resources optimally" anymore.
Mostly, it seems to me, that many free market economists cannot accept the simple fact that even in the ideal case, markets do not always lead to optimal allocations of resources and production. Rather than admitting that simple fact, they attempt to redefine notions of "efficiency".
Markets implement only one particular method for optimizing in a complex space of constraints. Necessarily, they get stuck in local minima. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but it is pretty much a trivial and inevitable mathematical fact that non-market mechanisms will sometimes lead to better allocation of resources, something ordinary human beings would call "more efficient".
In the case of QWERTY, that means that a government mandate to use DVORAK might be overall more efficient, even if it results in short term costs. In the case of QWERTY, I don't think there is a good argument to be made for that. In the case of cellular phone standards (Europe vs. US) or writing systems (Turkey), it seems that government intervention in the market has indeed resulted in significantly better efficiency. And in the case of operating systems, government intervention through standards setting could possibly also result in higher efficiency than the market by itself might achieve.
You may quote all the sources you like, but nothing will ever convince me that the Dvorak layout isn't God's True Gift to hackers.
I switched in the summer of '96 after doing some fairly extensive research. Changing the layout on my computer took all of thirty seconds, and I printed out a piece of paper with the layout on it and work began. In four days I was comfortable, within a week I was up to my QWERTY speed (roughly 60wpm). In about two months I was blazing along comfortably at 120wpm with fewer errors and much, much greater comfort.
Around November of that year, I retrained myself on QWERTY, having un-learned the layout during my Dvorak-izing. External factors, such as butt-headed school computer administration and games that refused to recognize the system layout, necessitated this, but it wasn't difficult, and didn't affect my Dvorak speed at all.
Today, I'm still chugging at 120 on Dvorak, can do about 50-60 on QWERTY, and can switch almost effortlessly. I can pop from one to the other instartly, and it takes me about two or three minutes to get in the proper mindset for full speed and fewest errors. However, when I'm presented with a computer that I cannot switch to Dvorak, I always feel handicapped by poor design and slow speed because, regardless of studies, that's how it feels to ME. I strongly encourage all of you who have looked at Dvorak but are undecided to look further: you DON'T have to lose your QWERTY and it IS better. Really.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I've heard lots about how convenient Dvorak is for typing, but I get the impression that this is mostly for typing prose. Does anyone know how dvorak does for typing code? (C & perl, specifically)
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Something I found on some obscure Dvorak page when I decided to go for it. It's a 165 byte DOS com file that does not work with NT. I just uploaded it to my company web page here. I put it into my autoexec.bat file and basically forget for the most part that it exists and that I really depend on it. DO NOT run it twice: you will get garbage. Scroll-lock will restore you to Sholes if you have use for such, or possibly save you if you ran it twice...
My testimonial: I have a chronic condition that is sapping my alertness and my Sholes typing speed was diminishing. I have never been able to touch-type, although I have yet to mount a serious effort with Dvorak. after one week I was up to my Sholes speed, but still a bit awkward. Within two weeks I was comfortable and faster.
I have had recurring carpel tunnel strain, but not since I switched. I'm faster with Dvorak, but am still a scan and peck (I used no training -- simply dove in). I am still more familiar with the arrangement of Sholes than Dvorak even though I've been typing Dvorak for 2 1/2 years (using a re-keycapped keyboard with uneven key heights), and wonder how much faster I'll be able to get (maybe something approaching a respecable typing speed) if I can get as familiar with the layout of Dvorak as with Sholes.
There are those who assume that Dvorak had a heavy hand in the Navy study (not proven) and had a conflict of interest (and behaved unethically, also not proven). The GSA study appears, from what I've read about it, to have been done by someone with a motive for seing Dvorak's simplified layout fail. Evidently there are no other studies.
Here's a possible study... randomly contact _n_ users (would need to be a large group, we need a significant number of people of all categories). The first part of the survey would be to assemble the "population" from which the second part of the survey is completed.
The groups: have tried Dvorak, went back to QWERTY (after seeing Shole's Dvoraklike revised layout I may well stop calling the QWERTY arrangement after its developer). Use Dvorak, have experience with QWERTY; Use Other; Use QWERTY, unfamiliar with Dvorak; and, if there are any, Use Dvorak, unfamiliar with QWERTY (just in case there are).
The main differences between the surveys given to each group in the second part of the survey would be rephrasing questions to keep them appropriate, increasing flexibility with the "Other" category, and eliminate inappropriate comparison questions.
There would be a target size for each group, with a random subsample of that group used for the groupse that have more than the target number (say 800 people).
This would take personal observation modes into a statistically measurable realm of evidence, and would require a bit less infrastructure than another study akin to the Naval or GSA studies or farces therof.
Why a survey? That's the type of research design I'm familiar with. 8)
SL
QWERTY is good enough for me. I can type 100 wpm with 98% accuracy, which is faster than my mind can produce meaningful words. You might say my brain is the bottleneck. Hmmm.... stty 115200 /dev/brainp0
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Some counter-arguments:
1. I know a 120wpm QWERTY typist. I've seen it done. (It's scary.)
2. Dvorak wasn't the only study. My analysis of the Maltron keyboard is that it's nearly the same layout as Dvorak's.
3. My experience with Dvorak is that some keys are in *STUPID* places! Please, swap the I and U at the very least! While we're at it, let's call the L back in from Siberia.
4. I actually type faster on QWERTY than Dvorak when I really get going, but Dvorak hurts my hands less. Either that, or it's switch-hitting between the two. I use Dvorak about 75% of the time now.
Here's another reason to love Dvorak layouts: Have you ever tried to use a QWERTY keyboard with one hand? Ya. Right. Who are we kidding. On the other hand, there are versions of the Dvorak layout that are designed for use with one hand.
-Cheetah
Yeah I see the same. Although I don't do dvorak I am in three different keyboard layouts and I have absolutely no problem switching from one of them to one of the other, *unless* I'm at the wrong place! Typing on the wrong keyboard in my office makes me crazy, but the good office layout confuses me if I'm in the computer room!
However, the switch itself is easy. It's just a question of having the right clues to switch, because switching mental keymaps doesn't seem to be something you can do consciously -- you just have to think the "right thoughts" or feel the right way and the switch is transparent.
TA
I'd also like to find out if anyone in the world other than Douglas Engelbart uses one of his "Chord keysets". Apparently Mr. Engelbart (for those who don't read and memorize every /. post, he's the inventor of the mouse) has long ago developed a left-hand device that lets him enter common commands or macros by hitting a "chord" (a set of simultaneous finger-presses). It sounds like it would be wonderful to use, far more interesting and powerful than "keyboard accelerators" or the all-but-forgotten function keys.
Bravery, Kindness, Clarity, Honesty, Compassion, Generosity
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
The article referenced in the Economist article is here:m l
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
The authors have written a series of papers supportive of Microsoft's claim not t be a monopolist; this page indexes some of them:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/netpage.ht
Interesting stuff, but one statement really sums up the limitations of their theory:
"Monopolists cause harm to consumers by reducing output and raising price."
