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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.
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
--
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."
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect