As a dvorak user, whatever increase in typing speed is mostly irrelevant, for most of us, our output isn't limited by how fast we can type, but how fast we can think. That being said, a long time ago I took an analysis of one of our code bases, mapped every character onto dvorak and qwerty keyboards to produce heatmaps, and it's startling how much less the fingers have to move on a dvorak keyboard. So if you're lazy, dvorak might be something to consider.
Overall, I've been using dvorak for >10 years and I like it. Going back to Qwerty is like going back to sleeping on a twin mattress. It gets the job done, but once you've become accustomed to sleeping on a queen, it's hard to justify going back to a twin.
Probably the best thing about Dvorak (and similar layouts) is that if you want to do proper touch typing, it is quite possibly easier to learn Dvorak than to learn how to touch type QWERTY.
Touch typing QWERTY is a constant uphill battle of using your willpower to force yourself to type correctly, despite the rest of your brain claiming it isn't the optimal way to type on that layout. I don't know that your brain is right, but I don't know that it is wrong either.
When you learn Dvorak or any other similar thing, you don't have to "learn" how to touch type. You just do it, because it's optimal already. You have to learn the layout, obviously, but once having done that you couldn't hardly fail to learn touch typing and "proper" typing technique if you tried. The same uphill gradient you're fighting when trying to learn "proper" typing technique with QWERTY is now a downhill gradient.
I'd actually recommend learning Dvorak over trying to force yourself to touch-type QWERTY properly. Of course, if you don't care about that, no big deal. I'm not sure how valuable that is as a goal on its own, and it's plainly obvious many people function as highly effective office workers of all sorts, programmers and otherwise, without learning to touch type.
> QWERTY users naturally wander around and have their hands leave the home row and I'm not entirely convinced it's actually wrong.
I think you are learning it wrong. It's not hard at all to learn QWERTY with the proper training technique.
I took touch typing in High School, back in the 1980's. Even back then I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work with computers so it made sense to take it. It turned out to be the most useful class I ever took in school by a wide margin since I've used that skill all day every day for 35 years.
It was a loooong time ago but I remember it started with lots of simple repetition. We were all using IBM selectrics and the instructor would call out "J-J-J Space, K-K-K Space, L-L-L space, sem sem sem space" etc. in a pattern around the keyboard while and we were told to avoid looking at the keyboard at all times. Eventually we would start copying simple and then longer, more complicated text, again without ever looking at the keyboard.
Well, of course I did. I used a keyboard for many years before my formal middle school typing class and by then it was too late. My brain already knew better and typing exercises did no good because I already knew how to use the keyboard without looking.
I imagine this is the dominant case.
If you want to fix it, I recommend simply learning a sensible layout for touch typing.
You also would not have needed such a class if the keyboard was laid out in Dvorak for everybody. You wouldn't need formal training that largely only works if it is drilled into you before natural exposure to a keyboard, because your hands would just do the right thing automatically. The idea of needing a typing class would become entirely absurd; there would be no technique to teach anyone that they wouldn't simply pick up.
> You also would not have needed such a class if the keyboard was laid out in Dvorak for everybody
you seriously believe, without any doubt, that with a clearly labelled dvorak keyboard and no typing lessons you would not have learned to hunt-and-peck at increasingly higher speeds as you did with QWERTY, but instead put your fingers "on the home row" and used your pinkies? At a young age, we all learn the alphabet, and if the keyboard is not in alphabetic order, you are on a hunt for keys, and fingers in the home position will obscure too many key labels.
Sorry, but thinking about it for 30 seconds makes it hard for me to take your argument seriously.
(as a total off-topic aside, back when Cambodian politics and Prince Sihanouk were in the news a lot, I thought "must be hunt-and-peck in German" every time I heard "FUNCINPEC" on the radio)
This thread is an amazing case study in the wide range of natural ability people have at using their hands.
I think I'd take an entire year to be able to use that!
Maybe going the opposite way would be more effective, a mirror in front of you so you can see the keys with your peripheral vision without moving your eyes.
Similar to how you can always see your fingers when typing on a phone. I can type without actively staring at the keyboard on my phone pretty well, although that may because thumbs only is just fewer points to process than ten fingers, for those of us who have trouble paying attention to multiple points at once.
"you seriously believe, without any doubt, that with a clearly labelled dvorak keyboard and no typing lessons you would not have learned to hunt-and-peck at increasingly higher speeds as you did with QWERTY, but instead put your fingers "on the home row" and used your pinkies?"
Yes.
Before I further argue with you, a simple question. I've learned Dvorak and been using it for years. Have you tried anything other than QWERTY for long enough to learn it? I am a hunt and peck QWERTY user and I touch type Dvorak. I've spent WAY more time formally trying to touch type QWERTY; I spent basically zero with Dvorak. (Obviously a lot of time to learn the layout. But I made zero extra effort to "touch type".)
What you believe to be a fundamental aspect of typing may be merely an accident of a keyboard layout that penalizes "proper" typing. To type "properly" with QWERTY takes work. To hunt and peck with Dvorak would take equal work, if not more. It is not natural with Dvorak. Why would your hands leave the home row? Only when the keys mean something other than letters entirely, like a WASD game.
I also took junior high typing in the 1980s, but we used manual typewriters. There were two IBM Selectrics in the back of the class that were used by lucky students for the day.
I type with only the three inner index fingers of each hand, because the keys on the manual typewriters were hard to press.
This limits my typing speed to 60wpm. If I used all four fingers, I could probably hit 90.
I never learned to type formally and also use a limited amount of fingers. On my left hand I use my thumb+middle+index finger for everything except zaq and modifiers which I use my ring finger, and on my right hand I only use my middle and index finger for everything except for backspace/delete which I use my ring finger for. Still manage to hit 100WPM.
I was also stuck at like 50wpm and I knew it was because of using the wrong fingers for the wrong keys. Someone recommended typing.com's complete beginner lesson where they literally just walk you through which fingers to use with which keys and after completing that and 2 days of practise my speed jumped by 10wpm. Highly recommend.
I had a similar beginning but using all the fingers, so I have to ask: was there something wrong with those manual typewriters, or did you just find manual typewriter keys in general hard to press?
> Well, of course I did. I used a keyboard for many years before my formal middle school typing class and by then it was too late. My brain already knew better and typing exercises did no good because I already knew how to use the keyboard without looking.
It’s possible that a relatively arbitrary keyboard layout would have worked for you too simply by forcing you to relearn how to type, then.
why would you even need to "learn", it comes naturally?
the school I went to also tried to push some crappy "correct" way to type on everyone. The teacher was moderately embarrased when I was able to type significantly faster without looking at the keyboard, because apparantly typing fast is only possible if following some special method..
dvorak is probably better, I dont know, but I type fast enough on qwerty
> the instructor would call out "J-J-J Space, K-K-K Space, L-L-L space, sem sem sem space"
That nicely demonstrates the poor Qwerty layout. The very first keys you learn are among the least used, especially semicolon. Adding the left hand (ASDF), we can then type 44 words from /usr/share/dict/words, like "salad", "salsa", "flasks", "falls" and "alfalfa".
For Dvorak, the instructor would be calling out "H-H-H Space, T-T-T Space, N-N-N Space, S-S-S space" — and then U-E-O-A on the left hand. We can already type 467 words! So the instructor would soon be calling out "Season, Tenant, Hushes, Taunts, Outset, Sunset, Assent".
This is a good point, but what you're actually doing with exercises like this is training muscle memory. It doesn't matter if you're learning Dvorak, QWERTY or how to chisel letters into a block of marble.
The advent of computers also killed one of Dvorak's selling points, which was a lower error rate at speed. Errors on a typewriter were painful to correct and took up a lot of time, but by the 70s and 80s, even typewriters were capable of reasonably easy correction. By the time word processors kicked in, mistakes were nothing to deal with.
> That nicely demonstrates the poor Qwerty layout. The very first keys you learn are among the least used, especially semicolon
OMG no it does not, your argument is ridiculous. You have to learn all the fingers and then all the keys before you can touchtype, no matter what layout you are learning. You can't efficiently touchtype 20 letters of the alphabet then take your hands off to hunt and peck the rest on a dvorak or a qwerty.
What letter you are instructed to learn first is immaterial. (and in GP's example, since I was taught by the same system, you don't learn semicolon as your 3rd letter, he just threw that in; you learn to rhythmically intersperse pointers (index fingers) and thumbkins/space first, then you add in tall-men, interspersed, etc. then moving between rows.)
what you are trying to connect your argument to, unsucessfully, is the idea that index fingers are naturally the best typists (coordination, musculature), so "let's give them the most common letters to type", which dvorak does. But this also implies, btw, that your worst finger, pinky, will over time also get the least exercise, so the gulf between its skill and pointer's skill will grow, not shrink. (I'm not saying that's more than a 2nd order effect, just sayin, muscle memory, 10,000 hours...)
While what you're saying is true, you can only type around 800 English words on the home row using QWERTY. You can type thousands using Dvorak, so mastering the Dvorak home row would gain you more than mastering the QWERTY home row. Dvorak is simply a better-thought-out layout.
He is talking about the fact that you can type so many words without even moving your hands. Dvorjak reduced the amount you move your hands and fingers to type. That reduces strain. That is the benefit of Dvorjak.
> I think you are learning it wrong. It's not hard at all to learn QWERTY with the proper training technique.
Eh, that's always easy to say, but I suspect it is not true.
I myself have tried several times, using several typing tutors, and I just couldn't do it. I can type without looking at the keyboard out of sheer habit, but the whole "put fingers on the home row" never clicked for me. It also, IMO, is very prone to RSI issues.
> I took touch typing in High School, back in the 1980's. Even back then I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work with computers so it made sense to take it. It turned out to be the most useful class I ever took in school by a wide margin since I've used that skill all day every day for 35 years.
Same. It's like the one high school class I use every single day. Do they even offer typing in high school anymore?
I graduated in 1999 and had to take two typing classes, one in 7th grade and one in 11th grade. Both were mostly wastes of time because I had already learned how to type.
I could type about 120-130 WPM back then and somehow, I was still required to take BOTH classes. I typically finished the work in the first ten minutes of class then studied or drew.
My family got a computer when I was about 5 and one of the first things I learned how to do was type. Having a personal computer in the late 80's still was pretty unusual. Ten years later, everyone had access to one either at home or in the school computer lab.
Probably goes under the name of "computer applications", but I sure hope so. I'm not a great typist by any means, but I did manage to get out of typing class by taking a little-advertised test. If you could manage 35 WPM, you didn't have to take it.
I'm not 100% sure you're right, but I'm one who did not touch type QWERTY properly. It could be because of the reasons you stated, or because I learned to type on a keyboard myself, not even knowing I should be using touch type. And I found that learning touch typing together with Dvora was great, like you say. It felt very natural with Dvorak, but I don't think the touch typing I learned made me touch type Qwerty properly.
I think there's something to be said about starting with a clean slate on the keyboard layout so you don't have to unlearn old bad habits in the process. For me learning Dvorak had the double benefit of making me type 100% correctly with the new layout. I'm really not sure I would have been motivated to do that if I decided to stick with Qwerty. Getting two comfort improvements with one training period makes it more worthwhile
This sounds very alluring but having to deal with setting up VIM in every environment or going to a new environment with VIM not set up sounds so painful.
I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK
Interestingly enough, the two vim bindings you probably use most, up/down (j/k) are actually positioned right next to each other on a dvorak keyboard. The rest take a bit of getting used to. You'd be surprised how natural vim feels on a dvorak keyboard.
I use VIM on Dvorak, having [shift], [:;], [q] next to each other is awesome.
Having [a], [i], [y], [p], [x] all on the left hand is also awesome. It's a bummer that [d] is on the other hand, though I could reach it in a pinch with my left hand if I need to.
I don't need the fake QWERTY arrow keys, the real arrow keys work.
Both vi-style and emacs-style key bindings work well under Dvorak without alteration. (Why are people capitalizing it? It's not an acronym, it's a name.)
I use Vim and Dvorak. It only took a couple of weeks to get used to. Never felt a need to customise Vim to change any keybindings strong enough to do so. And am happy I didn’t. For all these years I’ve been using them both together with just the default key bindings.
My vimrc has a specific section just for handling this:
"""""""""""" DVORAK FTW LOLZ! "
noremap d h
noremap h j
noremap t k
noremap n l
noremap k d
noremap l n
noremap j t
noremap ^Wd ^Wh
noremap ^Wh ^Wj
noremap ^Wt ^Wk
noremap ^Wn ^Wl
inoremap ^] ^[A
inoremap ð ^N
That's all I use for handling dvorak. This has been in my config since I switched to git from hg in 2007, dunno how long before that.
> I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK
This is why I don't use vim; I had been touch-typing in Dvorak for years by the time I encountered it, and vim's layout felt like it would require a painful degree of brute memorization.
I know maybe 0.5 percent of what vim (neovim these days) can do and between that and a sane config my text editing skills have gotten at least 4 times better compared to a regular text editor. You can just learn the things that matter to you plus how to save and exit.
It's been years since I last used Vim (happy Emacs user now), but I don't see much of an issue, j and k are still next to each other and for moving in a line f, F, t, and T are nicer. Also solidus, of course.
Same experience for me with Colemak. My wife at one point got curious enough to try typing a few sentences on my machine (with me reading out which finger to move how to get the right letters) and even she had to admit it felt very relaxing compared to what she's used to. (But not enough that she's willing to relearn...)
Are you able to have all your normal keyboards as dvorak? I have thought about trying to switch. But I use a few different keyboards in my day and it would be a real problem for other people if the keycaps didn't match what was on the keyboard. I also think my fingers would get confused about what letter is where when switching.
I've been typing Dvorak for nearly twenty years now. I decided to learn when my programming job turned into an offshore team management job, so wanted to make it more interesting.
Initially looking down at the Qwerty labelled keyboard would totally mess me up, so I had try really hard not to look down
After about a month I could look down on occasion, realise the caps were no help and then continue on
Because I would switch back to Qwerty whenever anyone would come over to my PC, my brain then decided the presence of a person was a key to flip to Qwerty, which was annoying for a while, as whenever anyone would come near I'd lose the ability to type properly.
After the second month I would look down and I was sort of 'see' both characters at the same time: the actual keycap with my eyes and the Dvorak keys with my mind. Was very trippy and a bit difficult to properly explain.
After another month or so, that went away and then I can look at the Qwerty keys and I just sorta ignore them unless I made an effort to read them. My brain has learnt to not read them, if that makes sense. That's still the state now, many years later.
I can still type reasonably fast on Qwerty too if I need to, but it takes me a minute to adjust.
At home I have some blank keyboards I bought, partly to reduce confusion and partly because I think they look cool, but I really couldn't care less any more what the keyboards are labelled with as I rarely look at them.
I use Vim using the original bindings, hjkl are not so badly placed: h and l are still left and right of each other.
I'm actually now debating setting up a stegography keyboard, partly for another amusing brain rewiring exercise, and just because I like geeky things.
Dvorak user for 6+ years. Whereas I was very proficient touch-typing qwerty, that ability was lost when I learned Dvorak. It was too difficult, with too little benefit, to train myself to touch type in both formats. I ended up going all-in on Dvorak.
My keyboard [0] has software that translates from Dvorak to qwerty. So plugging the keyboard into different machines means no change for me, since most do qwerty by default.
When I use laptop keyboard, I do switch to dvorak layout.
Also, I'll mention the most interesting bit for me personally with changing has been in-person software interviews. The interviewer (future boss) gave me quite a look when he saw me start hunt-and-pecking! I should have given him some warning but wasn't thinking about it until I sat down at the keyboard. Fortunately it led to a good conversation, and after taking the few seconds to switch keyboard formats on the test machine I was back to full speed (unnecessarily extra full speed to impress).
> it would be a real problem for other people if the keycaps didn't match...
If you're concerned about other people, use qwerty keycaps and just ignore for yourself. It's also possible to have blank keycaps. I have blanks because they were the only sculpted option at the time for the keyboard I wanted. Along with the ortholinear layout I get some weird looks sometimes, the keyboard is just a blank regular grid of buttons, doesn't really look quite normal.
The best touch typing doesn't look at the keyboard at all, so it has more often felt like a benefit that the keys don't match what I type. (I sometimes feel like I should apologize to grade school teachers that tried to impart that lesson at too young an age to me when teaching QWERTY typing and I'd complain when they tried to block the keyboard from view.)
Having QWERTY key caps is even sometimes still useful for hunt and peck when an app (often a game) uses the wrong system library for keyboard input and is accidentally hard-coded to QWERTY input.