In other words, product variety has no value in itself, it's only a means of forcing producers to hold down prices and maintain output. Or, I shouldn't complain if I have to use a Microsoft product as long as I don't have to pay any more from it or go to any more trouble obtaining it than I would for a competing product.
:-) Damn keys were in the wrong places after I switched from emacs to vi.
what about qwerty tutors?
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I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
ewps... my bad! hehehe
:) thanks for clearing that up!
shame on me....and i've been running linux since 93 *grin*
although i *did* mean X with linux in the sense that unix was already around when MS started windoze stuff, but unix was not a viable alternative OS for the common consumer... hence my coupling of X and linux (figuratively)
but yes... X has nothing to do (directly) with Linux.
"All that glitters is not gold"
if linux would have been around in the days of MS-DOS mass-usage, X would have progressed at the same time as windows *gag* 3.1 and earlier, and maybe the standard desktop would now be X instead of windoze. this logic seems to coincide with the logic of the author defending the QWERTY :)
but seriously, it seems to be a valid point. once the masses embrace a product such as windows.....no matter how inefficient or awkward it is.....it becomes increasingly difficult to overcome that standard.
cheers to *NIX
"All that glitters is not gold"
Yet another pro Dvorak article...
The basic advantage of the Dvorak layout is that it is easier to learn. Go grab the windows Dvorak typing tutor kpw101.zip and compare it against ANY QWERTY lesson. The Dvorak lesson is mostly real words, while the QWERTY lesson is mostly garbage. BTW, these lessons are in plain text format, and are (I think) non-copyright.
I started typing (but not touch typing) when I was around eight, and got to be pretty fast at it, but never learned to touch type. Not from lack of trying, but simply because I was to engrained into looking at the keyboard, which will actually slow down the process of learning to touchtype. I took a couple of touch typing classes, and practised at home as well, but no go. Didn't learn to touch type until I switched to the Dvorak layout. I've heard it compared to the keys on a Saxaphone and a flute. Both are very similar, but the one on the sax is more complex and more difficult to learn.
One of the main complaints I have against windows is that switching layouts SUCKS!!! The problem is that the layout switch (except in NT) doesn't effect the DOS boxes, and there is NO WAY in plain win 95/98 to switch the layout in a DOS box. Eventually, I found a generic 32 bit VXD that would do it - zdkeym.z ip but the problem with it is that it's nearly impossible to switch layouts on the fly. You can use regedit, but how clumsy! I finally found another program, keymap00.zip, that would do DOS boxes only, and which was fairly easily modified to switch between Dvorak, QWERTY, and the two Dvorak one-handed layouts. (My left handed brother doesn't have fingers on his left hand, which makes traditional touch typing rather difficult...) I wish I'd had MASM instead of having to modify the binary...
As for typing C code, where C was at least partially designed with the QWERTY layout in mind, shouldn't half your code be comments anyway? ;-) And Dvorak's slight limitations (worse placement of the ; primarily) are more than made up by it's more intuitive placement of other keys. Still, I've often thought that it would be real neat to design some sort of AI that would analyse your keyusage (including popular key pairs) and then design a custom keyboard mapping based on what would work best for you. Any takers? :>
Seriously, there isn't much point in switching to Dvorak unless you do a great deal of typing, just want to be a little odd, or are having RSI problems. I don't have any problem switching layouts, because my 'anchor' for switching is fairly simple: If I'm looking at the keyboard, I'm typing in QWERTY, otherwise it's Dvorak. (Though there are exceptions, such as C-? etc) Speaking of which, does anyone have a handy keycodes/xmodmap configuration file which will switch layouts at a keystroke? (I could make one, but if it's already there, why bother?)
Why aren't the Hypertext links that I embeded in the above active? I even logged out, on the off chance that it was some obscure setting somewhere, and it's still not showing up? What's up with that? Anyway, the resources I wanted to highlight where kpw101.zip, zdkeym.zip, and keymap00.zip, all of which can be found via http://ftpsearch.lycos.com
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Thank you for the reference. An examination of some of the other articles at the site indicate that this group believes that the current MS dominance in the business application market is due to superior products. It seems as if they have an agenda which colors my evaluation of their analysis of keyboard standards.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Yes, I did read before posting, but it appears that I only got the first three paragraphs in my browser when I first visited. Thanks to all the replies, I realized that there was more to see than what I had gotten at first. I appreciate the people who posted the URL to the referenced paper. Based on my perception of biases on the part of the authors, I will continue to be agnostic on the issue of Qwerty vs. Dvorak.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Too bad the article just asserts that it has been disproven rather then referring to some source. I would have to accept this on the authority of The Economist which is not a usual source for technical information. If anyone has any other links, I'd be interested.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
But QWERTY was adopted BEFORE Dvorak existed, thus QWERTY was already entrenched when Dvorak came around, thus they did not compete fairly, which is the reason that it's not a fable.
The "brain shift" time goes down a lot. I can now type QWERTY as fast as I could before, and I can switch back an forth in however long it takes me to realize that what I'm typing looks like gibberish.
I doubt Microsoft intended to become a pathetic monopoly, but they did, and it has had bad consequences. Likewise, they might not have designed QWERTY to be inefficient, but it is. One has only to play with an anagram program to see that your fingers have to move more on a QWERTY keyboard than on a Dvorak one. So maybe they didn't intentionally create something that would slow people down, but as I recall, there was a competetion between QWERTY and another keyboard, but the other "keyboard" had pedals, 80 keys (no shift), and was huge. So yes, QWERTY won for its efficiency, but that doesn't mean that it's actually efficient. (and that the letters in typewriter are in the first row is too much to be a coincidenc, and shows that ergonomics and speed were not at the forefront of Mr. Qwerty's (yes, joke) mine).
Saw somewhere a long while ago that the keyboard developer and the composer are distant cousins. Dunno about John C.
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
In Sholes' improved layout, where is the Z?
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
...and it might sell. There must be a few executives who finally have to use keyboards for the first times in their lives. Let them learn on a Dvorak letter layout. Add prestige-- Think creative marketing!
Legacy hardware/software addict. Midnight hacker, 1960. Codepage 819 in DOS: Total Latin-1 compatibility (no boxes/lines
I've been using dvorak and qwerty for years, and can type at 80-100wpm on both. It takes me only a couple keystrokes to "mind switch" between the two layouts, since I have to use qwerty occasionally.
:)
As far as I can tell, Dvorak has one big advantage. It seems much easier on my hands. I can type for hours on dvorak before noticing any strain at all, yet 10 minutes of qwerty can make my hands hurt for the rest of the day.
Cons? Some of the punctuation I use while programming is more difficult to reach in dvorak. Also, it took me a while to learn the layout and learn to switch layouts quickly. It's also more difficult to think up passwords which are "easy" to type on both layouts.. (it's fun to log in at 300wpm!
Mike
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Mike
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"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
It sounds like the market had a simple barrier to entry: prior saturation by a competing product requiring incentives to retrain current users and "rekey" (heheh) existing hardware... the primary incentive in such an instance is to compete on features. That's not necessarily a market *failure* - products out to have a demonstrable advantage before penetrating markets, shouldn't they? Sounds like a marketing or design failure, to me. Or am I missing something?
By the way - B.S., Economics & Finance, UT Dallas, '96 =)
Get off my launchpad!
ok, you got me, I haven't read the article yet =) I'll do it tonight, I'm supposed to be working, now.
Get off my launchpad!
Solaris and SunOS and a lot of others have had it for years before Linux, and they have beaucoup market share in the high end graphics market. The idea that X would progress faster if Linux existed earlier only works if there were also real mass market apps available for the OS itself as well. Only now are those apps becoming available.
Get off my launchpad!
My guess (coming from 30+ years of using keyboards since learning on a mechanical typewriter, plus a couple of anatomy courses) is that almost everything else about a keyboard design except the key layout is going to play a greater role in causing/reducing such injuries than key layout.
This includes things like keyboard angle, 'step height' between key rows, key sizes, key travel resistance (and resistance profile, ie resistance as the key is pressed), where the users wrists/elbows are relative to the keyboard, etc, etc. This could be tested since key layout can be easily remapped through software, holding all the mechanical variables constant. I'm not aware of any such research, however.
(BTW, was carpal-tunnel syndrome an occupational hazard of typists in the old mechanical typewriter days? If not, it suggests that better attention was payed to keyboarding ergonomics in those days.
-- Alastair
>In the local computer lab (albeit populated by evil win 95 boxen), one of my Dvorak friends wrote a Delphi program to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)
As opposed to adding a keyboard layout in the Keyboard Control Panel, and using LA + shift to switch between layouts? Really it is kind of bass-ackwards, but also handy: Windows lets you have a different keyboard layout per program incarnation, so that you can have a telnet session open using Dvorak, and another open using QWERTY. This allows you to use Dvorak without having to worry about another user coming up and getting confused (having that happen a couple of times can get you the boot from the lab). It may be that since they are lab computers they are locked down to prevent that, but hey, I thought I'd let some people know that you don't need to hack Delphi to use Dvorak (nor do you need to purchase a special keyboard). Unfortunately, Windows doesn't let you chose two "English (United States)" language settings, but I find that "English (Australian)" works fine.
On the other side, a friend wrote a nice set of scripts call aoeu and asdf (LH home row in Dvorak and QWERTY respectively) which would switch the console mappings back and forth...and created a login that would run each also, so you could login even if the mappings were wrong.
1) The Economist, while a great news source and typically trustworthy, is being defensive about this supposed "market failure."
2) The market can and does fail sometimes to provide consumers with the best products. The case that I have in mind deals with BetaMax and VHS. BetaMax is the better format of the two (smaller, better video quality), yet the market "chose" to set VHS as the standard for consumer videos. A clear-cut case of market failure if I ever saw one.
is in the eye of the beholder. And when it comes to advocates of a purely free market, superior is, by definition, the product that wins.
Scroll to the bottom of the article, and you'll find the link to the Liebowitz/Margolis article.
See this link: http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
For the fuller account referred to in the Economist article. It goes into more depth re: studies.
QWERTY vs. Dvorak (which I have no opinion on) aside, there is indeed, as you point out, a larger agenda behind the article (as well as the original Liebowitz paper). They have a vested interest in saying that the market works (i.e., the best solution is the one that will win in the marketplace). Liebowitz and his co-author are promoting a book on Microsoft's antitrust case.
If your terms are speed and dollars, with a modern keyboard I'm convinced that you won't find a very noticable difference. There might be some but not much and probably not enough to pay for retraining (although I don't know too many people who paid to learn to type anyways..) but what about long-term health concerns. The Dvorak keyboard is still popular amongst the ergonomic crowd and I've never heard a sales pitch that mentioned speed as the reason, it was always about not moving your fingers to reach the most common keys.
Anyone know of studies that compare QWERTY to Dvorak in respect of hand health? The most unhealthy action in typing is the thumb on the space action which is the same in both layouts (most people hammer on the space bar too hard and there thumb devleops clicks and tendon problems after a while, it's generally not painful but it's the early form of arthritis)
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
So, how does this article explain that the people who win the speed-typing contests are always Dvorak typists?
Additionally, the article doesn't say anything about RSI/carpal tunnel -- 'the black lung of hackers' (thanks N. Stephenson for that wonderful imagery!). I was under the impression that Dvorak reduced the damage due to this ailment.
This is as good a place as any: does anyone have any recommendations for a good Open Source typing trainer? I'd like to switch to Dvorak, but I need to retool myself. If there isn't a good one, maybe I'll get a typing instruction book and code one up...anybody interested?
john.,
off to take some ibuprofen for his aching wrists...
GeneHack {--(bioinfo*linux*opinion)
I originally learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard (just like everyone else) and then later I made the switch to Dvorak. I must say that Dvorak is certainly more comfortable to type on (I know that it sounds wierd, but it really imparts much less muscle strain). Think about it...why would *anyone* stick with a non-standard keyboard that isn't any better than the one that everyone else uses? The truth is, Dvorak IS faster, it IS more ergodynamic, it IS easier to learn, and it IS more accurate (most people make fewer errors on the Dvorak keyboard). There's even some evidence that the Dvorak keyboard helps to retard the onset of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and/or repetitive strain injuries. Every time I am forced to use the QWERTY keyboard, I recall exactly why I switched--once you get used to the Dvorak keyboard, you will never want to go back. The bottom line is, *** you * should * give * Dvorak * a * chance *** you WILL love it.
# They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Fran
Wow, these economist people are real scientists aren't they? It takes about 2 weeks to learn dvorak. The benefit will be received for the rest of your life. If they pulled their little economic formulas out they might learn something at this point.
The Dvorak keyboard also tends to alternate between left and right because the vowels are on one side and the consonants on the other. If anything Dvorak does a better job here.
The typing records are held on dvorak, and anybody who has given dvorak a go can testify that your hands don't move anywhere near as far leading to less hand strain.
But I'd like to see how the TWIDDLER keyboard does. It might not be faster, but it sure would be relaxing and easy on the hands. I can't wait to try one out.
I don't have to imagine. I use emacs and vi with dvorak every day and it is absolutely no problem.
Scientific studies have shown that the most limiting part of typing is being able to translate thought into physical action. The theoretical advantages to Dvorak have not been adequately proven.
I'm sure there is a theoretical maximum, but how that is reached varies. The brain creates what are called "engrams" for frequently used brain pathways. If I spent an entire day practing typing "hxb.,fihnxhb.fkns.huavhk.f,u.", I'm sure I could get VERY good at it, simply because the brain stops thinking "type h. Now type x. Now type b." and thinks, "run that engram for that weird thing." I've noticed that I can type certain key cominations VERY quickly (for example, "edit config.sys", a throwback to my DOS days).
So then the theoretical maximum keyrate becomes proportional to the rate of which nerve impulses travel from your brain to your hands. And we are probably probably NOWHERE NEAR that maxmimum
> FACT: With a QWERTY keyboard, only 30% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
> FACT: With a Dvorak keyboard, over 70% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
Again, this does not seem to be the major limiting factor to typing speeds.
It's not...but that's not the point...the point is that it's easier to type, which reduces the number or contorted hand keystrokes that you need to type any given work.
