I've only ever been able to hunt and peck QWERTY, not having learned it through touch typing, nor did I ever pick it up.
So when I learned Dvorak, through touch typing, it affected my QWERTY skills exactly not one bit. The only way in which my QWERTY skills are now bad is through attrition, but it's still no problem to accomplish a reasonable percentage of my previous speed. It just comes up pretty rarely that I have to type on QWERTY these days, and if I do for a few minutes it's no problem.
It's as if the two are in completely different areas of my brain, and for anyone wanting to learn Dvorak, then this is a very easy way indeed.
The problem with this keyboard and others (like Dvorak, Colemak) is nobody else uses them.
I have one of those old indestructible IBM model M keyboards with removable keycaps. I love that keyboard. I decided I'd try to learn DVORAK and work with it regularly, so I did so. And I realized something: every time I'd work with a keyboard, I _will_ be working with QWERTY. There's no way I would request to an employer that I have a special keyboard just for me, or try to reconfigure software to support it.
So I went back to QWERTY. May not be ideal but I know everyone supports it.
I've worked several programming jobs since switching to Dvorak, and it has never been an issue---it takes < 10 seconds to change the layout OS-wide. No need to request a special keyboard (and I leave my keycaps as QWERTY because I touch-type anyways).
I learned dvorak by printing out the layout and glancing over at the paper while typing back in high school. It took me about a month to get comfortable and I'm now basically a touch-typing bilinguist (though I'm slower at qwerty, it's more mental effort to do the conversion on the fly since my muscle memory is dvorak).
I'm relatively sure that every OS supports changing the keyboard layout without being root and for just one user, so unless your employer specifically disabled that, then that shouldn't be an issue.
The point about the keycaps is valid, but ideally you shouldn't be looking at them anyways. Additionally, I learned Dvorak an a QWERTY labeled keyboard, and found that eventually I just associated the labels I saw with what I was actually typing.
> There's no way I would request to an employer that I have a special keyboard just for me
Why not?
> or try to reconfigure software to support it.
Why not?
If there's a much better alternative out there that can make you more productive - and Dvorak has been one of those things for me - your employer should be jumping up and down in joy at throwing however many $10 keyboards at you as you're asking for.
There are also plenty of USB devices that convert between the two, or keyboards with hardware switches. Or, of course, in software. I use AutoHotkey, because keyboard layout switching in Windows is completely broken, and it works pretty well.
If that's your excuse for not using Dvorak rather than anything else, you're doing both yourself and your employer a huge disservice, especially if you're going to take that attitude to other things.
It's an impressively in depth and well reasoned analysis, and takes into account common bigrams which is something I'd never considered being important for keyboard layouts.
I tried switching to Dvorak many moons ago, I'm feeling it may be time to have another crack at an alternative layout, both out of interest in improving efficiency and reducing strain.
I don't see what the point of changing your keyboard layout is.
I don't know if QWERTY is even a good layout but what does it matter? Isn't the best keyboard layout the one you already know?
Thinking about it now, I can't think of any common digraphs or trigraphs that are inconvenient to type on a qwerty keyboard. Don't fix what ain't broke.
I also have RSI from years of piano, typing, and then (this is almost embarrassing to say) high level starcraft.
Changing your keyboard layout isn't going to fix bad habits and the things you have to do to stay healthy (stretching, taking breaks, and strengthening).
Good point. About 15 years ago I had the beginnings of RSI, and discovered the immense benefit of just getting up and walking around every now and then (good for the eyes, too). Also there are a few wrist/forearm massages that helped, basically I just squeezed wherever it felt necessary.
I also changed my typing style to use my arms to slide my wrists around the keyboard a little rather than overextending fingers, and I rotated my hands inward about 30 degrees (maybe less, never measured it). I still keep about 60-ish WPM with this method, even at 42 years old.
Anyway, I like the Workman layout a lot, especially that the common move for index fingers is down, and the common moves for middle and ring are up. Great thinking!
I also changed my typing style to use my arms to slide my wrists around the keyboard a little rather than overextending fingers, and I rotated my hands inward about 30 degrees
Yes, this. I've been typing this way my entire computing life (22 years) and have yet to develop symptoms of RSI from typing. (Note: I have developed RSI symptoms from mousing -- and relieved them by using a trackball.)
I switched to Dvorak seven or eight years ago to see if it would help with RSI issues I was having. It helped a lot, and I never switched back. Sometimes I have to type QWERTY (at kiosks at the library, for example) and I just laugh at how ridiculous my hand motions become when using it. For people experiencing wrist pain while typing, I recommend trying it. A lot of people use it (compared to other minority layouts), so support is widespread.
QWERTY is deeply, gut-wrenchingly broken. (Kind of like British electric outlets, or Christian death metal.)
However, just switching keyboard layouts doesn't fix things. I once switched to Colemak for a couple of months. My hands felt better, and typing on my own machine was way more comfortable. But every other keyboard I interacted with made me look like a dude twice my age with some kind of senility disorder.