If other people need to use my computer it is very easy to set up profiles that default still to QWERTY or to temporarily shift to QWERTY for their interaction. (The default Windows shortcut key to switch between installed layouts is Left CTRL+SHIFT. It's very easy to switch to/from QWERTY with that quick shortcut.)
I've also used for dvorak for a long time...over 15 years. I've never changed keycaps. If you're looking at your fingers while typing qwerty, learning to type dvorak on a qwerty keyboard might just be useful in that it will force you to stop looking at your keyboard and you'll find a speed up in typing just from that!
For me the learning process was very similar to learning a foreign language. At first it was hard, but once I started to get fluency in dvorak, typing in qwerty was hard for a while...but then at some point my qwerty typing ability came back and switching between the two layouts is as easy as switching computer or human languages. (when you know them fluently).
To address your fear, yes, there will a period in the learning process where your fingers get confused switching back and forth but once you get past that it goes away and switching becomes second nature.
Get good enough touch typing dvorak you don't need to seethe keys so typing on a qwerty keyboard isn't an issue. These days it's not the letters I ever have to personally look at the keys for but the random symbols I don't use often enough to have memorized. Sadly some of those move around too.
As a colemak user, I have the same flow. I used to have a keyboard that had blank keycaps, but that isn't kind to the rest of the family that uses the computer. :D
I have literally just learnt about colemak from these comments. I suffer from RSI and have tried Dvorak in the past, but as a qwerty touch typist found it too different.
How long did it take you to learn colemak? I guess if you still use it you find it better than qwerty?
Not OP but: I’ve been using Colemak for 10+ years at this point.. I switched in the middle of a semester while getting my CS degree to A) learn to actually touch type and B) maybe help prevent RSI issues cause I knew I was gonna be programming for a while (and I have trash typing posture).
It’s a struggle for maybe a month or two completely upending your muscle memory.. but retaining the locations of AZXCV from QWERTY did help a lot with transitioning. The hardest part for me was how S is moved one character over to where D is (took a while before I stopped making S related mistake..).
I think I practiced typing every day deliberately for a few months until I didn’t feel like I had to consciously think about it anymore and was up to ~80WPM again. No regrets here.. and it’s always amusing watch people use my computer at first
I learned Colemak in a long weekend "cold turkey". I wasn't quite as fast after that weekend, but I felt so much better and more comfortable after just the weekend. (I was in grad school and in pain and knew I was probably weeks or months from an RSI surgery if I didn't change something.)
The lesson plan I was using followed home row order and I knew I was "home" in Colemak in the first lessons because even in the first four "main finger" home row keys you start by typing entire, real English words, some of which can be quite long such as Tennessee. (That was always a problem for me in grade school QWERTY lessons was how much home row exercises were garbage and nonsense words.) I feel like that also added to the feeling that learning Colemak was fast and just took then one dedicated long weekend.
It took me 4 weeks to get back to 50% speed. 4 months to get back to 75% speed. 4 years to type faster than Qwerty.
I'm incredibly happy with my switch. I was getting RSI pain from awkward top-to-bottom row maneuvers with Qwerty. I still have some pain, but that's mostly from using the computer far too much.
Most of the challenge is not about learning the new layout, but getting your muscle memory to forget about the old way of doing things. If I were to do it again, I'd recommend a progressive layout change; switching a single set of keys at a time. It takes longer to switch, but reduces the upfront mental load.
I found it to be more comfortable, so I stuck with it. If I could do it again though, I’d swap between the two as I learned as I’m now rather slow with qwerty.
I made the switch from Qwerty to Colemak over ten years ago.
How long for me to transition from being quite fast at Qwerty to being happy enough with my Colemak speed? I'd guess roughly 2 to 4 weeks. As an independent software developer and entrepreneur at the time, it worked. I was mostly writing code, not having to write some heroic quantity of emails as a manager.
In addition to the "typing feels better" benefit, I found the very process of changing to be quite beneficial in two ways:
(1) I did more thinking in advance and more planning and therefore less unnecessary typing. This was very niiice. Please imagine Borat saying it for full effect.
(2) The cognitive challenge of switching my primary mode of interaction with computers had a much broader effect on how I appreciated learning and habits in general.
Conclusion: you have should switched yesterday from Qwerty to an APL keyboard. /s
I use Colemak-DH and learned it through the Tarmak progression. RSI is probably the wrong reason to learn Colemak. It made little difference for me and as far as I know there is no scientific evidence that it helps.
Better: get an adjustable table and chair and ensure that they are correctly configured. Take regular breaks and do exercises. Get a keyboard that is split (to ensure that your wrists are not bent) and tented (to put our wrists at a more comfortable angle). Bonus points for column stagger. For me, switching to a Kinesis Advantage improved a lot to the point where I pretty much pain free.
I learned colemak for the same reason (RSI) but it didn’t help much, it was especially hard because I use multiple computers, RDP and other remote management systems and sometimes other peoples computers.
I don’t know what the status is now, if all the OS have built in Colemak layouts but I don’t think they did at the time.
I got rid of RSI by using a Kinesis advantage keyboard for a year (with qwerty layout). This must have gotten rid of any bad habits I had, I focused hard on not bottoming out hard on the keys too.
After a year I switched to a topre keyboard and it hasn’t come back, it’s been over 10yrs.
I honestly don't remember how long it took. I know it took a couple of tries, but when I went "all in" it didn't take long. My speed is still not fully up to where I was, but I haven't been trying to improve. Specifically, I got up to 70ish and then just stopped caring.
I'd hesitate to say I notice much of any difference. It makes me a little happy to have made the change. But, in the same way that moving a mouse to my off hand makes me happy. And is something I do every so often.
I'm in a funny situation that at my desktop I've been using a Kinesis dvorak keyboard for over 20 years, but on laptops or other random computers I use qwerty. My brain is totally bought in on the different layouts, I don't even have to think about it. It's too much of a hassle to manage to reconfigure all of them to dvorak, and then no one else in the family would be able to use them either. An extra complication is that I also sometimes use a Swedish keyboard to type åäö and on a dvorak I have no idea where they would end up.
Perhaps it would pay off to standardize... But like someone else said, the letters aren't the problem, it's all the symbols that you almost never use that become impossible if they aren't labeled.
Not a Dvorak user, but I type on different language keypads a lot, both physically and on software keyboards. Your fingers get used to it within a few weeks and after a few years your brain doesn't even register the difference.
I found out while travelling, around 20 years ago, my (then current) SO would get frustrated with the keyboards in different languages (all over the EU). She gave up even trying to use a different keyboard and started asking me to type for her (it sucks, her being restrained like that).
I also found out that it takes me <60s to pick up the new layouts on those physical keyboards (again, European variants)
Regardless of the layout, she is always faster than me on virtual keyboards.
When I was learning dvorak (more than a decade ago) I bought a cheap keyboard at a garage sale and rearranged the keys.
An easier approach is just to get stickers.
I used that trainer keyboard for a summer, until my typing muscle memory was updated to dvorak.
Since then, I don't look at my keyboards while typing, so the fact that the keys are labeled for qwerty doesn't really matter.
I came to say this. It's not speed, it's comfort. I've been using Dvorak on my Kinesis Advantage since mid 90'es [1]. I don't actually think Dvorak is the best possible layout, but as the video points out, we are already in the realm of diminishing returns.
[1] I still use Qwerty on non-Kinesis keyboards and this fact is enough for my muscle memory to eliminate any mental overhead of switching.
> how fast we can think [...] an analysis of one of our code bases
Well, with coding that's certainly true. I can spend all day trying to come up with a dozen lines of code. Input speed is not the barrier there. But for writing English prose, at around 90 wpm, my fingers are often lagging behind what I want to say. People can reach short bursts when speaking as fast as 300 wpm. When I get such bursts of thought, it can be hard to hold on to the end of it while I'm still typing the beginning.
> output isn't limited by how fast we can type, but how fast we can think
It's hard to think while typing so the less time I spend typing the more time I have for thinking. Having said that I'm a qwerty user - it took me a lot of time (may be 100 hours) to learn touch typing and I don't have time to repeat the same with dvorak.
Hmm I never consciously learned to touch type, just got into it in time. Not being an actual practiced touch typist, I use like 3 fingers on each hand on average. Last time I took a speed test i could do like 50-60 wpm.
Thing is, this speed is more than enough for a developer. What do you write? Code and some communication with your co workers. In both cases you need to think about it, except the rare cases where you churn out yet another for loop.
I dont touch type in a proper way most of the time I'm typing with little more than three fingers plus a thumb (two fingers plus a thumb on my dominant hand, and one finger on my non-dominant), but I still manage about 80 WPM on a QWERTY keyboard without looking at the keyboard. When I switch to a full size Model M type, I do use more digits, but not alot more.
> It's a constant source of stress. I'm only ever comfortable if I force myself to think slower.
I have some questions:
1. From a psychological point of view, have you explored ways of coping with this stress? What are your expectations? Do you know why you have the stress? Is about results? Is it about fluidity / flow / fluency? Something else?
2. This may be obvious, but I want to make sure I ask the question to make it really concrete: is one of your goals to transfer your thinking directly to the computer as quickly as possible?
3. Would you be willing to reframe your goal? Perhaps frame your goals as: "Accomplish my goals efficiently with a sense of flow, without rushing down a suboptimal path." You know some of these proverbs:
* "Running faster in the wrong direction won't get you anywhere."
* "Better to walk in the right direction than run in the wrong one."
* "Haste makes waste."
* "A fool at high speed is still a fool."
* "Don't mistake activity for achievement."
* "When you're headed in the wrong direction, progress means turning around."
4. It may be useful to think slower! This might help you let go of framing it as "forcing myself to think slower".
A. Maybe you would feel better if you could reframe this process as not simply thinking slower but also allocating some of your mental processing to summarization and translation and other valuable processing?
B. No knock against your brain, but how do you actually measure your thinking speed and error rate?
C. There are a lot of counterintuitive things happening in the brain when you dig into the neuroscience. Many experiments show that our conscious awareness lags our actual decision-making. Perhaps this can "problematize" your situation and make it interesting, rather than purely stressful. Thinking and typing may not be happening the way you think they are
D. I'd expect for you, a good typist, your brain fires motor control circuits to cause your fingers to type before you are consciously aware of it, if you are aware at all. Ever notice how switching keyboards increases your awareness? This seems to suggest that one's low-level typing awareness (i.e. how keys feel) dulls over time when using one particular keyboard.
E. I have not read this yet, but it seems relevant: "Hierarchical control of cognitive processes: The case for skilled typewriting." by Logan and Crump, 2011. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-04906-001
5. What technologies and/or methods have you considered?
6. Are you familiar with a steno machine (aka stenotype machine / shorthand machine / stenograph)? Might it work for you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
Also, as a gamer, I'm concerned about keyboard mappings in games if I switch from Qwerty- I heard bad things, although games really should have switched from a key encoding mapping to a key location mapping a long time ago.
Some games do use key location. Factorio, for example, uses key location. It's really hit or miss. I am not sure what determines whether they use key location or not.
Edit: Basically, the key mappings would automatically change WASD to WARS for Colemak.
Using QUERTY after colemak is like being retarded, so after trying alternate keyboard layouts for a while, I'm just doing a hardpass on anything not QUERTY until we get rid of keyboards entirely.
I moved to dvorak to help with my RSI. I don't know if it actually helped (it's been decades since I used QWERTY on a keyboard for more than a minute), but typing speed was irrelevant to me.
I just don’t understand that metric or why Dvorak people keep using it. Yes my fingers might travel less, but do we know that moving your hands less leads to a reduction in pain and injury? I’d argue having them constantly in the same position might also do that.
And what about comfort? My index finger is stronger than my pinky; id much rather move further with my index finger than my pinky..
When I started using Dvorak, it was because I found that I could make my typing significantly quieter with Dvorak than with QWERTY, likely because of the reduced movement. As an undergraduate at a time when almost no one else had started typing notes in class, I found that there was a substantial reduction in how noticeable my typing was to others when I switched to Dvorak.
I did the same kind of code heatmap (only for querty) but never made a good implementation that accounts for autocomplete. The symbol characters are already much more heavily used than the abc but the real numbers are probably much worse.
These characters/keys are in better positions on Dvorak: '" ,< .> -_ +=
These are in worse positions: [{ ]} ;: /?
And this doesn't move: \| `~ and the punctuation over the numbers.
[]{} is significantly worse, equally -_=+ is significantly better, as these keys are swapped. Making an effort to learn and touch-type these keys is pretty similar on either layout.
It's just a matter of learning it. If you really want to, you can customize a keyboard layout on any OS and arrange these keys how you see fit, but then you lose any compatibility advantage of sticking with plain Dvorak.
I use the programmer variant of dvorak. The number keys are 'swapped' with symbols, so you press shift to access numbers. Given that most programmers (should) use symbols more often than numbers, this is highly convenient. Strongly recommend checking it out.
For the record, I mostly use python nowadays but it's still a big improvement over mashing shift all day.
,.<> are slightly more convenient than on Qwerty, ;: is obviously worse but hardly "way out" (it's where Z is on Qwerty).
[]{} are indeed further out, but instead we have -_=+ closer. Once we add in all the English I type, file-names, U_R_L?s, --command --flags, /directories/, I think, if anything, the rearrangement is an advantage.
I use a gaming mouse and assign common shortcuts to the extra buttons.
One nice advantage of mac os is the built-in Dvorak-Qwerty layout which retains Qwerty shortcuts. You need an AHK script to achieve the same result on Windows.
Anecdotally, I gave Dvorak a try and became somewhat proficient, but ultimately reverted back to QWERTY for one reason: keyboard shortcuts! Control-C|V|Z are all transformed into either two-handed shortcuts or right-handed shortcuts. In either case, I can't copy/paste while selecting text with the mouse (since I'm right-handed).
I now use Colemak (https://colemak.com/) which doesn't have this issue and I'm quite happy with!
Good point, but IMO mechanical programmable keyboard with hardware shortcuts are the way to go. That way you can remap to one-handed, or even one button, or whatever you like. You can even take it with you between machines. It's like a portable "human interface" that stays with you.
I'm a dvorak user and never really found a way around the shortcut issue. Mac has a native option to use Dvorak with QWERTY shortcuts which is what I prefer, but on windows you have to use buggy programs to map the shortcuts over. Never found anything that worked great. Linux is even worse since you have to mess around with the OS to get it to work, and is a bit different between distros / flavors.
In the end I use a Ergodox keyboard that switches the layout to QWERTY if you hold down the control key, works flawlessly and haven't had to deal with it since.
15 years on dvorak and shortcuts are the primary impediment. The mac tweaked shortcuts work nicely, but they're not consistent. Swing based UI ignores them. It's also still a bit confusing dealing with ctrl-* vs anything that has a cmd, including cmd-opt-shift-* etc. Seems like re-implementing the mac tweak but in a more complete way manually in qmk would be the ultimate cross-platform solution.
This depends on taste. I find it very easy to type "ls" on Dvorak, where it is typed with the same finger on adjacent keys.
Moreover, the variant of Dvorak that I use is much more shell-friendly than any QWERTY layout.
While for the alphabet and for the punctuation signs that are used in natural languages I use a layout closer to the initial Dvorak layout from 1932 than to the modern Dvorak layout, for the other non-alphanumeric symbols I have made a few changes that I consider best for typing shell commands or other kinds of programs.
The pre-WWII Dvorak layout does not say anything about most non-alphanumeric symbols and there are no suitable standards for them (i.e. any standards than are based on rational criteria, not on preserving a random historical layout), so anyone who wants an optimal keyboard for programming or work with a command-line interface should design a custom layout for the non-alphanumeric symbols, according to taste and experience.
Sorry, I don't follow: `ls` is dragging your right pinky downward. How is that not shell friendly?
(I mean, to each their own, I use dvorak because other layouts hurt my hands, but I would presume there are better non-shell-friendly examples -- but interestingly, I couldn't readily find them since `mv` is also just the right hand, unlike its qwerty friend)
I've been using dvorak exclusively for over 20 years. Best investment of my career. I don't bother remapping keys and just learn them however they land on the layout.
Ironically Qwerty is extremely well-designed for typing on a touchscreen phone.
Dvorak was designed to have common characters on home keys and common character sequences alternate between each hand.
That's great on a keyboard with 4 fingers on each hand. On a touch screen, that's really bad! Characters close together complicate touchscreen recognition - is it "poet", "peet", or "pout"? And consecutive characters on opposite sides of the keyboard creates lots of movement for a single thumb.
Instead, Qwerty has common characters spread out across the keyboard, and many common character sequences close together (e.g. "-ed", "tion"). Which is exactly the pattern that is fast & accurate on a touchscreen.