Another advantage with Dvorak is that there are very few words that you can type with one hand (papaya is one example), because the vowels and uncommon consonants are on the left hand, and commond consonants are on the right hand, so most words require switching back and forth between the hands, which is faster. Compare this to QWERTY, which has literally thousands of words that can be typed with one hand (devastate, etc.).
> You can realize for yourself what this means to the average typist.
Nevertheless, it has yet to be proven.
Proof is such a strong word...there can never be a PROOF that one is better than the other, since "better" is subjective. But there is very strong evidence and testimonials from those that have switched. I've never heard of anyone switching from QWERTY to Dvorak and back to QWERTY for any reason besides inconvenience of switching.
> These OSes have a program called xmodmap that makes it simple to switch their keys around.
This doesn't relabel the keys. It doesn't address the fact that no matter what OS you run, you will find yourself at someone else's keyboard.
That's true, but my school has a huge distributed system such that I can access my user account literally anywhere I can access an Athena machine. I work for Athena, my computer is a linux box running redhat/athena, so the only time i need to type in QWERTY is when I'm on someone else's PC running Windows, which is infrequent enough that it's not that much of a hassle. I'll jump back into QWERTY mode after a few minutes (just like riding a bike...). The human brain can be taught to switch back and forth between the two modes relatively easily...it just takes practice.
> As for hotkeys, deal with it. It took me about a week to get used to the new keys in vi--they don't have intuitive positions, but realistically, once you get used to them, it doesn't really matter ...
If it doesn't matter where the hot keys are, why does it matter where the other keys are? If the answer is to "get used to it", why bother? Why not "get used to" QWERTY?
if we're going to use that kind of logic, why not place the keys like "ABCDEFGHI..." Because it's really damn hard to type like that. Many programs use hotkeys with two conventions--either make them intuitively named (^C for copy, etc.), or they are placed conveniently (hjkl for vi et al). If it's the former, it doesn't matter where they are. If it's the latter, switching to any non-standard key layout will throw you off.
But it's more than just "getting used to" the position of the keys. I could "get used to" the purely alphabetical layout, but it would be too cumbersome to use (and very painful). Dvorak's key strength is ergonomics.
I do agree that in most cases the transition to the Dvorak keyboard is difficult, and not worth the effort... especially once you have all those editor shortcuts burned in your brain... BUT
The Dvorak keyboard is much better. It has all the vowels under the left hand home keys, and all the most used consonants (DHTNS) under the right
home keys. The idea is that you spend about twice the amount of time on the home keys. By _design_ it rocks.
I used to work at a "fufillment house" where people answer phones and enter data all day... we had a study "the bible" of the fufillment business, and it had a section which showed the scientific tests that showed %15 - %20 increase in productivity for people who type all day.
I made the switch in college, and saw my typing rate go from about 40wpm QWERTY to 65wpm Dvorak.
The second necessary skill after learning Dvorak is to go back to QWERTY when you have to. Once you can go back and forth... life is __good__
Celebrate Excellence!
First of all, my alignment. I've been typing QWERTY for 11 years beginning when I'm just a F.2 (in US standards, Grade 8) student. I didn't really choose QWERTY: there's no choice. I learn it because I think it is useful. And I learnt about Dvorak a year ago and really tried that and converted myself to be a Dvorak typist 3 months ago.
Back to the article now. Frankly speaking, I do not see what's the objective of the article, which is my first question. It seems to me that it tries to convince people that the Dvorak failure is not due to market failure. But that is the subject of the cited work "The Fable of the Keys", and this article seems to add no more argument nor additional evidence. It is just a restatement or reference to such work.
I've tried to read earlier posts here. I found reference to an article "Should technology choice be a concern of antitrust policy?", which use the cited work as a basis for the assertion that market failure did not apply to QWERTY. But then, after reading a little bit further, I found that "The Fable of Keys" asserted that "The benefit of Dvorak does not justify retraining of staffs", which is exactly a standard lock-in. I started to wonder how people actually think.
In fact, I believe the methodology of this work does not make much sense when the study is about "Is Dvorak better than QWERTY". It compares the rate of improvement between new Dvorak typists and old QWERTY typists. The Dvorak group do not enjoy the years of experience of typing enjoyed by QWERTY typists, and have never even attempted to type faster than they currently did. They doesn't even have a good motivation to try type faster, where QWERTY typists have abundent of reasons to try typing faster. Nor did the study address issues other than typing speed. If what you study is "which keymap is better", you got to use another experient, which employ individuals who never learnt how to type and never told about any story about which keymap is better. Without that sample, we have to rely on our own experience to "guess" which is better.
I also read posts that explain how they abandon Dvorak when they started the vi editor. I usually use Emacs, and since Emacs keymaps are generally keyboard-neutral there's no problem. But when I did use vi I actually comes up with the problems suggested by that post. But after a while, I found that it is not that uncomfortable using vi with Dvorak. Yes, there's no hjkl convenience. But are j and k really that far away? Not quite. How about h and l? Yes, they are really horrible. But there is something to balance that out: w and b are quite near and reachable in Dvorak. Don't forget that word movements are much more efficient way to navigate your text.
Then I try to find things that I can do and cannot do after switching to Dvorak, and try to find the missing links that prevent wide adoption. The only reason is: a huge switching cost. You have to renew every keyboard. And if you cannot make it happen overnight, we split ourselves into two parties typing different keyboards and cannot work on same machines. Modern operating systems does provide better "upgrade path", since you can install both keyboard mapping to a Win95 or Linux machine. But whenever you work at a new site, you end up doing the same exercise again. And nobody yet find THE way to switch between keymaps. Adding to the already long story, you have to relearn every keymap. I've said that Emacs is keyboard neutral, but that does not mean your brain use the keyboard neutral bindings. Any Dvorak learner will learn his lesson that your brain directly map the functionality like "next line" to positions on the keyboard like "left little finger left and down followed by striking the key left-low" (control-n). It needs quite some time to retrain your brain to use the keyboard neutral mapping, but soon it turns back to a (new) keyboard sensitive binding.
But that's not about which is better. That's about which is being used. What's being used is not necessarily what's better.
First of all, my alignment. I've been typing QWERTY for 11 years beginning when I'm just a F.2 (in US standards, Grade 8) student. I didn't really choose QWERTY: there's no choice. I learnt it because I think it is useful. And I learnt about Dvorak a year ago and really tried that and converted myself to be a Dvorak typist 3 months ago.
Back to the article now. Frankly speaking, I do not see what's the objective of the article, which is my first question. It seems to me that it tries to convince people that the Dvorak failure is not due to market failure. But that is the subject of the cited work "The Fable of the Keys", and this article seems to add no more argument nor additional evidence. It is just a restatement or reference to such work.
I've tried to read earlier posts here. I found reference to an article "Should technology choice be a concern of antitrust policy?", which use the cited work as a basis for the assertion that market failure did not apply to QWERTY. But then, after reading a little bit further, I found that "The Fable of Keys" asserted that "The benefit of Dvorak does not justify retraining of staffs", which is exactly a standard lock-in. I started to wonder how people actually think.
In fact, I believe the methodology of this work does not make much sense when the question is about "Is Dvorak better than QWERTY". It compares the rate of improvement between new Dvorak typists and old QWERTY typists. The Dvorak group does not enjoy the years of experience of typing enjoyed by QWERTY typists, and have never even attempted to type faster than they currently did. They doesn't even have a good motivation to try type faster, where QWERTY typists have abundent of reasons to try typing faster. Nor did the study addresses issues other than typing speed. If what you study is "which keymap is better", you got to use another experient, which employ individuals who never learnt how to type and never told about any story about which keymap is better. Without that sample, we have to rely on our own experience to "guess" which is better.
There is one point that is sure: were we to run such an experiment, a Dvorak group will learn much faster. That is because that they do not waste time familiarize themselves on meaningless "words" like "asdf" and "jkl;". As they get familiar with the home row, they get familiar with the words that they use most frequently in the future. I think anybody familiar with education know how important this is.
I also read posts that explaint how they abandon Dvorak when they started the vi editor. I usually use Emacs, and since Emacs keymaps are generally keyboard-neutral I've no such problem. When I did use vi I did comes up with the problems suggested by that post. But after a while, I found that it is not that uncomfortable using vi with Dvorak. Yes, there's no hjkl convenience. But are j and k really that far away? Not quite. How about h and l? Yes, they are really horrible. But there is something to balance that out: w and b are quite near and reachable in Dvorak. Back on QWERTY, it is horrible to repeatedly type w and b. Don't forget that word movements are much more efficient way to navigate your text.
Then I try to find things that I can do and cannot do after switching to Dvorak, and try to find the missing links that prevent wide adoption. The only reason is: a huge switching cost. You have to renew every keyboard. And if you cannot make it happen overnight, we split ourselves into two parties typing different keyboards and cannot work on same machines. Modern operating systems does provide better "upgrade path", since you can install both keyboard mapping to a Win95 or Linux machine. But whenever you work at a new site, you end up doing the same exercise again. And nobody yet find THE way to switch between keymaps. Adding to the already long story, you have to relearn every application keymap. I've said that Emacs is keyboard neutral, but that does not mean your brain use the keyboard neutral bindings. Any Dvorak learner will learn his lesson that your brain directly map the functionality like "next line" to positions on the keyboard like "left little finger left and down followed by striking the key left-low" (control-n). It needs quite some time to retrain your brain to use the keyboard neutral mapping, but soon it turns back to a (new) keyboard sensitive binding.
But that's not about which is better. That's about which is being used. What's being used is not necessarily what's better.
I wondered why I could not find a reasonable reference to the oft-mentioned Navy study. It would have been better to have more studies which were not operated by Dvorak.
You have to use HTML formatting to make Slashdot create a link to it.
Ignoring implementation costs leads to a peculiar definition of "most efficient." Suppose you invented a way of making your home as energy efficient as possible, which would save you $10 a month in electric bills. Would it be worth spending $1 million to remodel your house to get this efficiency gain? Clearly not: The present value of the infinite string of $10 payments is a few thousand dollars at most. How is this a failure of the market?
I think there are basically two ideas of market failure at work here:
The point of the article (as I understand it) is that Dvorak's advantage over QWERTY, if any, is not so large such that either market failures (1) and (2) can be said to have occurred. (Putting it another way, Dvorak's advantage over QWERTY is like the $10/month advantage in energy efficiency in my example: Too small to justify the implementation costs.)
Well, it WAS good. Then they went and "Elite"d it. Luckily, I was able to pick up one of the old ones used. The Elites are truly horrendous. They are a testament to the M$ philosophy of "If it ain't broke, change it and brand it as a M$ innovation".
--
--
Jason Eric Pierce
Now if we can just work on that Tesla/Edison business...
personally I find the dvorak layout to be much more efficient and comfortable. Learning qwerty was much more difficult than dvorak ever was.
just my opinion
proof...is in da puddin'
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Humans are like those trail of ants leaving the anthill - all following the same path established by the first ant.
The arguements for this article are not logical. They are essentially saying that because something _is_ makes it better. The qwerty standard has always been 'it'.
I am always looking for better methods of input. Most computers now-a-days have cheap mushy feel plastic keyboards. Just because 95 percent of the market use these keyboards that came with their computer does not make it 'better', or even reasonably equivalent to an alternative.
I was at the thrift store a week ago when I came accross an northgate omnikey keybooard. I had heard the legend that these were superior keyboards but had never seen one. It was $3.14 with tax.
It is better than the IBM keyboards I had used. The feel on these keys is perfection. It is truly a great keyboard. If this keyboard is so good (and is is), why isn't everybody using one?
By the same logic in this article, it would be like saying the pc concepts cheapo keyboard is, by its general acceptability, technically equivalent to this northgate. I bet people even type at the same speed - but I am not going back.
The fact that there is continual searching for something better shows that qwerty is inadeqate. All these "split keyboards" show a need for ergonomics that remains largely unfulfilled. The Maltron if priced more competively would probably make inroads into the qwerty market.
There is no mention of hand strain, fatigue, or ease of use factors in the article.
Just a trite attempt at objecting to the obviuos.
My grandfather once had a friend that was a typewriter salesman during the 1920's. By this time, the QWERTY standard had pretty much been established, but he was curious about the seemingly odd layout of the keys.
The answer that he was given was that the reason for the layout was both technical and marketing. The technical part was that it allowed the machine to work better (the jamming that the article talks about).
The marketing part is when it becomes interesting. When the QWERTY layout was designed, their main objective was to prevent the mechanism from jamming. The first version was not quite the layout we have today, but close. However, they noticed that the new layout made it difficult for the sales people to use, because the keys were in a fairly illogical order. If the sales people couldn't use it, there would be no chance that a potential customer would buy it. So, they decided to re-order a few keys.
I'm not sure what keys were moved, but the result was that it allowed the salesmen to easily type the word "typewriter" for demonstration purposes. This is why the word "typewriter" can be constructed using only the keys in the top row.
Scientific research means nothing to me when I have my own experience to trust. I learned QWERTY in fourth grade and Dvorak in seventh; I now type 10-15 wpm faster in Dvorak. Hey CmdrTaco -- How about a Dvorak vs Qwerty survey?
What are you talking about? Court stenographers can type upwards of 200 wpm on those phonetic keyboards (9 keys I think). I really don't think that it's a neurological limit. I know I can think
much faster than I type... but that's not saying much.
Regards,
--
For a longer article on the myth of the inferiority of the QWERTY keyboard (and lots of other good stuff on economics), see http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html.
The article did not, however, take into account repetitive motion injuries. I haven't read of formal studies, but suspect that retraining costs might be shown to be cost effective when considering the number of workers on disability due to carpel tunnel syndrym.
Certainly for me, almost all repetitive motion problems went away with the switch to Dvorak.
>why not place the keys like "ABCDEFGHI..." Because it's really damn hard to type like that.
I suspect this alphabetical layout would be no harder to touch-type with than the Qwerty layout, which was designed before touch-typing had been invented.
