John's Blog: Dvorak: An Alternate Keyboard
Everyone and his dog has a 'blog these days, right? So why not me? If you are interested in anything I'm saying, great! Let's talk about it! (Leave comments.) If not, try one of my other links. Better yet, why are you wasting your time staring at your computer screen, go do something real!
Let me know if you'd like to be to be updated whenever I post a new article. It won't happen every day!
Dvorak: An Alternate Keyboard
For the last 3 years, I have been using the Dvorak keyboard layout, an alternative to the standard "QWERTY" layout. The Dvorak layout was named after its inventor, August Dvorak, and usually pronounced as the Americanized "duh-VOR-ak" (unlike the European composer Antonin "duh-VOR-zhok", although they were cousins). I had been hearing about the Dvorak layout for years, and that it was rumored to be faster and easier than QWERTY (named after the first 6 letters on the top row), so finally a few years ago, when I stumbled upon a Dvorak touch-typing practice site, I decided to give it a try. Save for the occasional times when switching to Dvorak is impractical, such as on someone else's machine, I am now a regular user.
I have touch-typed ever since a summer typing course in high school, which I like to call "the most useful computer course I ever took" -- you hunt-and-peck programmers out there know what I mean. Learning Dvorak pretty much requires touch-typing, since you're probably learning on a QWERTY-labelled keyboard, so you can't look at the keys. So you're basically re-learning touch typing. The way it works with a normal QWERTY computer keybrd is you use some special software (usually provided with the operating system) to remap the keys to the Dvorak system, despite their physical labels. (You can learn the details about that for your operating system here. [Update, 12/29/03: That older page does not include Windows XP, so here are instructions for that.]) Interestingly, learning to touch-type Dvorak took away my ability to touch-type QWERTY for a while, and even now, I have to hunt-and-peck going back to QWERTY at first. However, I am still faster at it than your average non-touch-typist, and if I do it for very long, the QWERTY touch-typing will come back temporarily. A learning theorist could probably explain how the mind does this.
You can also buy an actual Dvorak keyboard. This company's models have a QWERTY/Dvorak toggle right on the keyboard, and the keys are labelled with both layouts, Dvorak in a bigger font, and QWERTY in a smaller font in the corner of each key. These features theoretically make the keyboard usable by people with either preference, although I have found in practice that unless you are a touch-typing QWERTY'ist, you will have trouble hunting-and-pecking looking at the smaller QWERTY letters. (My co-workers hate to have to type on my computer, even when I turn Dvorak off. It's pretty good security, especially combined with a left-handed mouse!)
Although Dvorak is still known mostly for its claims to increased speed, those claims are now held by many to be exaggerated at best. However, what is in less dispute is the ergonomic benefits -- your fingers move less. Indeed, one of the reasons I switched and stay switched is my concern, as someone who types 40 hours a week, about repetitive strain injuries. Here are some interesting facts from Jared Diamond's page, The Curse of QWERTY:
- On the QWERTY layout, only about 30% of the letters you type on average are on the home row. In Dvorak, 70% of them are (all 5 vowels and the most commonly used consonents).
- QWERTY overuses the left hand. There are about 3000 English words which can be typed in QWERTY with the left-hand only, compared to only 300 words with the right-hand only.
- Dvorak places the most common letters under the stronger fingers, and the less common under the weaker. This is only common sense, yet it is not true of QWERTY.
One unexpected aspect of the QWERTY/Dvorak debate is that there seems to be a political dimension to it. The June 1996 issue of Reason magazine published an article (which looks to be taken from the April 1990 issue of the Journal of Law & Economics) which not only seeks to show that the standard "proof" of Dvorak's increased speed (studies conducted for the Navy in the 1930's by Dvorak himself) is biased, but that this is further evidence of the "liberal elite's" propensity to claim superiority for a beaucratically-conceived solution (read "socialism") over a pure market solution (read "capitalism"). At least that's my take on the point they're trying to make. You can also read rebuttals to that article here and here. All I know is, I like it better than QWERTY.
0 comments
0 Comments:
Blog Index