I've had the on-screen keyboard on my phone set to Dvorak for > 5 years, and I just can't switch back to Qwerty. I think it's quite good for the phone.
One YouTube comment echoed my experience with Dvorak:
> Often overlooked is that the main reason for switching to dvorak isn't speed for most users. The dvorak layout is layed out for minimal movement while maintaining a roughly even split between hands. This reduces strain on a typists hands and helps a great deal with comfort when typing for longer periods of time.
I may not type faster than if I had stuck with qwerty, but I definitely don't have the wrist problems I keep hearing coworkers complain about.
This was my driving factor for switching to Colemak (I considered Dvorak, but felt Colemak was easier for _me_ to learn).
I'm starting to get some finger pain again, but that's almost entirely from overuse. QWERTY was crushing my hands. Far too many, weird twisting moves to hit consecutive keys between top and bottom rows.
For typing alphabetical characters, I'd expect a more significant impact from "adopt Dvorak instead of QWERTY" over "adopt a smaller keyboard".
For reducing strain to access keys like shift/backspace/escape/tab, I think that's where "use keyboard with multiple thumbkeys" would have a benefit, yeah.
In reality it would be easy to go down to a single thumb key, making it 32 keys.
In short I have layers for numbers and symbols, I make heavy use of combos (pressing multiple keys at once) where I have modifiers, big keys like escape and enter and also the numbers and symbols (for typing singletons). I also have different functions for long press and I use capsword and numword (caps lock / layer that turns off intelligently).
I spend the majority of my time in the shell (usually bash) or emacs. Learning the key-maps, especially for zsh and bash, was one of the best things I ever did. Wow, that cut my keypresses down immensely. So did remapping lynx(1) keybindings.
My experience is that Dvorak solved my RSI problems, and split keyboards do not. The amount of time it takes to retrain into Dvorak is irrelevant to me, because the alternative is something more extreme, like quitting my job, using speech-to-text, or living in pain.
Yeah, I think this sums up every Dvorak debunking story that pops up on HN twice a year. You can type 100 WPM with two fingers as seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqyiyh_hrUs so layout does not matter too much for speed. You can see his physical movement does not appear superhuman, and this is well above average typing speed of 40 WPM.
Dvorak is also based on English spelling, and thus its benefits vanish almost everywhere in the world. There are other alternative layouts, having the same kind of marginal gain over the standard, but then it's not available everywhere, and if you're a developer, you may also want an easier access to braces and stuff, and from here your keyboard will basically work nowhere unless you buy some kind of custom hardware to do the translation.
And it also has the same problem to me as QWERTY, it makes numbers accessible while I don't care since most keyboards have a numpad (and to enter a number holding shift isn't hard) while for example it adds a significant amount of keystrokes to open and close a brace.
> vowels are still the most common letters in most Latin-alphabet based languages.
Also "s" "t" and "n" are fairly-to-very common in damn near every language (Latin-alphabet or otherwise) due to how phonetics works. (They're the default-voiced-ness for each manner of articulation at the most-default-ish - alveolar - place of articulation for consonant phonemes.) The other two - "h" and "d" - are less universal, but still better than "j" and "g".
Regardless whether one uses Dvorak or QWERTY, it is good to revert the effect of the shift key on the 10 numeric keys of the upper row.
Thus the non-alphanumeric symbols, which are more frequent in programming languages, are available directly, while keeping shift pressed for the entire duration of a number is easy, so it is a minor disadvantage.
I also find useful to map the 3 pairs of ASCII brackets on 3 keys, so that the opening brackets are available directly and the closing brackets with shift. I need very seldom to type the closing brackets, as they are normally inserted automatically by most editors.
I use Dvorak. When typing on QWERTY, I feel like I'm playing a secretary in a 1950s movie trying to ham up the notion that I'm really typing something here, because it feels my fingers have to fly around everywhere in an exaggerated and ostentatious manner.
If you have typing speed less than 50 WPM, you'll probably type faster by switching to Dvorak. If you type faster than that before switching, your typing speed will go down and not fully recover automatically unless you train it back up. I lost some speed that I never recovered. It wasn't worth the effort because I can still type fast enough.
A lot of people get hung up on the keybindings thing. zxcv for CUA cut-copy-paste make a nice little row on QWERTY, and hjkl for vi type movements, but as it turns out, it really doesn't matter. Those help you learn when muscle memory doesn't translate into intention without thinking. Once you learn them by muscle memory, it doesn't matter where the keys are. I just use programs with QWERTY shortcuts and press the key on Dvorak wherever it happens to land on the layout, and it works perfectly fine.
I can still touch type QWERTY, but quite a bit slower than Dvorak.
Can attest vi movements can be learned on Dvorak. But have to admit it is not quite as nice, those movements were designed for qwerty.
Of course "j" and "k" are next to each other on Dvorak. "h" and "l" are also positioned at first and fourth fingers like qwerty... but on different rows and on different hand than "j/k". Which means Dvorak requires two-handed vi movements.
Maybe not a big deal, vi shortcuts mean moving all over the keyboard anyway. Just not quite as nice.
With the rise of (split) mechanical keyboards as a hobby in its own right (with open source keyboard firmware like QMK and ZMK) it is much easier to make small tweaks to your layout as you find things which annoy you, so there seems to be a lot of experimentation going on right now with alternative layouts.
I feel like I'm one of the last generation of Dvorak typers, anyone who cares about typing ergonomics learning about alternate layouts is probably both better off and more likely to try e.g. colemak, or something newer or maybe even design their own.
It's my lone complaint with Colemak is that Windows still doesn't include it out-of-the-box and needs it to be admin-installed from an MSI bundle that needs to be downloaded (or copied from a thumb drive). Every other modern OS includes it today (including iOS).
I taught myself dvorak for fun in high school have used it everyday for close to a decade now. It certainly never made me a faster typer, but what I don't hear a lot of people point out is that it is simply a more pleasant experience. Whenever I switch back to qwerty (I can still touch type in both), I become instantly contingent that my hands are having to move more erratically over the surface of my keyboard to type any given word or sentence. Also a couple small things about the layout that really like are that the underscore key is much easier to reach and the period and comma keys are on the top row which makes writing long numbers with decimals and commas nicer.
I built a simulator to allow you to experience what it is like to type in Dvorak before committing to learn the layout. It assumes that you can touch-type in QWERTY. Enter some text into the first text box, and it gives you the equivalent keypresses to make [in QWERTY] that would output the same sentence in Dvorak.
That's called a substitution cipher and can be defeated by hand by using frequency analysis, in case anyone wanted to know that. Please don't call the party pooper police!
Switched to dvorak ~10 years ago. The first 2 months were terrible: it took me 40 minutes to write a simple e-mail (no must not write the keys on the keyboard, but have a cheat sheet next to you to train your "muscle memory").
After some time though, in my case around a year, you start reaching your previous speed (in my case qwerty). I didn't gain speed but I gained a lot of muscular comfort. Indeed, you frequently do some weird gestures typing on a qwerty due to the dispositions of the keys. It's much rarer on dvorak and I'm really glad for that.
I switched to Colemak a little over 10 years ago and I've never looked back. I used to struggle a lot with hand pain when typing for more than a few hours, Colemak completely fixed that.
It took me about three weeks to become proficient enough that typing stopped being frustrating. Those three weeks really sucked, that was the hardest part.
It took a couple years, but I'm solidly "bilingual" now and can switch between Colemak and Qwerty with no effort.
There is zero overlap in my brain with thumb typing on the phone and touch typing on a keyboard. I've kept qwerty on my pixel and it's never bothered or confused me once.
It's not really a win for me in terms of productivity, but being able to type 120wpm is fun :)
Your story is very similar to mine, I switched to Colemak in 2010 and it took about 3 weeks of 5 minutes bursts of practice a couple of times every day(ish).
I have never looked back. My motivation was moving my finger less, speed was just a bonus.
As a Dvorak user (for 20 years now), I always say "I came for the speed benefits that never materialized, but stayed for the ergonomics (reduced strain)"
If I could go back, I would've learned colemak for the keyboard shortcut reasons people have outlined in other comments, but I don't have it in me to learn another layout at this point.
I use Dvorak for keyboards and qwerty for thumbs. Keeps them both in muscle memory to some extent, so it's not too painful when I'm using someone else's keyboard.
Me, too. I tried using Dvorak on the phone once I saw it was available but soon realized that my Dvorak skill was entirely muscle memory and that I had no visual sense of the layout. QWERTY (plus "glide" or "swipe" typing) works fine for that purpose, for me.
Ditto! It's actually good for thumbs because your thumbs can't get all crumbled on top of eachother. Same for swipe typing - the further distances makes it easier to pick up on different words.
I can kind of see that: by moving all the frequently-used letters to the edges and mostly away from each other (and keeping frequent letter pairs further apart), it probably makes interpreting taps between letters and things like swipe keyboards easier to execute.
> Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype (sangaline.com)
Can't believe that got only a hundred points and was posted only once in 2015. In my head this is an inspiring if not influential article. Glad it's still online at least.
Conclusion hint: it's not any of the established layouts that would be best for mobile!
I'm a Dvorak user myself since ~2006, and it is good. The main benefit is not the speed, but much less fatigue from typing: you move your fingers far less.
This does come at a cost: hotkeys are usually a mess, especially if you have a second language layout (Cyrillic in my case), sometimes working differently dependent on layout, and hotkeys positions are typically optimised for QWERTY.
Interestingly, all Dvorak advantages on regular keyboard become severe disadvantages on smartphones: Dvorak is optimised for alternating hands while typing as much as possible, but when you type with one thumb, you constantly need to move your finger from one side of a keyboard to another. One could probably come with a screen keyboard layout optimized to type with one finger, but I'm yet to see such keyboard.
I actually tried that and it's very confusing, because now no keys are corresponding to new positions of English letters.
I ended up creating my own Dvorak and Cyrillic layouts, so that Cyrillic layout has hotkeys on their Dvorak positions (in most apps, but not all), and Dvorak layout has some keys like -,= on the same positions as ЙЦУКЕН Cyrillic layout.
Still, I didn't yet find a way to make this layout default for a system: macOS refuses to use one of these on lock screen to enter password, but that's a minor inconvenience.
So he mentions the "popular" belief that QWERTY was designed to avoid jams from typists hitting adjacent keys in rapid succession, but he doesn't say whether this is untrue or not. It seemed implied that this is false, but I'm left uncertain. Does anyone know?
Agreed, the video is way too short (basically he gives the introduction and then thanks us for watching?!) and doesn't answer the question. The HN comment thread is interesting but the video leaves the viewer sitting with a finger half raised at the screen going "I still have questions"
I learnt Dvorak in 2 weeks and got back to my hunt-and-peck QWERTY speed within a month, within 2 I was typing 60-70WPM without effort, and about 90% accuracy. I did this with no formal training and my only motivation was that at that time I couldn't afford an "ergonomic keyboard" and had heard that Dvorak was better, so I gave it a try. It's also an ANSI standard so I didn't have to install any weird software, just choose it in the operating system settings.
I no longer have shooting pains up my arms. Whether that's a result of the ergonomics of Dvorak, or simply that I can touch type, is not something I'm qualified to answer, but what I can say is that:
- Dvorak is easy to learn
- only takes mild motivation to get good at
- is more comfortable
which leads to better typing habits that are good for you physically and make you a faster typist than hunt-and-peck, with less effort than learning to touch type on QWERTY.
Would I learn Dvorak these days over another layout like Colemak or whatever is the favorite today? Yes, I would, because it's a standard. I think we're at diminishing returns (for English) so it doesn't really matter: anything is better than QWERTY, even ABCDE...
I learned to use the Dvorak keyboard and was quickly as fast, and then faster than Querty. That's not what interesting. I felt like my brain was unencumbered with the additional motor control required of the Querty layout, resulting in improved memory and cognitive ability while I was typing. I would love to see this effect experimentally tested.
I was exclusively using Dvorak on my home and work machines for 8 years, but switched back to QWERTY about 5 years ago. I loved the feel of Dvorak -- subjectively more comfortable -- but minor annoyances added up.
1. I didn't practice QWERTY, so when I used someone else's computer, it was always an exercise in re-jogging my memory
2. Having to use one hand/finger to type (don't ask me why :)) on DVORAK was super slow because I had to map manually each key in my brain because I couldn't rely on the letters on the physical key caps
Ultimately I also wasn't typing that much, even as a programmer, so it didn't make a huge difference for me, but I do miss it sometimes.
I have switched to Dvorak only one year ago, after many decades of using QWERTY.
I consider this as one of my best decisions and my only regret is that I have not tried to do this many years earlier, because I had wrongly feared that typing Dvorak on a keyboard with QWERTY inscriptions might be a hindrance.
As many other posters have already said, the advantage of Dvorak is seldom a greater speed (and I needed a couple of months to recover the previous typing speed). The big advantage of Dvorak is a much greater comfort while typing. I will never go back to QWERTY.
When I was using QWERTY, I did not really have a feeling of discomfort, but I did not enjoy typing and sometimes I resented that this activity is unavoidable for transferring my thoughts into the computer.
After switching to Dvorak, even after only a few days and even if only significantly later I have reached and exceeded the previous typing speed, it already felt much easier to find by touch any key than it has ever felt on QWERTY, despite the fact that I have been using QWERTY since high school, for almost a half of century.
Now I enjoy typing and it feels effortlessly, which has never happened before.
So before trying Dvorak seriously, I was never concerned with the fact that the keyboard layout may be suboptimal. Only after the change the improvement has been obvious and I have realized that what I had been using previously had not been good enough.
Nevertheless, when someone wants to try another keyboard layout, an appropriate time must be chosen, when for a few days there is nothing that must be typed ASAP. During the first few days the drop in typing speed can be very large. The slow typing speed can be very frustrating and it is very difficult to resist the temptation of going back to the previous keyboard layout, for a normal typing speed.
When I was in the Air Force and had to take a typing class (on IBM Selectrics w/ blank keycaps), they had a couple set aside with Dvorak keyboard layouts --- everyone was offered the chance to "type out" on the first day, by typing 50 WPM or faster after adjusting for errors (I did 65).
The instructor noted that while folks often failed when testing on QWERTY, that he had never seen a formally trained Dvorak keyboard typist fail to type out, and that most were well above the average QWERTY speed.
As someone who is expertly proficient in QWERTY since my teens, is it even possible to learnDVORAK and be proficient in both in an ambidextrous sort of way?
Yes. When I switched to Dvorak (college, circa 2000 or 2001) my Qwerty speed dropped from around 60 to around 20, and Dvorak, after a couple months, was up to 60. Then 120. My Qwerty speed stayed low until I got a job where I didn't have full-control of all the computers I used (shared lab systems, didn't want to be rude and create confusion by adding a layout to them even if it was opt-in). At that point I was spending about half the day on my own work computer in Dvorak (still around 120 wpm) and half in Qwerty and my Qwerty speed went back to around 60-70.
If you don't want as big a delay (several years for me from when my Qwerty speed dropped to when it recovered), I'd suggest going "all in" on Dvorak for 3-6 months and then integrate some Qwerty time in deliberately to recover and then maintain your Qwerty proficiency.
Yes, maintaining your proficient in QWERTY is only a matter of not stopping to use it altogether when switching to a new layout. It'll just be a matter of time spent to become fluent in both. I recommend Colemak however.
I personally didn't maintaing typing on QWERTY, interestingly my brain still has the QWERTY mapping for tablets.
Obv it would be helpful/nice/cool to have reconfigurable keycaps, where the keycap's legend (LED-enhanced) could display whatever character you choose.
Each key glowing in conformance with your current keyboard layout of choice.
The last time I searched around for something like this, all I could find was some guy in Russia who had hacked up a positively brilliant-looking homebrew keyboard.
I’ve been using Programmers Dvorak together with QWERTY for 10+ years. Whenever I need to use common shortcuts I switch layouts with a simple shortcut, and sometimes do this dance a few times if a few seconds subconsciously as needed.
Typing speed is unimportant, it’s the reduced strain that is the main benefit.
Another 10+ year user of this reporting in. It's 10000% not the speed but the reduced strain. I used to get bad pain from typing 60wpm in QWERTY for 30 minutes. I can type 100WPM constantly for the whole day with zero pain since the days I switched in college. It took me 3 times to change, but once I forced myself it was great.
Edit: And want to clarify from reading other comments: I was a touch typist on QWERTY, had the recommended posture, and even used ergonomic keyboards. The pain happens in your knuckles and back of your hand, not wrists. Zero of that ten years later.
Nope, I’m using Dvorak mainly, but switch to QWERTY when I need to use shortcuts with one hand while the other is using the mouse (when designing in Figma etc).