It would also be a much easier layout to learn. And a much easier layout for non-touch typists with no interest in learning touch typing.
In my oppinion, an alphabetical layout would have been a much more sensible standard than qwerty.
I don't think most of us are suggesting to lose the cap's lock all together. We simply mean assigning the cap's lock function to a more obscure location (I'm using my left Win95 key), thus enabling us to use the easy-to-access home row for a more common function.
I use my Cap's Lock key as a backspace. Since I probably hit backspace as often as any other letter, having it in such a convenient location saves me time and effort
If you think of yourself as a hacker a crappy design should just frost your cookies. Just think about it, Dvorac was specifically designed to be easy to use. While you may not be able to prove it's better it definately can't be any worse. I have a hot switchable Q/D keyboard from Kinesis but haven't had the time to switch, opefullly this summer.
"The Winter 1993 issue of Delta Pi Epsilon carried a study done by Dr. Scot Ober called 'Relative Efficiencies of the Standard and Dvorak Simplified Keyboards'. The study was extensive, and here are some of his conclusions:
/usr/dict/words.) The difference there is an order of magnitude in dvorak's favor.
In QWERTY, 31% of typing is done on the home row. In Dvorak, 70%. In addition, The Dvorak layout has 35% more right-hand reaches, 63% more same-row reaches, 45% more alternate-hand reaches, and 37% less finger travel than the QWERTY layout."
(Dvorak international FAQ.)
So where does this guy get off saying that QWERTY favors combinations that shift from one side of the keyboard to the other? Precisely the opposite is true.
Or simply contrast the number of qwerty words that must be typed with one hand compared with the number of such dvorak words. (This information is at the fingertips of anyone who knows how to grep
He is on target in saying that the fastest dvorak typers aren't any faster than the fastest qwerty typers. He misses a key point, though - speed isn't the only issue. Many people (myself included) find the dvorak layout to be vastly more comfortable. And the jury's still out on whether it helps prevent repetitive-stress injury, but it seems unlikely that a layout that involves 37% less finger-motion wouldn't be better in that regard.
I read the second argument by the two economist authors, and I can understand their arguments. I might even agree to a certain degree.
However, I can't help but notice that their two arguments are temporally (and logically) disjoint.
The dvorak layout wasn't created until the 1930/40's. All of those shootouts that were mentioned had taken place BEFORE dvorak even existed.
The more contemporary GSA tests during the 1970's say that there was marginal improvement in performance. But by this time, QWERTY had already established dominance, mindshare, and last but not least QWERTY TOUCH TYPING CLASSES.
Somehow, these two disconnects from their explanation make me second-guess their conclusions.
At any rate, I was a fast QWERTY touch typist before switching to dvorak, and now I'm equally proficient at both. Though I might be in the minority in this respect, I believe that any and all dvorak users out primarily use it because IT FEELS BETTER and IT'S LESS STRESSFUL than QWERTY. And that's the bottom line these days for RSI/carpal tunnel sufferers.
And I thank the maker for the fact that computers are so easy to switch to dvorak!
Anyway, my two cents...
JosefK is exactly right in calling attention to the agenda of dogmatic lassie fare ideologues. Read that as folks that believe that the market is never wrong. To me as a Texas Baptist this is nothing short of idolatry, certainly it is setting oneself up for a fall. (Can you say 'the hubris of false gods, there I knew you could.')
Dvorak is the best!
I was the one who posted the Dvorak on MSNatural comment (that was before I got a real login here)
I hate the Elite too. I also have an earlier model.
I'm the one who wrote the Delphi program he was referring to. If anyone wants a the program or source, they can email me and I'll send them the source or binary.
The reason I wrote it was that our lab computers were locked up. Yes, I know you can switch layouts the way you mentioned, but Dvorak still has to be loaded the first time with the Control Panel. Most people don't know about that though, and this simple app allowed me to peacefully co-write a program with a QWERTY friend.
May I suggest you just don't want to consider the possibly that you might be using an inferior layout? This is not a sample size of one or three. Read these postings. As some of the other postings state, the economist's "evidence" was worthless. They also have good links to other evidence. One is www.dvorakint.org
I don't know of one person who switched and regretted it. ALL the people who posted here and said they switched back did so because of what was the standard, not because the liked the other one better. 100% is pretty good.
Many of you learned to type Dvorak long after you learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard. It appears some stuck w/ Dvorak (big pat on the back all around ;-) and excelled and some couldn't handle a month of tedium. While these evaluations are certainely important as the most important issue w/ Dvorak is "is it worth the switch", I believe I have emperical evidence suggesting Dvorak is a more intelligent, useful layout.
;-)
I learned Dvorak and QWERTY at the same time, and I can assure you their is a difference.
My father is something of a nerd, and when I learned to type (I was homeschooled/self-taught) he had me learn Dvorak at the same time as QWERTY. To be honest I *could* already type a little QWERTY, but in the neighborhood of 25-30WPM. I spent about equal time each day learning both keyboards. Not only can I type faster today in Dvorak (15+WPM faster), I reached 50WPM *faster* with Dvorak than w/ QWERTY. And I already knew how to touch-type properly on QWERTY, though at a lower speed.
I type in QWERTY about as often as Dvorak by nature of doing about 1/3 of my typing at school where they refuse to let me install Dvorak drivers (darn committees!). However typing in QWERTY still feels awkward to me compared with the freedom Dvorak offers. I can be typing at the same speed on Dvorak & QWERTY and on Dvorak my fingers flick every so often from the home row- where on QWERTY I'm doing serious finger gymnastics over the whole keyboard. I've actually had people notice I was using a different layout 'cause they saw my fingers remained on the home row. If you've ever seen a video of a Dvorak keyboardist and a QWERTY keyboardist typing the same doc in sync (don't ask me how they do this) you would be amazed.
This leads Dvorak to have *FAR* higher accuracy as the majority of typing errors are caused when fingers land improperly on a new row. If you switch rows far less you make fewer errors.
Some people may also be worried about confusing their fingers in typing. I must admit that when I am typing QWERTY I very occasionally mistrike keys (that would have been the correct Dvorak letter). However this probably accounts for less than 5% of my typing errors. I can sit down at a keyboard, be typing full speed in Dvorak, switch the keyboard w/ a three keystrokes (about 2 seconds) and resume typing full speed in QWERTY or vice versa.
My advice- if you currently type QWERTY seriously consider switching. If you know somebody who doesn't really know how to type yet, teach them Dvorak (even if you don't know Dvorak). Use Mavis Beacon, it teaches Dvorak pretty well. They'll thank you for it later. They will inevitably learn QWERTY from daily life, and proper typing technique can be taught as well (or better) with Dvorak as with QWERTY. So in the end they'll know two layouts well, but I'm betting they'll use Dvorak on their home computer!
Just attempted random credibility data (yah, right!), I'm not exactly the fastest typist in the world, but I'm no slug. I type about 95WPM on Dvorak and about 75 on QWERTY. My accuracy on Dvorak is about 98%, my accuracy on Q is lower though I'm not sure of the exact figure.
-Seth N. (snickell@bigfoot.com)
Dvorak: It just feels right.
