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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.
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."
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