I once decided that since I broke my left hand, it would be a good opportunity to learn Right Hand Dvorak. I was wrong. I was a terrible idea. Instead of being somewhat able to type with QWERTY, I was barely able to type at all with RH Dvorak. I tried it for a day, went back to QWERTY.
I tried Dvorak for a ~month, on and off, and still didn't type as fast as with qwerty. Plus my qwerty performance was reducing.
Can't recommend to do anything but cold turkey (or at least 80% of the time or so), and most definitely you'll need more than a day. You can't conclude it's a bad layout from just one day of starting to learn it!
If I can recommend it at all, that is. If you regularly type on someone else's keyboard, it's already a no go. Yes, this is why we can't have nice things (it's objectively better than qwerty for pretty much any latin-script language that has vowels, yet we don't switch, and I'm basically recommending to maintain that status quo).
Switching keyboards takes at least 2-4 weeks, in my opinion, to get to somewhat 80% speed of what you would expect.
Personally, switching to a "columnar" keyboard (Moonlander keyboard) took me about that time, but afterwards I could switch between keyboards without too much confusion. (I don't type faster, but I feel less pain from typing)
Most of the comments seem to be "I switched to Dvorak and love it" with a couple of "I switched to Dvorak but had to go back to QWERTY for other people".
Is there anyone that became sufficiently proficient with Dvorak and regret it/wished they hadn't wasted their time?
I wish I didn't. I loved DVORAK when I used it and wish it was the standard so all the video game keys and office shortcuts didn't require a QWERTY layout but I feel like using DVORAK permanently ruined the keyboard pathway in my brain. When went back to QWERTY my typing accuracy took a hit compared to what it was before learning DVORAK. A couple decades later it still feels like I don't have absolute mastery of any keyboard layout anymore.
Shortcuts and default keybindings are exactly why I haven't touched Dvorak. I don't want to remap them in every application I use (if the application even supports that). And the remapping might not even be consistent. Take Ctrl-C for example. When it comes to editing text, I'd want to remap it into the same position because on QWERTY theres a bunch of others set up to all be next to each other and easy to press with just the left hand. But when it comes to sending a SIGINT, I'd want that to remain as Ctrl-C no matter where C is located.
I switched in 1998 and kept it up for several years. BYOD wasn't a thing back then so I had to be able to switch but it wasn't that hard. My main gripe was relearning emacs, never got efficient at it. Too much muscle memory and less memory of the names of the key sequences.
I was an 80 wpm typist since 1993. On Dvorak I never got that fast even on a Model M, which I was wicked fast on using QWERTY. Eventually the laptop keyboards took over and my accuracy and comfort plummeted overall.
I think most problems could be solved by sitting properly and typing on a keyboard with good response like Cherry MX Brown or buckling spring keyboards, and not using a palm rest.
Dvorak's actually pretty good for vim keybindings.
While 'hjkl' is positionally significant; Dvorak 'jk' are still adjacent and easy to reach in Dvorak, and 'h' is still to the left of 'l' on the same hand.
Other keybindings are better remembered by the letter itself rather than by the position on the keyboard (e.g. "di'" or "gg"), so these aren't that much of an issue.
My experience was that vim keybindings are tied to characters, not key codes (position).
Insert is 'i', not the key at position of 'i' in QUERTY.
Maybe I was doing it wrong, but Vim, for me, is all about the interface and muscle memory. Having keys move position due to the different keyboard layout was a deal-breaker.
e.g. I recall that blogpost titled "ZZ vs zz". I use both of these on both QWERTY and Dvorak frequently enough; although tbh I had to actually try typing 'zz' to recall what it did.
My suspicion is that when I picked up using Dvorak with Vim, whatever association or motor-memory goes on gets some indirection added, so that 'letter and position' are not quite so tightly coupled.
For me, using DVORAK has nothing to do with speed, and everything to do with comfort. It's simply easier to use and results in less hand and wrist strain.
Could one reason that Dvorak didn't catch on is that its established rival, QWERTY, was not randomly designed?
QWERTY supposedly helps to reduce jams.
Dvorak was introduced at a time in which that was still a problem, before electric typewriters.
If Dvorak didn't actually produce its speed advantages on a classic, mechanical typewriter in which a semicircular gallery of arms concentrate their strikes on the same tiny location on the ink ribbon, typists trying Dvorak would have found that Dvorak's claims don't actually hold up.
I could never get past the idea of a key sending a different keystroke than the one printed on it.
Yes, I know you're not supposed to look at the keyboard as you type. And I don't. But I still don't like it. It sets off "this is dumb" alarm bells in my head.
And because it's impossible to replace every keyboard I own or use, or physically rearrange their keys from QWERTY to Dvorak/Colemak, i'm stuck with QWERTY.
While DVORAK may only be a 5% improvement over QWERTY, a steno keyboard is vastly superior in typing speed and ergonomics, as it's used by courtroom stenographers keeping up with recording speech. (And if you learn on a proper steno keyboard, your muscle memory won't get all confused because the keys are entirely different.)
Now I use a mix of Dvorak some of the time and QWERTY some of the time.
I have a Dvorak layout for the ErgoDox EZ Shine keyboard, link to repo below. There’s a PDF linked from the reademe in the repo showing what my Dvorak layout looks like.
I’ve tried Dvorak and Colemak but went back to QWERTY. Whole software world is developed with QWERTY in mind, and it was too much PITA.
Split keyboard (especially with ortholinear, column staggered layout) will give you much more benefit than any alternative layout - and will be much easier to switch too.
I wonder if a keyboard optimized for typists (typing in English with the most common word being ‘the’) is also optimal for programmers (writing code in say Python, with the most commonly used word likely being ‘def’ or ‘if’).
The statistics of the two corpora should be different.
I expect there'll be a difference in which layout is optimal when analysing an average python code base with names (variables, functions, etc.) in your language versus regular text in that language, but honestly this is not where typing holds me back. Very rarely do I max out on typing speed for just a few minutes when coding something greenfield. Even if we're talking comfort rather than speed, you'd probably get 99% of the way by laying out symbols differently and leaving the letters and digits untouched.
I am generally very efficiency-minded (I run a speed-reading startup!), but I have never even felt the urge to try an alternate layout. Has anyone else who initially resisted these given it a try, and how long did it take you to figure out if it was amazing, or meh?
I've never seen the point in DVORAK or other fancy layouts, until I read a post on Workman and Colemak and decided to give Colemak a try.
To this day, I think it's one of the best decisions I've ever made - it resulted in much more relaxed typing, and forever broke a bad habit of looking at keys while typing.
How long did it take to reach that conclusion? Probably about a month. After achieving decent speeds on Colemak, going back to Qwerty just felt painful - even when I was going faster, it felt so much more stressful.
Did you buy a new keyboard? I assume it's easy to set up on an iPhone? What about when you have to use a QWERTY keyboard, on someone else's computer or at a kiosk or something?
I'd also be curious to know if folks would recommend this for kids, especially those who have not yet mastered touch-typing on QWERTY.
No, i just printed out the new layout and stuck it near the monitor. Eventually I moved to blank keycaps.
> easy to set up on an iPhone?
Why would I care about that? Phones are for thumbs, and thumbs have their own muscle memory. Besides, the strength of layouts like Colemak is typically in leveraging the home-row, which is really not a thing on phones, so there is no point. It would make more sense to investigate those fancy swipey versions (or make new layouts that leverage "home columns"?).
> What about when you have to use a QWERTY keyboard
I just go a bit slower. Which is fine, considering it's such a rare experience...
Huh, so you use Colemak on computer and QWERTY on iPhone? I assumed I'd have to switch everything over in order to get much of a benefit. But if this is viable I might give it a try. I figured I'd have to switch everything over, which would make things difficult when my wife borrows my phone, for example.
Can I ask if you code much? Unlike most HNers, I don't, so I'm interested in its usefulness for writing emails and such, not the special chars used mostly for coding.
I'm not a programmer, but the advantages of Colemak are fundamentally related to writing English. Programming doesn't get any real boost, special characters are still an afterthought (pretty much all on right pinkie).
And yeah, i only use Colemak on laptops/desktops. I don't use external keyboards with phones and tablets, so it's all done with two thumbs, which have their own muscle memory.
IMO not worth it when switching between personal and shared computers, OS shortcuts like copy/paste, or when executing programs that code the raw key inputs vice characters, like games. Juice was not worth squeeze for me.
I had used a Dvorak layout for a few years and loved it. Ultimately, I switched back to Qwerty for a few fairly practical reasons:
1) Every video game I've ever played has had key bindings with Qwerty (or a controller) in mind. I would estimate that roughly 60%-ish of those games permit for some level of keyboard remapping. When remapping is possible, there will be bewildering exceptions for certain actions. When it's not possible, they are impossible to play.
Yes, I am aware you can switch between different layouts through the OS easily enough, but after I had gotten used to a letter being in a specific spot for Dvorak, and then being prompted to press it in a Qwerty layout, I found myself mis-typing extremely frequently for button prompts. It also became a chore to switch between them if I was in the middle of playing, then wanted type out a quick message in instant messenger.
2) Random bugs. I had noticed that for whatever reason, some programs just seemed to have some kind of issue with Dvorak layouts. I can't think of any specifics, it's been at least a decade since then, but it was something bizarre like: program recognizes that I was using a Dvorak layout except if I was using a keyboard shortcut.
3) It was weird that my cellphone was in a Qwerty layout but my computer wasn't. I seem to recall having a lot of issues trying to get Dvorak to work as the default layout.
4) I shared the computer with another family member. They complained that they had to learn the new layout. I convinced them it would improve their typing speed and they agreed. Eventually, they also started going to the library to do some research, which of course had a Qwerty layout. This caused an incredible amount of grief for them. Ultimately, this is the reason I switched back.
5) I seem to remember programming in general just being more uncomfortable in Dvorak. I think the punctuation I needed was in the upper left(?) which put a lot of extra strain on my left pinky.
I liked Dvorak quite a bit, but it just felt impractical. The world I live in just feels like it's setup for Qwerty, inefficient as that layout may be. I see it like if someone chose to become left-handed. You could do it, but if an much more popular method exists, and there is extra effort in going with the less popular one, for what amounts to the same outcome, why go through the struggle?
If things were to suddenly switch tomorrow, I'd gladly switch back, I just don't see much point in fighting for such a thing when we have a solution that is close enough.
I like this guys content generally, but it's worth noting in this instance he's unknowingly echo-ing free-market libertarian dogma.
> You might hear comments from time to time about studies showing Dvorak is "no better than QWERTY," or words to that effect. All such comments that I've heard seem to echo an article, "The Fable of the Keys," by S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, published in the Journal of Law & Economics, vol. XXXIII (April 1990).
> Note the word "economics." Liebowitz and Margolis are economists opposed to an "excessive inertia" theory, for which QWERTY is often cited as an example. Rather than try to prove their point with a generally valid argument, they simply attack Dvorak as a dubious replacement for QWERTY. As the article's last footnote explains, there are a number of other possible reasons for Dvorak's failure to replace QWERTY, besides a perceived lack of value. The article ignores those reasons, however, and perpetrates that false perception in a nicely self-fulfilling way.
I haven't looked in a few years, but "The Fable of the Keys" was not available on the web. I had to slip into CU's library to find it on microfiche. Unimpressive paper, no original research, just pot shots at old Navy and Dvorak experiments.
Path dependence is a kind of market failure. Libertarians like to pretend that market failure does not exist in free markets because market failure implies market intervention.
As a dvorak user, whatever increase in typing speed is mostly irrelevant, for most of us, our output isn't limited by how fast we can type, but how fast we can think. That being said, a long time ago I took an analysis of one of our code bases, mapped every character onto dvorak and qwerty keyboards to produce heatmaps, and it's startling how much less the fingers have to move on a dvorak keyboard. So if you're lazy, dvorak might be something to consider.
Overall, I've been using dvorak for >10 years and I like it. Going back to Qwerty is like going back to sleeping on a twin mattress. It gets the job done, but once you've become accustomed to sleeping on a queen, it's hard to justify going back to a twin.
Probably the best thing about Dvorak (and similar layouts) is that if you want to do proper touch typing, it is quite possibly easier to learn Dvorak than to learn how to touch type QWERTY.
Touch typing QWERTY is a constant uphill battle of using your willpower to force yourself to type correctly, despite the rest of your brain claiming it isn't the optimal way to type on that layout. I don't know that your brain is right, but I don't know that it is wrong either.
When you learn Dvorak or any other similar thing, you don't have to "learn" how to touch type. You just do it, because it's optimal already. You have to learn the layout, obviously, but once having done that you couldn't hardly fail to learn touch typing and "proper" typing technique if you tried. The same uphill gradient you're fighting when trying to learn "proper" typing technique with QWERTY is now a downhill gradient.
I'd actually recommend learning Dvorak over trying to force yourself to touch-type QWERTY properly. Of course, if you don't care about that, no big deal. I'm not sure how valuable that is as a goal on its own, and it's plainly obvious many people function as highly effective office workers of all sorts, programmers and otherwise, without learning to touch type.
> QWERTY users naturally wander around and have their hands leave the home row and I'm not entirely convinced it's actually wrong.
I think you are learning it wrong. It's not hard at all to learn QWERTY with the proper training technique.
I took touch typing in High School, back in the 1980's. Even back then I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work with computers so it made sense to take it. It turned out to be the most useful class I ever took in school by a wide margin since I've used that skill all day every day for 35 years.
It was a loooong time ago but I remember it started with lots of simple repetition. We were all using IBM selectrics and the instructor would call out "J-J-J Space, K-K-K Space, L-L-L space, sem sem sem space" etc. in a pattern around the keyboard while and we were told to avoid looking at the keyboard at all times. Eventually we would start copying simple and then longer, more complicated text, again without ever looking at the keyboard.
"I think you are learning it wrong."
Well, of course I did. I used a keyboard for many years before my formal middle school typing class and by then it was too late. My brain already knew better and typing exercises did no good because I already knew how to use the keyboard without looking.
I imagine this is the dominant case.
If you want to fix it, I recommend simply learning a sensible layout for touch typing.
You also would not have needed such a class if the keyboard was laid out in Dvorak for everybody. You wouldn't need formal training that largely only works if it is drilled into you before natural exposure to a keyboard, because your hands would just do the right thing automatically. The idea of needing a typing class would become entirely absurd; there would be no technique to teach anyone that they wouldn't simply pick up.
> You also would not have needed such a class if the keyboard was laid out in Dvorak for everybody
you seriously believe, without any doubt, that with a clearly labelled dvorak keyboard and no typing lessons you would not have learned to hunt-and-peck at increasingly higher speeds as you did with QWERTY, but instead put your fingers "on the home row" and used your pinkies? At a young age, we all learn the alphabet, and if the keyboard is not in alphabetic order, you are on a hunt for keys, and fingers in the home position will obscure too many key labels.
Sorry, but thinking about it for 30 seconds makes it hard for me to take your argument seriously.
(as a total off-topic aside, back when Cambodian politics and Prince Sihanouk were in the news a lot, I thought "must be hunt-and-peck in German" every time I heard "FUNCINPEC" on the radio)
Labelling the keys on the keys was the mistake. The labels should have been written on a cardboard yo put between your keyboard and your screen.
Not exactly beginner friendly though.
This thread is an amazing case study in the wide range of natural ability people have at using their hands.
I think I'd take an entire year to be able to use that!
Maybe going the opposite way would be more effective, a mirror in front of you so you can see the keys with your peripheral vision without moving your eyes.
Similar to how you can always see your fingers when typing on a phone. I can type without actively staring at the keyboard on my phone pretty well, although that may because thumbs only is just fewer points to process than ten fingers, for those of us who have trouble paying attention to multiple points at once.
"you seriously believe, without any doubt, that with a clearly labelled dvorak keyboard and no typing lessons you would not have learned to hunt-and-peck at increasingly higher speeds as you did with QWERTY, but instead put your fingers "on the home row" and used your pinkies?"
Yes.
Before I further argue with you, a simple question. I've learned Dvorak and been using it for years. Have you tried anything other than QWERTY for long enough to learn it? I am a hunt and peck QWERTY user and I touch type Dvorak. I've spent WAY more time formally trying to touch type QWERTY; I spent basically zero with Dvorak. (Obviously a lot of time to learn the layout. But I made zero extra effort to "touch type".)
What you believe to be a fundamental aspect of typing may be merely an accident of a keyboard layout that penalizes "proper" typing. To type "properly" with QWERTY takes work. To hunt and peck with Dvorak would take equal work, if not more. It is not natural with Dvorak. Why would your hands leave the home row? Only when the keys mean something other than letters entirely, like a WASD game.