Just typing 'ls' (r-ring, l-ring to r-pinky+, r-pinky) a half-dozen times killed the joy. vi and other utilities which rely on a "logical" placement of movement keys are utterly broken by Dvorak. Such is the power of lock-in.
That said, I found I had a more natural rhythem using Dvorak for text and documents.
BTW: pessimum = ! optimum. The Yellow Book.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I have used Dvorak for 9 months now. The feeling is like drumming your fingers on a table. Sometimes, I am amazed when I see how little my fingers move; it is like keyboard ventriloquism- typing without your fingers moving.
.tgz and .deb formats. It also includes scripts to switch between Dvorak and qwerty by typing aoeu or asdf, which can be typed by the left hand without moving. This is convenient for households with mixed classes of typists.
I see no reason to argue, it is a matter of personal choice. I use Linux because it is the best for me. Dvorak is supported in almost all OS. My dinosaur 386 supports Dvorak under DOS and Win3.11.
Dvorak tutorials:
http://www.karelia.com/abcd forms based tutorial. This is how I learned.
unix software called dvorak7min uses ncurses to teach you the lessons of karelia's abcd. It is available in
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
The Economist needs some basic lessons in economics, it seems. If the Dvorak layout is indeed more efficient and it is only the cost of retraining that keeps people from adopting it, then the market is not efficient because, clearly, the most efficient technology is not being used.
This argument is only the tip of an iceberg of economic discussion (follow the references from the article). To many economists, the notion that markets cannot be anything but efficient is so ingrained that they try to explain away common sense facts using circular reasoning. "If people use QUERTY, it must be efficient [no matter what experiments may show]." "If people use Windows, it must be the optimal choice [no matter what the technical experts may say]."
Dvorak wins by a long shot. I spent approximately a month training to get to my old qwerty speed and accuracy. Things I've noticed _personally_ since switching:
/dvorak.html
1) I haven't had that sore-typing-hands feeling since.
2) Typing on the qwerty keyboard now feels like I'm tying my fingers in knots. Typing on dvorak just "flows".
3) I've gained approximately 15 WPM since switching. My old qwerty rate was approximately 80wpm- with dvorak, I'm up to 95wpm. I've even hit around 120wpm a few times.
4) If anything, my typing is more accurate. I did not track this- however, I certainly haven't lost any accuracy.
5) Yes, I even like it more for programming.
Papers and studies and articles in nonwithstanding, the only way you will ever know if it works for you is to try it. From the web pages I've seen, an overwhelming majority have been pro-dvorak.
Finally, I remember last year reading a very convincing rebuttal to the "Fable of the Keys" article on which this Economist article is largely based. I'll post the URL as a reply here if I can find it again. I've been unsuccessful so far.
Some good links for those who want to see for themselves:
Comparison of Dvorak and Qwerty typing "demons":
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/Dvorak/demons.ht ml
Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard:
http://www.ccsi.com/~mbrooks/dvorak
Let Your Fingers Do Less Walking:
http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~s ander/mensa/dvorak1.html
The reason Dvorak keyboards seem to help RSI sufferers is that the pattern of repetition changes, which is almost as good as just resting. (Further and more, once RSI is recognized, paying attention to the keyboard layout is just part of paying attention to the whole keyboard/wrist/desktop/etc layout so other contributing factors are likely eliminated at the same time as going to Dvorak.)
Because Dvorak use is such a small percentage of the population, RSI injuries due to long-term Dvorak use are, as a total, lower. However, someone with a Dvorak-induced RSI may gain from using a QWERTY keyboard.
(One exception -- folks who don't have their kb's angled properly/at the right height/etc may be more susceptible with a QWERTY keyboard because of the need to move to the upper row more often.)
Mind, all these studies were based on typing English text. C coders are going to have a different pattern of key usage (probaly going for the very top row a lot more often).
-- Alastair
Okay. If this were true, how would it be relevant? Meanwhile, if you take a look at the URL posted on this thread from the U. of T. Dallas researchers, you would find that this isn't (or, at least wasn't) true. Good typists who had a vested interest in typing really fast are the people who win (and have won) speed-typing contests. These days, there really aren't very many typing contests, and I would suspect that the only people with a huge interest in entering or winning them are people who sell either "improved" keyboards or "improved" training programs.
Typing-related injuries are definitely a real problem. But, I just checked the recent psychological and medical literature (Psychlit and Medline) for any references to studies that claimed RSIs could be reduced by keyboard layout. I found nothing, although it could be hiding under a different set of keywords than I used.
This is not to say that current keyboards are perfect; Donald Norman, in particular, has noted that one could potentially improve on the typing speed of either QWERTY or Dvorak with other designs. It is also true that until very recently, nobody even thought much about designing keyboards or keyboard layouts to minimize the effect of carpal-tunnel-like injuries. But I would have to be very skeptical about anybody's untested claim that their favorite keyboard reduces typing injuries.
King Babar
Babar
From the article:
and also:You did read before posting, yes?
john.
GeneHack {--(bioinfo*linux*opinion)
From the article: "Ergonomists point out that QWERTY's bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits..."
Since when are accidental benefits a justification for bad design?
I decided a while ago that I should switch to Dvorak, after reading about it quite a while. At the time I had developed tendonitis in both my wrists, thanks to the job I was working. I can say that i agree 100%. The Dvorak keyboard *feels* so much easier to to type on. Your hands feel "lazy" almost, compared to the amount of work they do on a QWERTY. I even went so far as to pry all the keys off of my keyboard and rearrange them. All in all it took me about 6 weeks to get up to speed on Dvorak, and I can say that it was a definate improvement over QWERTY. It really felt like there was a plan behind the layout of the keys, instead of feeling like you were accomidating someone's arbitrary decision.
In the end, I had to switch back as my new line of work found me working on different computers all the time, most of which didn't belong to me. It took me about a week and a half to convert back.
Though The Economist is an excellent and relatively unbiased magazine, the article cited is an EDITORIAL, and is hardly evidence that the Dvorak is in any way inferior. As for the articles cited within the editorial, those that wrote those articles have a strong bias toward discounting *any* example of market failure, and will construct their research accordingly. Visit Liebowitz's webpage to see just what his ideology is. Most of us would agree that bad standards can locked in, because we've seen it happen. But it is hard to demonstrate "better" versus "good enough" to those who have little understanding of the technology in question, or already equate market position as evidence of being "better".
A while ago Scientific American had a great article on QWERTY and to make a long story short QWERTY basically won out because of good marketing not because it was better, but we should all be familar with this phenomenon by now. I don't have access to my old issues right now else I would post the issue it was in as well. If you are really interested in knowing the facts and someone dosen't post it I will find and post which issue it was from in a day or so. I wasn't able to find it on their website but it may be there.
You'll notice that most articles that say the dvorak layout "isn't worth it" mostly say that it isn't worth the costs of retraining hundreds of people. They do not make the case well against an individual learning dvorak. They point out the fact that the tests of the dvorak keyboard were biased and this is true, but also a large part of the issue up until the last ten years has been that to retool for dvorak would for a business or agency involve scrapping thousands of dollars in QWERTY typewriters and buying new dvorak layout ones. With moderns PCs, remapping one's keyboard layout is trivial.