I also took junior high typing in the 1980s, but we used manual typewriters. There were two IBM Selectrics in the back of the class that were used by lucky students for the day.
I type with only the three inner index fingers of each hand, because the keys on the manual typewriters were hard to press.
This limits my typing speed to 60wpm. If I used all four fingers, I could probably hit 90.
> I type with only the three inner index fingers of each hand
You have a lot of index fingers. Most people only have one per hand. ;)
I never learned to type formally and also use a limited amount of fingers. On my left hand I use my thumb+middle+index finger for everything except zaq and modifiers which I use my ring finger, and on my right hand I only use my middle and index finger for everything except for backspace/delete which I use my ring finger for. Still manage to hit 100WPM.
I was also stuck at like 50wpm and I knew it was because of using the wrong fingers for the wrong keys. Someone recommended typing.com's complete beginner lesson where they literally just walk you through which fingers to use with which keys and after completing that and 2 days of practise my speed jumped by 10wpm. Highly recommend.
I had a similar beginning but using all the fingers, so I have to ask: was there something wrong with those manual typewriters, or did you just find manual typewriter keys in general hard to press?
> the three inner index fingers of each hand
Found the AI
> Well, of course I did. I used a keyboard for many years before my formal middle school typing class and by then it was too late. My brain already knew better and typing exercises did no good because I already knew how to use the keyboard without looking.
It’s possible that a relatively arbitrary keyboard layout would have worked for you too simply by forcing you to relearn how to type, then.
There's no shortage of good typing-tutor software. I learned from such a program on a home computer in the early 80s, no class needed.
(I now use Dvorak. Little effect on speed, but I do feel comfier.)
why would you even need to "learn", it comes naturally?
the school I went to also tried to push some crappy "correct" way to type on everyone. The teacher was moderately embarrased when I was able to type significantly faster without looking at the keyboard, because apparantly typing fast is only possible if following some special method..
dvorak is probably better, I dont know, but I type fast enough on qwerty
> the instructor would call out "J-J-J Space, K-K-K Space, L-L-L space, sem sem sem space"
That nicely demonstrates the poor Qwerty layout. The very first keys you learn are among the least used, especially semicolon. Adding the left hand (ASDF), we can then type 44 words from /usr/share/dict/words, like "salad", "salsa", "flasks", "falls" and "alfalfa".
For Dvorak, the instructor would be calling out "H-H-H Space, T-T-T Space, N-N-N Space, S-S-S space" — and then U-E-O-A on the left hand. We can already type 467 words! So the instructor would soon be calling out "Season, Tenant, Hushes, Taunts, Outset, Sunset, Assent".
This is a good point, but what you're actually doing with exercises like this is training muscle memory. It doesn't matter if you're learning Dvorak, QWERTY or how to chisel letters into a block of marble.
The advent of computers also killed one of Dvorak's selling points, which was a lower error rate at speed. Errors on a typewriter were painful to correct and took up a lot of time, but by the 70s and 80s, even typewriters were capable of reasonably easy correction. By the time word processors kicked in, mistakes were nothing to deal with.
> That nicely demonstrates the poor Qwerty layout. The very first keys you learn are among the least used, especially semicolon
OMG no it does not, your argument is ridiculous. You have to learn all the fingers and then all the keys before you can touchtype, no matter what layout you are learning. You can't efficiently touchtype 20 letters of the alphabet then take your hands off to hunt and peck the rest on a dvorak or a qwerty.
What letter you are instructed to learn first is immaterial. (and in GP's example, since I was taught by the same system, you don't learn semicolon as your 3rd letter, he just threw that in; you learn to rhythmically intersperse pointers (index fingers) and thumbkins/space first, then you add in tall-men, interspersed, etc. then moving between rows.)
what you are trying to connect your argument to, unsucessfully, is the idea that index fingers are naturally the best typists (coordination, musculature), so "let's give them the most common letters to type", which dvorak does. But this also implies, btw, that your worst finger, pinky, will over time also get the least exercise, so the gulf between its skill and pointer's skill will grow, not shrink. (I'm not saying that's more than a 2nd order effect, just sayin, muscle memory, 10,000 hours...)
Dvorak minimises finger movement, also described elsewhere in this discussion as being comfortable and so on.
Being able to type many words from the "home" keys (AOEU HTNS) neatly demonstrates this.
While what you're saying is true, you can only type around 800 English words on the home row using QWERTY. You can type thousands using Dvorak, so mastering the Dvorak home row would gain you more than mastering the QWERTY home row. Dvorak is simply a better-thought-out layout.
He is talking about the fact that you can type so many words without even moving your hands. Dvorjak reduced the amount you move your hands and fingers to type. That reduces strain. That is the benefit of Dvorjak.
None hunt out the one ton nun.
It's a silly sentence, but that's what makes learning Dvorak so fun.
> I think you are learning it wrong. It's not hard at all to learn QWERTY with the proper training technique.
Eh, that's always easy to say, but I suspect it is not true.
I myself have tried several times, using several typing tutors, and I just couldn't do it. I can type without looking at the keyboard out of sheer habit, but the whole "put fingers on the home row" never clicked for me. It also, IMO, is very prone to RSI issues.
> I took touch typing in High School, back in the 1980's. Even back then I knew I was going to be doing a lot of work with computers so it made sense to take it. It turned out to be the most useful class I ever took in school by a wide margin since I've used that skill all day every day for 35 years.
Same. It's like the one high school class I use every single day. Do they even offer typing in high school anymore?
I graduated in 1999 and had to take two typing classes, one in 7th grade and one in 11th grade. Both were mostly wastes of time because I had already learned how to type.
I could type about 120-130 WPM back then and somehow, I was still required to take BOTH classes. I typically finished the work in the first ten minutes of class then studied or drew.
My family got a computer when I was about 5 and one of the first things I learned how to do was type. Having a personal computer in the late 80's still was pretty unusual. Ten years later, everyone had access to one either at home or in the school computer lab.
Probably goes under the name of "computer applications", but I sure hope so. I'm not a great typist by any means, but I did manage to get out of typing class by taking a little-advertised test. If you could manage 35 WPM, you didn't have to take it.
Alas, I learned to type as a kid in the 60's
I still avoid looking at the keyboard because in my head i can't find the keys, but my fingers know where to go. :)
I'm not 100% sure you're right, but I'm one who did not touch type QWERTY properly. It could be because of the reasons you stated, or because I learned to type on a keyboard myself, not even knowing I should be using touch type. And I found that learning touch typing together with Dvora was great, like you say. It felt very natural with Dvorak, but I don't think the touch typing I learned made me touch type Qwerty properly.
I think there's something to be said about starting with a clean slate on the keyboard layout so you don't have to unlearn old bad habits in the process. For me learning Dvorak had the double benefit of making me type 100% correctly with the new layout. I'm really not sure I would have been motivated to do that if I decided to stick with Qwerty. Getting two comfort improvements with one training period makes it more worthwhile
This sounds very alluring but having to deal with setting up VIM in every environment or going to a new environment with VIM not set up sounds so painful.
I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK
Interestingly enough, the two vim bindings you probably use most, up/down (j/k) are actually positioned right next to each other on a dvorak keyboard. The rest take a bit of getting used to. You'd be surprised how natural vim feels on a dvorak keyboard.
> I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK
Not really. Most vim keybindings follow mnemonics (like `di"`). Dvorak still has 'jk' adjacent to each other; and `h` to the left of `l`.
There are several keyboard shortcuts which are nicer with QWERTY left-hand only: (Ctrl Z, X, C, V, S, F, W, ... T?, A).
For two-hands-on-keyboard, these are less of an issue than for keyboard+mouse workflows.
I use VIM on Dvorak, having [shift], [:;], [q] next to each other is awesome.
Having [a], [i], [y], [p], [x] all on the left hand is also awesome. It's a bummer that [d] is on the other hand, though I could reach it in a pinch with my left hand if I need to.
I don't need the fake QWERTY arrow keys, the real arrow keys work.
The "fake" arrow keys are nice so you don't have to move your hands. They are pretty decently placed in dvorak though, so it's no issue.
Both vi-style and emacs-style key bindings work well under Dvorak without alteration. (Why are people capitalizing it? It's not an acronym, it's a name.)
I use Vim and Dvorak. It only took a couple of weeks to get used to. Never felt a need to customise Vim to change any keybindings strong enough to do so. And am happy I didn’t. For all these years I’ve been using them both together with just the default key bindings.
My vimrc has a specific section just for handling this:
That's all I use for handling dvorak. This has been in my config since I switched to git from hg in 2007, dunno how long before that.> I imagine the native VIM bindings would be atrociously positioned in DVORAK
This is why I don't use vim; I had been touch-typing in Dvorak for years by the time I encountered it, and vim's layout felt like it would require a painful degree of brute memorization.
I know maybe 0.5 percent of what vim (neovim these days) can do and between that and a sane config my text editing skills have gotten at least 4 times better compared to a regular text editor. You can just learn the things that matter to you plus how to save and exit.
It's been years since I last used Vim (happy Emacs user now), but I don't see much of an issue, j and k are still next to each other and for moving in a line f, F, t, and T are nicer. Also solidus, of course.
Same experience for me with Colemak. My wife at one point got curious enough to try typing a few sentences on my machine (with me reading out which finger to move how to get the right letters) and even she had to admit it felt very relaxing compared to what she's used to. (But not enough that she's willing to relearn...)
Are you able to have all your normal keyboards as dvorak? I have thought about trying to switch. But I use a few different keyboards in my day and it would be a real problem for other people if the keycaps didn't match what was on the keyboard. I also think my fingers would get confused about what letter is where when switching.
I've been typing Dvorak for nearly twenty years now. I decided to learn when my programming job turned into an offshore team management job, so wanted to make it more interesting.
Initially looking down at the Qwerty labelled keyboard would totally mess me up, so I had try really hard not to look down
After about a month I could look down on occasion, realise the caps were no help and then continue on
Because I would switch back to Qwerty whenever anyone would come over to my PC, my brain then decided the presence of a person was a key to flip to Qwerty, which was annoying for a while, as whenever anyone would come near I'd lose the ability to type properly.
After the second month I would look down and I was sort of 'see' both characters at the same time: the actual keycap with my eyes and the Dvorak keys with my mind. Was very trippy and a bit difficult to properly explain.
After another month or so, that went away and then I can look at the Qwerty keys and I just sorta ignore them unless I made an effort to read them. My brain has learnt to not read them, if that makes sense. That's still the state now, many years later.
I can still type reasonably fast on Qwerty too if I need to, but it takes me a minute to adjust.
At home I have some blank keyboards I bought, partly to reduce confusion and partly because I think they look cool, but I really couldn't care less any more what the keyboards are labelled with as I rarely look at them.
I use Vim using the original bindings, hjkl are not so badly placed: h and l are still left and right of each other.
I'm actually now debating setting up a stegography keyboard, partly for another amusing brain rewiring exercise, and just because I like geeky things.
This self analysis is - assuming it's all correct - a very interesting capability that you have.
Dvorak user for 6+ years. Whereas I was very proficient touch-typing qwerty, that ability was lost when I learned Dvorak. It was too difficult, with too little benefit, to train myself to touch type in both formats. I ended up going all-in on Dvorak.
My keyboard [0] has software that translates from Dvorak to qwerty. So plugging the keyboard into different machines means no change for me, since most do qwerty by default.
When I use laptop keyboard, I do switch to dvorak layout.
Also, I'll mention the most interesting bit for me personally with changing has been in-person software interviews. The interviewer (future boss) gave me quite a look when he saw me start hunt-and-pecking! I should have given him some warning but wasn't thinking about it until I sat down at the keyboard. Fortunately it led to a good conversation, and after taking the few seconds to switch keyboard formats on the test machine I was back to full speed (unnecessarily extra full speed to impress).
> it would be a real problem for other people if the keycaps didn't match...
If you're concerned about other people, use qwerty keycaps and just ignore for yourself. It's also possible to have blank keycaps. I have blanks because they were the only sculpted option at the time for the keyboard I wanted. Along with the ortholinear layout I get some weird looks sometimes, the keyboard is just a blank regular grid of buttons, doesn't really look quite normal.
[0] Ergodox-EZ (old style, not sold anymore) https://ergodox-ez.com/
The best touch typing doesn't look at the keyboard at all, so it has more often felt like a benefit that the keys don't match what I type. (I sometimes feel like I should apologize to grade school teachers that tried to impart that lesson at too young an age to me when teaching QWERTY typing and I'd complain when they tried to block the keyboard from view.)
Having QWERTY key caps is even sometimes still useful for hunt and peck when an app (often a game) uses the wrong system library for keyboard input and is accidentally hard-coded to QWERTY input.
If other people need to use my computer it is very easy to set up profiles that default still to QWERTY or to temporarily shift to QWERTY for their interaction. (The default Windows shortcut key to switch between installed layouts is Left CTRL+SHIFT. It's very easy to switch to/from QWERTY with that quick shortcut.)
I've also used for dvorak for a long time...over 15 years. I've never changed keycaps. If you're looking at your fingers while typing qwerty, learning to type dvorak on a qwerty keyboard might just be useful in that it will force you to stop looking at your keyboard and you'll find a speed up in typing just from that!
For me the learning process was very similar to learning a foreign language. At first it was hard, but once I started to get fluency in dvorak, typing in qwerty was hard for a while...but then at some point my qwerty typing ability came back and switching between the two layouts is as easy as switching computer or human languages. (when you know them fluently).
To address your fear, yes, there will a period in the learning process where your fingers get confused switching back and forth but once you get past that it goes away and switching becomes second nature.
Get good enough touch typing dvorak you don't need to seethe keys so typing on a qwerty keyboard isn't an issue. These days it's not the letters I ever have to personally look at the keys for but the random symbols I don't use often enough to have memorized. Sadly some of those move around too.
As a colemak user, I have the same flow. I used to have a keyboard that had blank keycaps, but that isn't kind to the rest of the family that uses the computer. :D
Numbers, amusingly, can mess me up.
I have literally just learnt about colemak from these comments. I suffer from RSI and have tried Dvorak in the past, but as a qwerty touch typist found it too different.
How long did it take you to learn colemak? I guess if you still use it you find it better than qwerty?
Not OP but: I’ve been using Colemak for 10+ years at this point.. I switched in the middle of a semester while getting my CS degree to A) learn to actually touch type and B) maybe help prevent RSI issues cause I knew I was gonna be programming for a while (and I have trash typing posture).
It’s a struggle for maybe a month or two completely upending your muscle memory.. but retaining the locations of AZXCV from QWERTY did help a lot with transitioning. The hardest part for me was how S is moved one character over to where D is (took a while before I stopped making S related mistake..).
I think I practiced typing every day deliberately for a few months until I didn’t feel like I had to consciously think about it anymore and was up to ~80WPM again. No regrets here.. and it’s always amusing watch people use my computer at first
I learned Colemak in a long weekend "cold turkey". I wasn't quite as fast after that weekend, but I felt so much better and more comfortable after just the weekend. (I was in grad school and in pain and knew I was probably weeks or months from an RSI surgery if I didn't change something.)
The lesson plan I was using followed home row order and I knew I was "home" in Colemak in the first lessons because even in the first four "main finger" home row keys you start by typing entire, real English words, some of which can be quite long such as Tennessee. (That was always a problem for me in grade school QWERTY lessons was how much home row exercises were garbage and nonsense words.) I feel like that also added to the feeling that learning Colemak was fast and just took then one dedicated long weekend.
It took me 4 weeks to get back to 50% speed. 4 months to get back to 75% speed. 4 years to type faster than Qwerty.
I'm incredibly happy with my switch. I was getting RSI pain from awkward top-to-bottom row maneuvers with Qwerty. I still have some pain, but that's mostly from using the computer far too much.
Most of the challenge is not about learning the new layout, but getting your muscle memory to forget about the old way of doing things. If I were to do it again, I'd recommend a progressive layout change; switching a single set of keys at a time. It takes longer to switch, but reduces the upfront mental load.
Thanks, that's encouraging. It's worth a go I guess. I'll probably spend 10-20 minutes per day using this [1] to progressively learn colemak-dh
[1] https://www.colemak.academy/
I found it to be more comfortable, so I stuck with it. If I could do it again though, I’d swap between the two as I learned as I’m now rather slow with qwerty.
I know what you mean, though I question how such a transition would pan out.
Any ideas of how well this tends to work as a learning strategy?
I have a friend who did it that way, but I’ve never done it myself.
Does your friend have 4 hands? If so, I would love to see 2 hands do QWERTY and 2 Colemak.
And then swap hands.
Then keyboards behind the back.
Have I taken this joke too far? Or not far enough?
I made the switch from Qwerty to Colemak over ten years ago.
How long for me to transition from being quite fast at Qwerty to being happy enough with my Colemak speed? I'd guess roughly 2 to 4 weeks. As an independent software developer and entrepreneur at the time, it worked. I was mostly writing code, not having to write some heroic quantity of emails as a manager.
In addition to the "typing feels better" benefit, I found the very process of changing to be quite beneficial in two ways:
(1) I did more thinking in advance and more planning and therefore less unnecessary typing. This was very niiice. Please imagine Borat saying it for full effect.
(2) The cognitive challenge of switching my primary mode of interaction with computers had a much broader effect on how I appreciated learning and habits in general.
Conclusion: you have should switched yesterday from Qwerty to an APL keyboard. /s
I use Colemak-DH and learned it through the Tarmak progression. RSI is probably the wrong reason to learn Colemak. It made little difference for me and as far as I know there is no scientific evidence that it helps.
Better: get an adjustable table and chair and ensure that they are correctly configured. Take regular breaks and do exercises. Get a keyboard that is split (to ensure that your wrists are not bent) and tented (to put our wrists at a more comfortable angle). Bonus points for column stagger. For me, switching to a Kinesis Advantage improved a lot to the point where I pretty much pain free.
(IANAD, but personal experience.)
My MS ergonomic keyboard and vertical mouse definitely help. Never tried a Kinesis advantage though. I'll try it and see how I get on.
I learned colemak for the same reason (RSI) but it didn’t help much, it was especially hard because I use multiple computers, RDP and other remote management systems and sometimes other peoples computers.
I don’t know what the status is now, if all the OS have built in Colemak layouts but I don’t think they did at the time.
I got rid of RSI by using a Kinesis advantage keyboard for a year (with qwerty layout). This must have gotten rid of any bad habits I had, I focused hard on not bottoming out hard on the keys too.
After a year I switched to a topre keyboard and it hasn’t come back, it’s been over 10yrs.
I honestly don't remember how long it took. I know it took a couple of tries, but when I went "all in" it didn't take long. My speed is still not fully up to where I was, but I haven't been trying to improve. Specifically, I got up to 70ish and then just stopped caring.
I'd hesitate to say I notice much of any difference. It makes me a little happy to have made the change. But, in the same way that moving a mouse to my off hand makes me happy. And is something I do every so often.
I'm in a funny situation that at my desktop I've been using a Kinesis dvorak keyboard for over 20 years, but on laptops or other random computers I use qwerty. My brain is totally bought in on the different layouts, I don't even have to think about it. It's too much of a hassle to manage to reconfigure all of them to dvorak, and then no one else in the family would be able to use them either. An extra complication is that I also sometimes use a Swedish keyboard to type åäö and on a dvorak I have no idea where they would end up.
Perhaps it would pay off to standardize... But like someone else said, the letters aren't the problem, it's all the symbols that you almost never use that become impossible if they aren't labeled.
Not a Dvorak user, but I type on different language keypads a lot, both physically and on software keyboards. Your fingers get used to it within a few weeks and after a few years your brain doesn't even register the difference.
> ...different language keypads...
I found out while travelling, around 20 years ago, my (then current) SO would get frustrated with the keyboards in different languages (all over the EU). She gave up even trying to use a different keyboard and started asking me to type for her (it sucks, her being restrained like that).
I also found out that it takes me <60s to pick up the new layouts on those physical keyboards (again, European variants)
Regardless of the layout, she is always faster than me on virtual keyboards.
When I was learning dvorak (more than a decade ago) I bought a cheap keyboard at a garage sale and rearranged the keys. An easier approach is just to get stickers.
I used that trainer keyboard for a summer, until my typing muscle memory was updated to dvorak.
Since then, I don't look at my keyboards while typing, so the fact that the keys are labeled for qwerty doesn't really matter.
I came to say this. It's not speed, it's comfort. I've been using Dvorak on my Kinesis Advantage since mid 90'es [1]. I don't actually think Dvorak is the best possible layout, but as the video points out, we are already in the realm of diminishing returns.
[1] I still use Qwerty on non-Kinesis keyboards and this fact is enough for my muscle memory to eliminate any mental overhead of switching.
Long-time Dvorak user, and I 100% agree with this. Dvorak is much less taxing on your body.
> how fast we can think [...] an analysis of one of our code bases
Well, with coding that's certainly true. I can spend all day trying to come up with a dozen lines of code. Input speed is not the barrier there. But for writing English prose, at around 90 wpm, my fingers are often lagging behind what I want to say. People can reach short bursts when speaking as fast as 300 wpm. When I get such bursts of thought, it can be hard to hold on to the end of it while I'm still typing the beginning.
You want to be able to follow speaking pace? Learn steno, it is made for that. https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/
> output isn't limited by how fast we can type, but how fast we can think
It's hard to think while typing so the less time I spend typing the more time I have for thinking. Having said that I'm a qwerty user - it took me a lot of time (may be 100 hours) to learn touch typing and I don't have time to repeat the same with dvorak.
Hmm I never consciously learned to touch type, just got into it in time. Not being an actual practiced touch typist, I use like 3 fingers on each hand on average. Last time I took a speed test i could do like 50-60 wpm.
Thing is, this speed is more than enough for a developer. What do you write? Code and some communication with your co workers. In both cases you need to think about it, except the rare cases where you churn out yet another for loop.
I dont touch type in a proper way most of the time I'm typing with little more than three fingers plus a thumb (two fingers plus a thumb on my dominant hand, and one finger on my non-dominant), but I still manage about 80 WPM on a QWERTY keyboard without looking at the keyboard. When I switch to a full size Model M type, I do use more digits, but not alot more.
Same here, I learned how to touch type years before I heard about Dvorak and found it very difficult to switch so I'm still using qwerty.
I type between 80-120 wpm with reasonable accuracy on qwerty and I feel super slow compared to the pace of thinking.
It's a constant source of stress. I'm only ever comfortable if I force myself to think slower.
> It's a constant source of stress. I'm only ever comfortable if I force myself to think slower.
I have some questions:
1. From a psychological point of view, have you explored ways of coping with this stress? What are your expectations? Do you know why you have the stress? Is about results? Is it about fluidity / flow / fluency? Something else?
2. This may be obvious, but I want to make sure I ask the question to make it really concrete: is one of your goals to transfer your thinking directly to the computer as quickly as possible?
3. Would you be willing to reframe your goal? Perhaps frame your goals as: "Accomplish my goals efficiently with a sense of flow, without rushing down a suboptimal path." You know some of these proverbs:
* "Running faster in the wrong direction won't get you anywhere."
* "Better to walk in the right direction than run in the wrong one."
* "Haste makes waste."
* "A fool at high speed is still a fool."
* "Don't mistake activity for achievement."
* "When you're headed in the wrong direction, progress means turning around."
4. It may be useful to think slower! This might help you let go of framing it as "forcing myself to think slower".
A. Maybe you would feel better if you could reframe this process as not simply thinking slower but also allocating some of your mental processing to summarization and translation and other valuable processing?
B. No knock against your brain, but how do you actually measure your thinking speed and error rate?
C. There are a lot of counterintuitive things happening in the brain when you dig into the neuroscience. Many experiments show that our conscious awareness lags our actual decision-making. Perhaps this can "problematize" your situation and make it interesting, rather than purely stressful. Thinking and typing may not be happening the way you think they are
D. I'd expect for you, a good typist, your brain fires motor control circuits to cause your fingers to type before you are consciously aware of it, if you are aware at all. Ever notice how switching keyboards increases your awareness? This seems to suggest that one's low-level typing awareness (i.e. how keys feel) dulls over time when using one particular keyboard.
E. I have not read this yet, but it seems relevant: "Hierarchical control of cognitive processes: The case for skilled typewriting." by Logan and Crump, 2011. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-04906-001
5. What technologies and/or methods have you considered?
6. Are you familiar with a steno machine (aka stenotype machine / shorthand machine / stenograph)? Might it work for you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
7. Have you discussed this with others with similar goals? Have you read "Quest for a fully deterministic keyboard shorthand system" https://www.reddit.com/r/shorthand/comments/3ul9y3
I switched to Colemak a long time ago (from qwerty) and it helped with the RSI issues I was having. Definitely more ergonomic.
What about Colemak?
Also, as a gamer, I'm concerned about keyboard mappings in games if I switch from Qwerty- I heard bad things, although games really should have switched from a key encoding mapping to a key location mapping a long time ago.
Some games do use key location. Factorio, for example, uses key location. It's really hit or miss. I am not sure what determines whether they use key location or not.
Edit: Basically, the key mappings would automatically change WASD to WARS for Colemak.
Using QUERTY after colemak is like being retarded, so after trying alternate keyboard layouts for a while, I'm just doing a hardpass on anything not QUERTY until we get rid of keyboards entirely.
I moved to dvorak to help with my RSI. I don't know if it actually helped (it's been decades since I used QWERTY on a keyboard for more than a minute), but typing speed was irrelevant to me.
I just don’t understand that metric or why Dvorak people keep using it. Yes my fingers might travel less, but do we know that moving your hands less leads to a reduction in pain and injury? I’d argue having them constantly in the same position might also do that.
And what about comfort? My index finger is stronger than my pinky; id much rather move further with my index finger than my pinky..
When I started using Dvorak, it was because I found that I could make my typing significantly quieter with Dvorak than with QWERTY, likely because of the reduced movement. As an undergraduate at a time when almost no one else had started typing notes in class, I found that there was a substantial reduction in how noticeable my typing was to others when I switched to Dvorak.
Another angle is comfort and ergonomics. Less stress and strain on the wrists and fingers using less contortions to get where you need to go.
I did the same kind of code heatmap (only for querty) but never made a good implementation that accounts for autocomplete. The symbol characters are already much more heavily used than the abc but the real numbers are probably much worse.
> analysis of one of our code bases, mapped every character
if your code base is C, is dvorak going to help with all the [^A-Za-z]* punctuation characters? That's what slows me down.
These characters/keys are in better positions on Dvorak: '" ,< .> -_ +=
These are in worse positions: [{ ]} ;: /?
And this doesn't move: \| `~ and the punctuation over the numbers.
[]{} is significantly worse, equally -_=+ is significantly better, as these keys are swapped. Making an effort to learn and touch-type these keys is pretty similar on either layout.
It's just a matter of learning it. If you really want to, you can customize a keyboard layout on any OS and arrange these keys how you see fit, but then you lose any compatibility advantage of sticking with plain Dvorak.
I use the programmer variant of dvorak. The number keys are 'swapped' with symbols, so you press shift to access numbers. Given that most programmers (should) use symbols more often than numbers, this is highly convenient. Strongly recommend checking it out.
For the record, I mostly use python nowadays but it's still a big improvement over mashing shift all day.
The issue I have with Dvorak is that it pushes many common programmer keys, like [], <>, and ; waaaay out to very unergonomic locations.
,.<> are slightly more convenient than on Qwerty, ;: is obviously worse but hardly "way out" (it's where Z is on Qwerty).
[]{} are indeed further out, but instead we have -_=+ closer. Once we add in all the English I type, file-names, U_R_L?s, --command --flags, /directories/, I think, if anything, the rearrangement is an advantage.
How did you solve the Shortcuts problem? I really gave Dvorak a good shot, but it completely failed when I was using auto cad CAD.
I use a gaming mouse and assign common shortcuts to the extra buttons.
One nice advantage of mac os is the built-in Dvorak-Qwerty layout which retains Qwerty shortcuts. You need an AHK script to achieve the same result on Windows.
I've long fantasized about switching to Dvorak just to confuse people who want to use my computer.
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Anecdotally, I gave Dvorak a try and became somewhat proficient, but ultimately reverted back to QWERTY for one reason: keyboard shortcuts! Control-C|V|Z are all transformed into either two-handed shortcuts or right-handed shortcuts. In either case, I can't copy/paste while selecting text with the mouse (since I'm right-handed).
I now use Colemak (https://colemak.com/) which doesn't have this issue and I'm quite happy with!
Good point, but IMO mechanical programmable keyboard with hardware shortcuts are the way to go. That way you can remap to one-handed, or even one button, or whatever you like. You can even take it with you between machines. It's like a portable "human interface" that stays with you.
On Mac, you have the "Dvorak - QWERTY ⌘" layout which retains QWERTY shortcuts.
I used to love this, eventually just took the plunge and learnt the shortcuts though and I'm more productive because I can use non-Mac Dvorak layouts.
I'm a dvorak user and never really found a way around the shortcut issue. Mac has a native option to use Dvorak with QWERTY shortcuts which is what I prefer, but on windows you have to use buggy programs to map the shortcuts over. Never found anything that worked great. Linux is even worse since you have to mess around with the OS to get it to work, and is a bit different between distros / flavors.
In the end I use a Ergodox keyboard that switches the layout to QWERTY if you hold down the control key, works flawlessly and haven't had to deal with it since.
15 years on dvorak and shortcuts are the primary impediment. The mac tweaked shortcuts work nicely, but they're not consistent. Swing based UI ignores them. It's also still a bit confusing dealing with ctrl-* vs anything that has a cmd, including cmd-opt-shift-* etc. Seems like re-implementing the mac tweak but in a more complete way manually in qmk would be the ultimate cross-platform solution.
For me it was the burden of typing 'ls'. I'm in the shell a lot, and the dvorak layout is very much _not_ shell friendly.
This depends on taste. I find it very easy to type "ls" on Dvorak, where it is typed with the same finger on adjacent keys.
Moreover, the variant of Dvorak that I use is much more shell-friendly than any QWERTY layout.
While for the alphabet and for the punctuation signs that are used in natural languages I use a layout closer to the initial Dvorak layout from 1932 than to the modern Dvorak layout, for the other non-alphanumeric symbols I have made a few changes that I consider best for typing shell commands or other kinds of programs.
The pre-WWII Dvorak layout does not say anything about most non-alphanumeric symbols and there are no suitable standards for them (i.e. any standards than are based on rational criteria, not on preserving a random historical layout), so anyone who wants an optimal keyboard for programming or work with a command-line interface should design a custom layout for the non-alphanumeric symbols, according to taste and experience.
Sorry, I don't follow: `ls` is dragging your right pinky downward. How is that not shell friendly?
(I mean, to each their own, I use dvorak because other layouts hurt my hands, but I would presume there are better non-shell-friendly examples -- but interestingly, I couldn't readily find them since `mv` is also just the right hand, unlike its qwerty friend)
"ls -l" is a bit awful as it's all with the right pinky finger. Compared to pretty much everything else I type on Dvorak, it's terrible.
I have "alias hh='ls -l'" in my .zshrc.
I've been using dvorak exclusively for over 20 years. Best investment of my career. I don't bother remapping keys and just learn them however they land on the layout.
For Emacs controls, I found that Dvorak is not much of a problem after remapping it a tiny bit:
I ended up with the following[0]
Along with a quick function to make sure I don't forget :) [0]: https://github.com/codemac/config/blob/master/emacs.d/boot.o...I use a TypeMatrix keyboard to get around the moved keyboard shortcut keys for copy paste.
Ironically Qwerty is extremely well-designed for typing on a touchscreen phone.
Dvorak was designed to have common characters on home keys and common character sequences alternate between each hand.
That's great on a keyboard with 4 fingers on each hand. On a touch screen, that's really bad! Characters close together complicate touchscreen recognition - is it "poet", "peet", or "pout"? And consecutive characters on opposite sides of the keyboard creates lots of movement for a single thumb.
Instead, Qwerty has common characters spread out across the keyboard, and many common character sequences close together (e.g. "-ed", "tion"). Which is exactly the pattern that is fast & accurate on a touchscreen.
I've had the on-screen keyboard on my phone set to Dvorak for > 5 years, and I just can't switch back to Qwerty. I think it's quite good for the phone.
One YouTube comment echoed my experience with Dvorak:
> Often overlooked is that the main reason for switching to dvorak isn't speed for most users. The dvorak layout is layed out for minimal movement while maintaining a roughly even split between hands. This reduces strain on a typists hands and helps a great deal with comfort when typing for longer periods of time.
I may not type faster than if I had stuck with qwerty, but I definitely don't have the wrist problems I keep hearing coworkers complain about.
This was my driving factor for switching to Colemak (I considered Dvorak, but felt Colemak was easier for _me_ to learn).
I'm starting to get some finger pain again, but that's almost entirely from overuse. QWERTY was crushing my hands. Far too many, weird twisting moves to hit consecutive keys between top and bottom rows.