Now, as for specific technical issues... The QWERTY layout has to it's advantage the fact that the keys are all splayed out, as so that while you are typing one key your fingers can set up to type the next key. While this gets you pretty good speed, it tends to be at the expense of good typing style and in the long run can be absolute hell on your wrists. The dvorak layout tends to induce better typing style because the home row is where the most used keys are - no jumping around the keyboard to hit everything. Just comparing the two keyboards is rather telling - with QWERTY, you can type something like maybe 100 common words using the home row. With dvorak the number is something like 600. Qwerty graces the home row with such useful characters as "j", "k", and the ever-useful ";" - useful for programming perhaps, but the majority of typing I do each day is not code. Analyzing a bit of english for letter frequency and mapping it onto qwerty and dvorak shows commonly used letters all splayed all over with qwerty - with dvorak, the home row is most common, then the top, then the bottom, with the more common letters in the middle and moving out to the edges of the keyboard.
Lastly, ask the average person who has taken the plunge and stayed with it and they will tell you they havn't regretted it at all. It just feels better to type dvorak, and when you try to type quickly on qwerty it just feels like you are moving your hands way too much. Finally, you really aren't risking all that much. You won't lose your precious QWERTY skills when you are forced to use other people's computers - once you can comfortably touch-type dvorak (it takes about 2 weeks) going between QWERTY and dvorak takes very little effort - for example, I only use dvorak in X. At the console, it's qwerty all the way. Often when I'm playing a game or doing something where key position matters and I'm not touch-typing I'll switch back to QWERTY because that's what the key labels still say on my keyboard :)
If you've been sold on the wonders of dvorak, check out my page which has an xmodmap file to load a dvorak mapping (it also has some tweaked-out shifting bits - Super, Meta and Hyper baby! :)
This bit of unabashed dvorak advocacy was typed on a dvorak keyboard
The best thing about dvorak off the bat wasn't any type of speed increase (though I KNOW that if I stuck with it I would have gotten much faster because it's so easy to type on), but the fact that my hands didn't hurt at all anymore. You don't really move your hands around like a QWERTY.. it's pretty crazy how far your hands jump around the keyboard on a QWERTY. In dvorak, the home row has all the vowels and major consonants, and you'd be surprised how many entire words you form just by typing along the home row without even moving your hands!
As for the cons, there were a few. First of all, if I wanted to use dvorak anywhere but home, I had to setup the computer to be dvorak (not a big deal, but a pain no less). Also, if I left it on dvorak and didn't switch it back to QWERTY, oh man were people scared then!
However, the MAIN drawback to dvorak has got to be hotkeys. My hands were so used to key combinations in programs and things such as copy and paste that didn't make sense after dvorak. Ctrl-Z is undo, and is a very easy one-handed key combo. With dvorak (if I remember correctly) it's a little more out of the way. This was the main thing that brought me back to qwerty, among the other small things. If dvorak was everywhere and well supported, however, I'd be very happy.
P.S. - The best trick I would do with my dvorak typing skill would to open up notepad and tell someone "Hey you! Type something!".. of course they'd jump away from the computer once they realized the keys were all messed up. Then I'd just go over and type like it was no big deal, and it would really freak em out
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Dvorak is superior to QWERTY in almost all respects, and the ONLY drawbacks are due to the commonness of the QWERTY layout.
A very interesting article, but flawed. You can't judge the QWERTY/Dvorak debate solely on Economic grounds. Of COURSE it's a pain in the ass to relearn how to type. It can take up to a month before people are up to snuff in Dvorak (it depends on how much you have QWERTY ingrained--i.e., how much you look at the keys, how much you type words instead of letters (that is, you don't think "d-o-g-" when you type, you just think "dog"), etc.).
Dvorak spent over 10 YEARS developing the Dvorak layout, under the guise of a study for the Navy. He filmed typists, found the common problems, and fixed them. I'd like to see ONE study that supports the claim that QWERTY is as fast or faster. It just doesn't make sense:
FACT: Every national typing contest since 1931 has been won by a typist with a Dvorak keyboard.
One of the main reasons is that to execute extremely fast typing (I can do over 150 WPM in QWERTY, no joke), typists form "chords". For examle, to type "the dog" in QWERTY, a fast typist will place his or her fingers over all of the aforementioned keys and then just hit the keys in sequence. This is MUCH easier to do in Dvorak. Here is the Dvorak home row:
A O E U I D H T N S -
So to form a chord for "the dog", you only have to move off the home row for the G. You only move your hands off the home KEYS for the D and G, in fact. This is inherently better than QWERTY. Just watch your hands when you type either. QWERTY is ridiculous.
FACT: With a QWERTY keyboard, only 30% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
FACT: With a Dvorak keyboard, over 70% of your keystrokes will be in the home row.
You can realize for yourself what this means to the average typist.
There are some disadvantages that others have pointed out. Leaving a keyboard in Dvorak will mess up friends who use your computer. Hotkeys are all messed up. Switching can be a pain in the ass.
But all of these are easily solvable. I run Linux, and I'd guess that a fair number of /. readers use some form of unixish OS. These OSes have a program called xmodmap that makes it simple to switch their keys around. So in my .login, I run "xmodmap $HOME/keyboard/linux.dvorak" (I also have files for Sun and SGI keyboards). This means that others can login to my computer with no problems. The keyboard itself is a QWERTY layout (I love the macro keys on Gateway 2000 keyboards). All the translation is done in software.
As for hotkeys, deal with it. It took me about a week to get used to the new keys in vi--they don't have intuitive positions, but realistically, once you get used to them, it doesn't really matter where the keys are. And if stuff like that really bothers you, hack the programs to change the hotkeys--it's pretty simple.
Switching back and forth will blow your mind the first few times you do it. As it is, I type Dvorak on every computer I log into, but if I am trying to fix something for someone, I will have to type QWERTY more than likely (I haven't managed to convince anyone to switch).
I liken switching from Dvorak to QWERTY to programming in several languages. It doesn't take me 10 seconds to forget everything I know about Perl and start coding in C, and the same goes for the other 10 languages I know--I never get confused, even though several of the languages have similar syntax (Java vs. C++, etc).
But I didn't intend this text to extoll the virtues of Dvorak and beat down the evil QWERTY. It's pretty obvious that Dvorak will stay where it is for some time until there is a sweeping revolution in the keyboard. We can't simply replace the keyboards in our schools with Dvorak because the teachers will refuse. Even if we did, the children who learned to type on these keyboards will only be able to type decently on these keyboards, and will be utterly confused elsewhere. I think the best compromise (at least until QWERTY/Dvorak hardware switchable keyboards are prevalent) is to have everyone learn QWERTY (because it's the most prevalent) *AND* Dvorak.
But enough ranting...
These two articles give far more details, and, I think, provide a convincing case that the evidence in favor of Dvorak is "cooked." "Should technology choice be a concern of antitrust policy?" and more specifically related to QWERTY vs.Dvorak, "TYPING ERRORS: The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A in the hottest new case against markets. But the evidence has been cooked."
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