Split keyboards is my recommendation
Split keyboards can help with wrist positioning but not finger travel, both of which can contribute to wrist problems.
That's why you should also choose a small keyboard, like one with 34 keys or similar.
For typing alphabetical characters, I'd expect a more significant impact from "adopt Dvorak instead of QWERTY" over "adopt a smaller keyboard".
For reducing strain to access keys like shift/backspace/escape/tab, I think that's where "use keyboard with multiple thumbkeys" would have a benefit, yeah.
What type of layout do you use for 34 keys?
I've got a 42 key split board so I'm not a total noob to minimalist keyboard but struggle to see how 34 keys can be used effectively.
This is my layout: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2022/09/06/the_current_t-34...
In reality it would be easy to go down to a single thumb key, making it 32 keys.
In short I have layers for numbers and symbols, I make heavy use of combos (pressing multiple keys at once) where I have modifiers, big keys like escape and enter and also the numbers and symbols (for typing singletons). I also have different functions for long press and I use capsword and numword (caps lock / layer that turns off intelligently).
I spend the majority of my time in the shell (usually bash) or emacs. Learning the key-maps, especially for zsh and bash, was one of the best things I ever did. Wow, that cut my keypresses down immensely. So did remapping lynx(1) keybindings.
My experience is that Dvorak solved my RSI problems, and split keyboards do not. The amount of time it takes to retrain into Dvorak is irrelevant to me, because the alternative is something more extreme, like quitting my job, using speech-to-text, or living in pain.
Split keyboards solved my hand problems 6years ago. I started learning Dvorak this week to reduce my left index finger strain.
Yeah, I think this sums up every Dvorak debunking story that pops up on HN twice a year. You can type 100 WPM with two fingers as seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqyiyh_hrUs so layout does not matter too much for speed. You can see his physical movement does not appear superhuman, and this is well above average typing speed of 40 WPM.
Debunkers: It's not any faster!
Dvorak users: We know, and we don't care.
As another anecdote this was my driver switching off of QWERTY as well, with no regrets.
Dvorak is also based on English spelling, and thus its benefits vanish almost everywhere in the world. There are other alternative layouts, having the same kind of marginal gain over the standard, but then it's not available everywhere, and if you're a developer, you may also want an easier access to braces and stuff, and from here your keyboard will basically work nowhere unless you buy some kind of custom hardware to do the translation.
And it also has the same problem to me as QWERTY, it makes numbers accessible while I don't care since most keyboards have a numpad (and to enter a number holding shift isn't hard) while for example it adds a significant amount of keystrokes to open and close a brace.
The benefits don't vanish completely, since vowels are still the most common letters in most Latin-alphabet based languages.
> vowels are still the most common letters in most Latin-alphabet based languages.
Also "s" "t" and "n" are fairly-to-very common in damn near every language (Latin-alphabet or otherwise) due to how phonetics works. (They're the default-voiced-ness for each manner of articulation at the most-default-ish - alveolar - place of articulation for consonant phonemes.) The other two - "h" and "d" - are less universal, but still better than "j" and "g".
Regardless whether one uses Dvorak or QWERTY, it is good to revert the effect of the shift key on the 10 numeric keys of the upper row.
Thus the non-alphanumeric symbols, which are more frequent in programming languages, are available directly, while keeping shift pressed for the entire duration of a number is easy, so it is a minor disadvantage.
I also find useful to map the 3 pairs of ASCII brackets on 3 keys, so that the opening brackets are available directly and the closing brackets with shift. I need very seldom to type the closing brackets, as they are normally inserted automatically by most editors.
I use Dvorak. When typing on QWERTY, I feel like I'm playing a secretary in a 1950s movie trying to ham up the notion that I'm really typing something here, because it feels my fingers have to fly around everywhere in an exaggerated and ostentatious manner.
If you have typing speed less than 50 WPM, you'll probably type faster by switching to Dvorak. If you type faster than that before switching, your typing speed will go down and not fully recover automatically unless you train it back up. I lost some speed that I never recovered. It wasn't worth the effort because I can still type fast enough.
A lot of people get hung up on the keybindings thing. zxcv for CUA cut-copy-paste make a nice little row on QWERTY, and hjkl for vi type movements, but as it turns out, it really doesn't matter. Those help you learn when muscle memory doesn't translate into intention without thinking. Once you learn them by muscle memory, it doesn't matter where the keys are. I just use programs with QWERTY shortcuts and press the key on Dvorak wherever it happens to land on the layout, and it works perfectly fine.
I can still touch type QWERTY, but quite a bit slower than Dvorak.
> ...vi type movements...
Can attest vi movements can be learned on Dvorak. But have to admit it is not quite as nice, those movements were designed for qwerty.
Of course "j" and "k" are next to each other on Dvorak. "h" and "l" are also positioned at first and fourth fingers like qwerty... but on different rows and on different hand than "j/k". Which means Dvorak requires two-handed vi movements.
Maybe not a big deal, vi shortcuts mean moving all over the keyboard anyway. Just not quite as nice.
With the rise of (split) mechanical keyboards as a hobby in its own right (with open source keyboard firmware like QMK and ZMK) it is much easier to make small tweaks to your layout as you find things which annoy you, so there seems to be a lot of experimentation going on right now with alternative layouts.
I feel like I'm one of the last generation of Dvorak typers, anyone who cares about typing ergonomics learning about alternate layouts is probably both better off and more likely to try e.g. colemak, or something newer or maybe even design their own.
I think there is immense value to being able to walk up to any computer, change the keyboard setting and being productive.
It's my lone complaint with Colemak is that Windows still doesn't include it out-of-the-box and needs it to be admin-installed from an MSI bundle that needs to be downloaded (or copied from a thumb drive). Every other modern OS includes it today (including iOS).
That's the exact reason why I chose Dvorak over Colemak a decade or so ago. Sad to see that this hasn't been fixed yet.
I agree. At least they made it trivial to switch layout even on the login screen, with win+spacebar.
I taught myself dvorak for fun in high school have used it everyday for close to a decade now. It certainly never made me a faster typer, but what I don't hear a lot of people point out is that it is simply a more pleasant experience. Whenever I switch back to qwerty (I can still touch type in both), I become instantly contingent that my hands are having to move more erratically over the surface of my keyboard to type any given word or sentence. Also a couple small things about the layout that really like are that the underscore key is much easier to reach and the period and comma keys are on the top row which makes writing long numbers with decimals and commas nicer.
I built a simulator to allow you to experience what it is like to type in Dvorak before committing to learn the layout. It assumes that you can touch-type in QWERTY. Enter some text into the first text box, and it gives you the equivalent keypresses to make [in QWERTY] that would output the same sentence in Dvorak.
https://dvorak.iterinc.com/
https://github.com/osbert/dv-sim2
A former colleague of mine graciously contributed Colemak as an option as well.
This is great! Also seems like a simple code engine.
Kjg; g; uodak! Ap;s ;ddm; pgvd a ;gmrpd ishd dluglde
That's called a substitution cipher and can be defeated by hand by using frequency analysis, in case anyone wanted to know that. Please don't call the party pooper police!
Switched to dvorak ~10 years ago. The first 2 months were terrible: it took me 40 minutes to write a simple e-mail (no must not write the keys on the keyboard, but have a cheat sheet next to you to train your "muscle memory").
After some time though, in my case around a year, you start reaching your previous speed (in my case qwerty). I didn't gain speed but I gained a lot of muscular comfort. Indeed, you frequently do some weird gestures typing on a qwerty due to the dispositions of the keys. It's much rarer on dvorak and I'm really glad for that.
I switched to Colemak a little over 10 years ago and I've never looked back. I used to struggle a lot with hand pain when typing for more than a few hours, Colemak completely fixed that.
It took me about three weeks to become proficient enough that typing stopped being frustrating. Those three weeks really sucked, that was the hardest part.
It took a couple years, but I'm solidly "bilingual" now and can switch between Colemak and Qwerty with no effort.
There is zero overlap in my brain with thumb typing on the phone and touch typing on a keyboard. I've kept qwerty on my pixel and it's never bothered or confused me once.
It's not really a win for me in terms of productivity, but being able to type 120wpm is fun :)
Your story is very similar to mine, I switched to Colemak in 2010 and it took about 3 weeks of 5 minutes bursts of practice a couple of times every day(ish).
I have never looked back. My motivation was moving my finger less, speed was just a bonus.
Eerily similar to mine too! Except I switched to Dvorak; Colemak didn't exist at the time :(
As a Dvorak user (for 20 years now), I always say "I came for the speed benefits that never materialized, but stayed for the ergonomics (reduced strain)"
I was dealing with RSI when I learned Dvorak. The speed appealed to my ego, but I was really just trying to save my career.
same here!
If I could go back, I would've learned colemak for the keyboard shortcut reasons people have outlined in other comments, but I don't have it in me to learn another layout at this point.
As a dvorak user: in a way that's kinda great that dvorak didn't make it. It's terrible for mobile.
I use Dvorak for keyboards and qwerty for thumbs. Keeps them both in muscle memory to some extent, so it's not too painful when I'm using someone else's keyboard.
Me, too. I tried using Dvorak on the phone once I saw it was available but soon realized that my Dvorak skill was entirely muscle memory and that I had no visual sense of the layout. QWERTY (plus "glide" or "swipe" typing) works fine for that purpose, for me.
The vowel collisions is what makes dvorak nearly unusable
Ditto! It's actually good for thumbs because your thumbs can't get all crumbled on top of eachother. Same for swipe typing - the further distances makes it easier to pick up on different words.
I can kind of see that: by moving all the frequently-used letters to the edges and mostly away from each other (and keeping frequent letter pairs further apart), it probably makes interpreting taps between letters and things like swipe keyboards easier to execute.
Specifically the vowels. Lots of words have levenstein distance one vowel in many langs (yes I'm aware many langs don't use qwerty but most are ~)
So true. Dvorak user for 20+ years but I find QWERTY to be much better for one handed typing on a touch screen.
I think it's the design goal of having a high chance of switching keyboard side each stroke that makes it so horrible.
Still I would never go back to using QWERTY on a real keyboard, using Dvorak is so much more comfortable.
Obligatory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9355276
> Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype (sangaline.com)
Can't believe that got only a hundred points and was posted only once in 2015. In my head this is an inspiring if not influential article. Glad it's still online at least.
Conclusion hint: it's not any of the established layouts that would be best for mobile!
I still use Qwerty on mobile. Thumbs are completely different muscle memory. No reason to force an alternative layout everywhere.
Of course not, but in an alternate universe where we had switched over to dvorak, mobile would have been terrible
I'm a Dvorak user myself since ~2006, and it is good. The main benefit is not the speed, but much less fatigue from typing: you move your fingers far less.
This does come at a cost: hotkeys are usually a mess, especially if you have a second language layout (Cyrillic in my case), sometimes working differently dependent on layout, and hotkeys positions are typically optimised for QWERTY.
Interestingly, all Dvorak advantages on regular keyboard become severe disadvantages on smartphones: Dvorak is optimised for alternating hands while typing as much as possible, but when you type with one thumb, you constantly need to move your finger from one side of a keyboard to another. One could probably come with a screen keyboard layout optimized to type with one finger, but I'm yet to see such keyboard.
OSX has a Dvorak-Qwerty-⌘ layout where commands use the Qwerty letters so people switching can keep their muscle memory.
It helped when I tried to learn, but I abandoned because I felt like the effort wasn't worth it. I already type fast enough for my needs.
I actually tried that and it's very confusing, because now no keys are corresponding to new positions of English letters.
I ended up creating my own Dvorak and Cyrillic layouts, so that Cyrillic layout has hotkeys on their Dvorak positions (in most apps, but not all), and Dvorak layout has some keys like -,= on the same positions as ЙЦУКЕН Cyrillic layout.
Still, I didn't yet find a way to make this layout default for a system: macOS refuses to use one of these on lock screen to enter password, but that's a minor inconvenience.
Messagease is an on-screen phone keyboard optimized for single finger use:
https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php
I get about 30 words per minute with it.
Very interesting, thank you. I'll definitely try it out.
I switch between Dvorak and QWERTY on my computer keyboards primarily because of the shortcuts being a mess.
But since I only exclusively type with two thumbs on my phone, Dvorak is noticeably faster than QWERTY.
I usually hold my phone with just one hand, and, sadly, my hand has only one thumb.
So he mentions the "popular" belief that QWERTY was designed to avoid jams from typists hitting adjacent keys in rapid succession, but he doesn't say whether this is untrue or not. It seemed implied that this is false, but I'm left uncertain. Does anyone know?
Agreed, the video is way too short (basically he gives the introduction and then thanks us for watching?!) and doesn't answer the question. The HN comment thread is interesting but the video leaves the viewer sitting with a finger half raised at the screen going "I still have questions"
Wikipedia links a short paper discussing this: https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433...
TL;DR: it's more likely it was just the result of a series of progressive compromises, as keyboards moved from telegraph to typewriting.
I learnt Dvorak in 2 weeks and got back to my hunt-and-peck QWERTY speed within a month, within 2 I was typing 60-70WPM without effort, and about 90% accuracy. I did this with no formal training and my only motivation was that at that time I couldn't afford an "ergonomic keyboard" and had heard that Dvorak was better, so I gave it a try. It's also an ANSI standard so I didn't have to install any weird software, just choose it in the operating system settings.
I no longer have shooting pains up my arms. Whether that's a result of the ergonomics of Dvorak, or simply that I can touch type, is not something I'm qualified to answer, but what I can say is that:
- Dvorak is easy to learn
- only takes mild motivation to get good at
- is more comfortable
which leads to better typing habits that are good for you physically and make you a faster typist than hunt-and-peck, with less effort than learning to touch type on QWERTY.
Would I learn Dvorak these days over another layout like Colemak or whatever is the favorite today? Yes, I would, because it's a standard. I think we're at diminishing returns (for English) so it doesn't really matter: anything is better than QWERTY, even ABCDE...
I learned to use the Dvorak keyboard and was quickly as fast, and then faster than Querty. That's not what interesting. I felt like my brain was unencumbered with the additional motor control required of the Querty layout, resulting in improved memory and cognitive ability while I was typing. I would love to see this effect experimentally tested.
I was exclusively using Dvorak on my home and work machines for 8 years, but switched back to QWERTY about 5 years ago. I loved the feel of Dvorak -- subjectively more comfortable -- but minor annoyances added up.
1. I didn't practice QWERTY, so when I used someone else's computer, it was always an exercise in re-jogging my memory
2. Having to use one hand/finger to type (don't ask me why :)) on DVORAK was super slow because I had to map manually each key in my brain because I couldn't rely on the letters on the physical key caps
Ultimately I also wasn't typing that much, even as a programmer, so it didn't make a huge difference for me, but I do miss it sometimes.
I have switched to Dvorak only one year ago, after many decades of using QWERTY.
I consider this as one of my best decisions and my only regret is that I have not tried to do this many years earlier, because I had wrongly feared that typing Dvorak on a keyboard with QWERTY inscriptions might be a hindrance.
As many other posters have already said, the advantage of Dvorak is seldom a greater speed (and I needed a couple of months to recover the previous typing speed). The big advantage of Dvorak is a much greater comfort while typing. I will never go back to QWERTY.
Did you have discomfort while typing on qwerty? That you noticed before trying Dvorak I mean.
When I was using QWERTY, I did not really have a feeling of discomfort, but I did not enjoy typing and sometimes I resented that this activity is unavoidable for transferring my thoughts into the computer.
After switching to Dvorak, even after only a few days and even if only significantly later I have reached and exceeded the previous typing speed, it already felt much easier to find by touch any key than it has ever felt on QWERTY, despite the fact that I have been using QWERTY since high school, for almost a half of century.
Now I enjoy typing and it feels effortlessly, which has never happened before.
So before trying Dvorak seriously, I was never concerned with the fact that the keyboard layout may be suboptimal. Only after the change the improvement has been obvious and I have realized that what I had been using previously had not been good enough.
Nevertheless, when someone wants to try another keyboard layout, an appropriate time must be chosen, when for a few days there is nothing that must be typed ASAP. During the first few days the drop in typing speed can be very large. The slow typing speed can be very frustrating and it is very difficult to resist the temptation of going back to the previous keyboard layout, for a normal typing speed.
When I was in the Air Force and had to take a typing class (on IBM Selectrics w/ blank keycaps), they had a couple set aside with Dvorak keyboard layouts --- everyone was offered the chance to "type out" on the first day, by typing 50 WPM or faster after adjusting for errors (I did 65).
The instructor noted that while folks often failed when testing on QWERTY, that he had never seen a formally trained Dvorak keyboard typist fail to type out, and that most were well above the average QWERTY speed.
As someone who is expertly proficient in QWERTY since my teens, is it even possible to learnDVORAK and be proficient in both in an ambidextrous sort of way?
Yes. When I switched to Dvorak (college, circa 2000 or 2001) my Qwerty speed dropped from around 60 to around 20, and Dvorak, after a couple months, was up to 60. Then 120. My Qwerty speed stayed low until I got a job where I didn't have full-control of all the computers I used (shared lab systems, didn't want to be rude and create confusion by adding a layout to them even if it was opt-in). At that point I was spending about half the day on my own work computer in Dvorak (still around 120 wpm) and half in Qwerty and my Qwerty speed went back to around 60-70.
If you don't want as big a delay (several years for me from when my Qwerty speed dropped to when it recovered), I'd suggest going "all in" on Dvorak for 3-6 months and then integrate some Qwerty time in deliberately to recover and then maintain your Qwerty proficiency.
Yes, maintaining your proficient in QWERTY is only a matter of not stopping to use it altogether when switching to a new layout. It'll just be a matter of time spent to become fluent in both. I recommend Colemak however.
I personally didn't maintaing typing on QWERTY, interestingly my brain still has the QWERTY mapping for tablets.
Obv it would be helpful/nice/cool to have reconfigurable keycaps, where the keycap's legend (LED-enhanced) could display whatever character you choose.
Each key glowing in conformance with your current keyboard layout of choice.
The last time I searched around for something like this, all I could find was some guy in Russia who had hacked up a positively brilliant-looking homebrew keyboard.
Never used it, but there's https://www.nemeio.com/
With the right software, you could even "improve" the layout on a daily basis based on the most used keys the previous day.
Looks sleek! No pricing. Sign me up anyways.
Ready for APL, music, IPA, Linear B, ...
You can use Dvorak and QWERTY together.
I’ve been using Programmers Dvorak together with QWERTY for 10+ years. Whenever I need to use common shortcuts I switch layouts with a simple shortcut, and sometimes do this dance a few times if a few seconds subconsciously as needed.
Typing speed is unimportant, it’s the reduced strain that is the main benefit.
Another 10+ year user of this reporting in. It's 10000% not the speed but the reduced strain. I used to get bad pain from typing 60wpm in QWERTY for 30 minutes. I can type 100WPM constantly for the whole day with zero pain since the days I switched in college. It took me 3 times to change, but once I forced myself it was great.
Edit: And want to clarify from reading other comments: I was a touch typist on QWERTY, had the recommended posture, and even used ergonomic keyboards. The pain happens in your knuckles and back of your hand, not wrists. Zero of that ten years later.
So whenever you are constantly typing, you move to Dvorak? Otherwise you are in QWERTY?
Nope, I’m using Dvorak mainly, but switch to QWERTY when I need to use shortcuts with one hand while the other is using the mouse (when designing in Figma etc).
I once decided that since I broke my left hand, it would be a good opportunity to learn Right Hand Dvorak. I was wrong. I was a terrible idea. Instead of being somewhat able to type with QWERTY, I was barely able to type at all with RH Dvorak. I tried it for a day, went back to QWERTY.
I tried Dvorak for a ~month, on and off, and still didn't type as fast as with qwerty. Plus my qwerty performance was reducing.
Can't recommend to do anything but cold turkey (or at least 80% of the time or so), and most definitely you'll need more than a day. You can't conclude it's a bad layout from just one day of starting to learn it!
If I can recommend it at all, that is. If you regularly type on someone else's keyboard, it's already a no go. Yes, this is why we can't have nice things (it's objectively better than qwerty for pretty much any latin-script language that has vowels, yet we don't switch, and I'm basically recommending to maintain that status quo).
It takes longer than a day though! It took me about 2 weeks to get accustomed to Dvorak, and maybe a few weeks more to start being faster than QWERTY
For sure- the issue though was that I was almost completely unproductive. I had work to do :)
Switching keyboards takes at least 2-4 weeks, in my opinion, to get to somewhat 80% speed of what you would expect.
Personally, switching to a "columnar" keyboard (Moonlander keyboard) took me about that time, but afterwards I could switch between keyboards without too much confusion. (I don't type faster, but I feel less pain from typing)
Most of the comments seem to be "I switched to Dvorak and love it" with a couple of "I switched to Dvorak but had to go back to QWERTY for other people".
Is there anyone that became sufficiently proficient with Dvorak and regret it/wished they hadn't wasted their time?
I wish I didn't. I loved DVORAK when I used it and wish it was the standard so all the video game keys and office shortcuts didn't require a QWERTY layout but I feel like using DVORAK permanently ruined the keyboard pathway in my brain. When went back to QWERTY my typing accuracy took a hit compared to what it was before learning DVORAK. A couple decades later it still feels like I don't have absolute mastery of any keyboard layout anymore.
Shortcuts and default keybindings are exactly why I haven't touched Dvorak. I don't want to remap them in every application I use (if the application even supports that). And the remapping might not even be consistent. Take Ctrl-C for example. When it comes to editing text, I'd want to remap it into the same position because on QWERTY theres a bunch of others set up to all be next to each other and easy to press with just the left hand. But when it comes to sending a SIGINT, I'd want that to remain as Ctrl-C no matter where C is located.
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I switched in 1998 and kept it up for several years. BYOD wasn't a thing back then so I had to be able to switch but it wasn't that hard. My main gripe was relearning emacs, never got efficient at it. Too much muscle memory and less memory of the names of the key sequences.
I was an 80 wpm typist since 1993. On Dvorak I never got that fast even on a Model M, which I was wicked fast on using QWERTY. Eventually the laptop keyboards took over and my accuracy and comfort plummeted overall.
I think most problems could be solved by sitting properly and typing on a keyboard with good response like Cherry MX Brown or buckling spring keyboards, and not using a palm rest.
I tried and considered switching to dvorak as my main keyboard layout.
I didn't stay with it because of two things:
> Vim keybindings
Dvorak's actually pretty good for vim keybindings.
While 'hjkl' is positionally significant; Dvorak 'jk' are still adjacent and easy to reach in Dvorak, and 'h' is still to the left of 'l' on the same hand.
Other keybindings are better remembered by the letter itself rather than by the position on the keyboard (e.g. "di'" or "gg"), so these aren't that much of an issue.
The issue is that w/ decades of muscle-memory, having vim keys change position is a no-go.
> due to swapping onto other people's machines
I find it really easy to switch layouts though (either on linux with a `loadkeys dvorak`, or by quickly going to the menus).
Admittedly, my experiment was a while ago. It might be easier now.
Vim is perfectly usable with Dvorak.
Could you elaborate?
My experience was that vim keybindings are tied to characters, not key codes (position).
Insert is 'i', not the key at position of 'i' in QUERTY.
Maybe I was doing it wrong, but Vim, for me, is all about the interface and muscle memory. Having keys move position due to the different keyboard layout was a deal-breaker.
e.g. I recall that blogpost titled "ZZ vs zz". I use both of these on both QWERTY and Dvorak frequently enough; although tbh I had to actually try typing 'zz' to recall what it did.
My suspicion is that when I picked up using Dvorak with Vim, whatever association or motor-memory goes on gets some indirection added, so that 'letter and position' are not quite so tightly coupled.
You dont need to type fast to be productive imho
For me, using DVORAK has nothing to do with speed, and everything to do with comfort. It's simply easier to use and results in less hand and wrist strain.
Really depends on what your job is.
Could one reason that Dvorak didn't catch on is that its established rival, QWERTY, was not randomly designed?
QWERTY supposedly helps to reduce jams.
Dvorak was introduced at a time in which that was still a problem, before electric typewriters.
If Dvorak didn't actually produce its speed advantages on a classic, mechanical typewriter in which a semicircular gallery of arms concentrate their strikes on the same tiny location on the ink ribbon, typists trying Dvorak would have found that Dvorak's claims don't actually hold up.
I could never get past the idea of a key sending a different keystroke than the one printed on it.
Yes, I know you're not supposed to look at the keyboard as you type. And I don't. But I still don't like it. It sets off "this is dumb" alarm bells in my head.
And because it's impossible to replace every keyboard I own or use, or physically rearrange their keys from QWERTY to Dvorak/Colemak, i'm stuck with QWERTY.
I'm thinking, just tape a few DIY legends onto a few key keys (heh) and then glance at a paper cheat sheet for the rest. Repeat as necessary.
Workman user checking in. Every positive thing about dvorak is also true for workman plus you get easy control keys and easier learning from qwerty.
Do people really make the assumption that the QWERTY keyboard's layout is random? I'm GenX and I was taught the reason given in the video.
So, why not a steno keyboard instead?
While DVORAK may only be a 5% improvement over QWERTY, a steno keyboard is vastly superior in typing speed and ergonomics, as it's used by courtroom stenographers keeping up with recording speech. (And if you learn on a proper steno keyboard, your muscle memory won't get all confused because the keys are entirely different.)
I used to use Dvorak exclusively.
Now I use a mix of Dvorak some of the time and QWERTY some of the time.
I have a Dvorak layout for the ErgoDox EZ Shine keyboard, link to repo below. There’s a PDF linked from the reademe in the repo showing what my Dvorak layout looks like.
https://github.com/ctsrc/ergodox-ez-shine-dvorak
I’ve tried Dvorak and Colemak but went back to QWERTY. Whole software world is developed with QWERTY in mind, and it was too much PITA.
Split keyboard (especially with ortholinear, column staggered layout) will give you much more benefit than any alternative layout - and will be much easier to switch too.
I wonder if a keyboard optimized for typists (typing in English with the most common word being ‘the’) is also optimal for programmers (writing code in say Python, with the most commonly used word likely being ‘def’ or ‘if’). The statistics of the two corpora should be different.
I expect there'll be a difference in which layout is optimal when analysing an average python code base with names (variables, functions, etc.) in your language versus regular text in that language, but honestly this is not where typing holds me back. Very rarely do I max out on typing speed for just a few minutes when coding something greenfield. Even if we're talking comfort rather than speed, you'd probably get 99% of the way by laying out symbols differently and leaving the letters and digits untouched.
Agreed on optimal with respect to either task will be much better than QWERTY overall.
I am generally very efficiency-minded (I run a speed-reading startup!), but I have never even felt the urge to try an alternate layout. Has anyone else who initially resisted these given it a try, and how long did it take you to figure out if it was amazing, or meh?
I've never seen the point in DVORAK or other fancy layouts, until I read a post on Workman and Colemak and decided to give Colemak a try.
To this day, I think it's one of the best decisions I've ever made - it resulted in much more relaxed typing, and forever broke a bad habit of looking at keys while typing.
How long did it take to reach that conclusion? Probably about a month. After achieving decent speeds on Colemak, going back to Qwerty just felt painful - even when I was going faster, it felt so much more stressful.
Did you buy a new keyboard? I assume it's easy to set up on an iPhone? What about when you have to use a QWERTY keyboard, on someone else's computer or at a kiosk or something?
I'd also be curious to know if folks would recommend this for kids, especially those who have not yet mastered touch-typing on QWERTY.
> Did you buy a new keyboard?
No, i just printed out the new layout and stuck it near the monitor. Eventually I moved to blank keycaps.
> easy to set up on an iPhone?
Why would I care about that? Phones are for thumbs, and thumbs have their own muscle memory. Besides, the strength of layouts like Colemak is typically in leveraging the home-row, which is really not a thing on phones, so there is no point. It would make more sense to investigate those fancy swipey versions (or make new layouts that leverage "home columns"?).
> What about when you have to use a QWERTY keyboard
I just go a bit slower. Which is fine, considering it's such a rare experience...
Huh, so you use Colemak on computer and QWERTY on iPhone? I assumed I'd have to switch everything over in order to get much of a benefit. But if this is viable I might give it a try. I figured I'd have to switch everything over, which would make things difficult when my wife borrows my phone, for example.
Can I ask if you code much? Unlike most HNers, I don't, so I'm interested in its usefulness for writing emails and such, not the special chars used mostly for coding.
Thanks for the feedback!
I'm not a programmer, but the advantages of Colemak are fundamentally related to writing English. Programming doesn't get any real boost, special characters are still an afterthought (pretty much all on right pinkie).
And yeah, i only use Colemak on laptops/desktops. I don't use external keyboards with phones and tablets, so it's all done with two thumbs, which have their own muscle memory.
Do you mean that you run a speed reading startup or really a speed-reading startup?
Hopefully both: https://www.beelinereader.com
Some people use our tools for speed reading; others use it as an assistive technology for reading, or for helping kids learn to read.
IMO not worth it when switching between personal and shared computers, OS shortcuts like copy/paste, or when executing programs that code the raw key inputs vice characters, like games. Juice was not worth squeeze for me.
I documented my Dvorak experience in an FAQ. https://www.nayuki.io/page/i-type-in-dvorak
Somewhat unrelated: shouldn’t it be pronounced “Dvorjak”? That is how the other famous Dvorak (Czech composer) is pronounced.
I had used a Dvorak layout for a few years and loved it. Ultimately, I switched back to Qwerty for a few fairly practical reasons:
1) Every video game I've ever played has had key bindings with Qwerty (or a controller) in mind. I would estimate that roughly 60%-ish of those games permit for some level of keyboard remapping. When remapping is possible, there will be bewildering exceptions for certain actions. When it's not possible, they are impossible to play.
Yes, I am aware you can switch between different layouts through the OS easily enough, but after I had gotten used to a letter being in a specific spot for Dvorak, and then being prompted to press it in a Qwerty layout, I found myself mis-typing extremely frequently for button prompts. It also became a chore to switch between them if I was in the middle of playing, then wanted type out a quick message in instant messenger.
2) Random bugs. I had noticed that for whatever reason, some programs just seemed to have some kind of issue with Dvorak layouts. I can't think of any specifics, it's been at least a decade since then, but it was something bizarre like: program recognizes that I was using a Dvorak layout except if I was using a keyboard shortcut.
3) It was weird that my cellphone was in a Qwerty layout but my computer wasn't. I seem to recall having a lot of issues trying to get Dvorak to work as the default layout.
4) I shared the computer with another family member. They complained that they had to learn the new layout. I convinced them it would improve their typing speed and they agreed. Eventually, they also started going to the library to do some research, which of course had a Qwerty layout. This caused an incredible amount of grief for them. Ultimately, this is the reason I switched back.
5) I seem to remember programming in general just being more uncomfortable in Dvorak. I think the punctuation I needed was in the upper left(?) which put a lot of extra strain on my left pinky.
I liked Dvorak quite a bit, but it just felt impractical. The world I live in just feels like it's setup for Qwerty, inefficient as that layout may be. I see it like if someone chose to become left-handed. You could do it, but if an much more popular method exists, and there is extra effort in going with the less popular one, for what amounts to the same outcome, why go through the struggle?
If things were to suddenly switch tomorrow, I'd gladly switch back, I just don't see much point in fighting for such a thing when we have a solution that is close enough.
I have used Dvorak keyboards with my Linux desktop for many years
I wrote a blog post about my experience with Dvorak!
TL;DR It's great, but if you're interested you should use Colemak. Once you switch you won't go back.
https://maxgreenwald.me/blog/switching-to-dvorak
I learned dvorak - I would have stuck with it if I didn't have to have other people use my computer - or use other peoples computers.
Qwerty is fast enough...
...because it breaks vi.
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I like this guys content generally, but it's worth noting in this instance he's unknowingly echo-ing free-market libertarian dogma.
> You might hear comments from time to time about studies showing Dvorak is "no better than QWERTY," or words to that effect. All such comments that I've heard seem to echo an article, "The Fable of the Keys," by S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, published in the Journal of Law & Economics, vol. XXXIII (April 1990).
> Note the word "economics." Liebowitz and Margolis are economists opposed to an "excessive inertia" theory, for which QWERTY is often cited as an example. Rather than try to prove their point with a generally valid argument, they simply attack Dvorak as a dubious replacement for QWERTY. As the article's last footnote explains, there are a number of other possible reasons for Dvorak's failure to replace QWERTY, besides a perceived lack of value. The article ignores those reasons, however, and perpetrates that false perception in a nicely self-fulfilling way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050204023432/http://www.mwbroo...
I haven't looked in a few years, but "The Fable of the Keys" was not available on the web. I had to slip into CU's library to find it on microfiche. Unimpressive paper, no original research, just pot shots at old Navy and Dvorak experiments.
Economists call "excessive inertia" "path dependence".
What makes that libertarian dogma?
Path dependence is a kind of market failure. Libertarians like to pretend that market failure does not exist in free markets because market failure implies market intervention.
The authors of "The Fable of the Keys" have frequently argued against the existence of path dependence. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/path-dependence/