To really get the benefits of a better layout, you have to not switch, but rather add a new keyboard fluency, while maintaining QWERTY proficiency. That made the cost-benefit equation very different for me... and I went crawling back to my old abusive partner, QWERTY.
Hey now, British sockets are the best: integrated switch, grounded, fused plugs, bomb-proof, cable is flush to wall and its much harder to accidentally pull out the plug.
I've read a lot of reports of people who maintained dual fluency. They say you just have to switch back to it for about half an hour a day and that will keep it fresh. I think that you can do much less if you're concerned with basic competence rather than actual proficiency.
After years of using Colemak (and not practicing QWERTY regularly), I've found that QWERTY is actually getting easier again. I'm not fast with it, but I no longer have to think hard to recall positions or look down at the keyboard. It feels like my brain said "Oh this is how keyboards work now" and rearranged the QWERTY structure in my brain to do Colemak instead. Now after years of having to occasionally use QWERTY, my brain seems to have built a semi-competent second typist, so to speak.
There are many measurable metrics to determine the "best keyboard layout", such as whether common letters in your language are on the home row, or the total finger distance travelled when typing typical text, etc.
The three most common english digraphs are TH, HE, AN, and they all require moving off the home row to type in qwerty. I consider this an inconvenience, one that doesn't exist in other layouts.
Of course there is a cost to learning a new layout, but if you're probably going to be typing for much of the rest of your life, the cost is very small.
The reason I switched to Dvorak was that I wanted to learn to touch-type properly. When changing an ingrained habit, there's always that transition period where the bad old habit is the better short-term choice than the good new habit, and if I'd tried to learn touch-typing QWERTY I'd have fallen back on my bad habits probably without realising it. By introducing a new keyboard layout into the mix, falling back on my bad old habits had an immediate negative consequence (wrong letters appear on screen) so I knew I'd messed up and could immediately rectify the mistake.
Of course, now I know how to touch-type and I'm quite comfortable with Dvorak, so I'm not sure I could muster the mental energy to switch to this Workman layout, pleasant-looking as it is. The biggest drawback of Dvorak is indeed the L and R keys... but I guess my finger muscles have strengthened or I'm just more used to it now, so it no longer bothers me.
It's reasonable to be a bilingual typist. I use dvorak on my personal and work computers, but qwerty for other people's computers and iphone/ipad. It's really not too bad.
I originally thought this two. Trick: when typing QUERTY, look at your keyboard. Anything else, try to just look at the screen. Helps your brain differentiate layouts.
At my desk, I use a Dvorak keyboard. However, I often need to rip my laptop away from my desk for meetings, emergencies, etc. When I'm typing on the laptop, I use Qwerty. It's not a problem at all. I don't need to think about it; my hands just do the right thing depending upon where I'm typing.
It's good to hear that. Being afraid of forgetting how to touch type on a qwerty was one of the reasons I never made the plunge into alternative keyboard layouts.
Though, now that I think about it, alternating between keyboard layouts is really no different than using a modal editor like vim -- after a while it just becomes second-nature.
I've been pretty consistent about only using dvorak on split keyboards, and only typing QWERTY on non-split keyboards. This has done a pretty good job of keeping my muscle memory for both separate. My QWERTY typing is a bit rusty, but I can still manage up to 60wpm when using my laptop, and I don't have to pay too much attention to what my fingers are doing. Though when I use QWERTY on a split keyboard I have to watch my fingers.
(These environmental cues can be funny sometimes - if I use emacs for editing C++, which I do only very rarely, I keep missing out semicolons. Because most of the time, if I'm programming, and my eyes can see emacs, my fingers know I'm using python.)
At least on your computers (where it matters) you can change the mapping. If you can touch type you can simply ignore the labels on the keys.
I'm building a custom mechanical keyboard (with blank keycaps) and I have changed the various function layers several times and had no problems with adjusting to that.
It all comes down to the question what you do mostly and how easy you can get used to new layouts both physical and in software.
Think of it this way: typing is a distraction from thinking, and minimizing it is a good thing. When I type much slower than I think, make mistakes or otherwise have to think about the keyboard, it pulls me out of flow.
Or learn QWERTY with your hands placed diagonally.
I never learned how to type "properly", i.e. "home-row" typing: my hands rest naturally somewhere between the middle and upper row at maybe 30° angles from the vertical, and some keys I strike with either hand depending on the word (e.g. t/y g/h b/n).
Yet I type faster than most people I know, and have had no RSI issues due to typing almost daily for 22 years. (I have had RSI issues due to using (gripping) a mouse; replacing the mouse with a trackball / no mouse eliminated this.)
This "nontraditional" method of typing leaves my wrists straighter and reduces repetitive motion, to which I credit my fortunate freedom from RSI.
The downside is that I am unable to use so-called "ergonomic" split keyboards, as my fingers are trained to work both sides of the keyboard.
(And I say "ergonomic" in quotes, because while most "ergonomic" keyboards, such as the Kinesis, are designed to reduce movement, my personal experience is that ergonomics is all about making morevaried movement.)
Interesting. I have a split ergodox and switch to a laptop keyboard a bit. My fingers don't seem to mind the angle too much. Though it is crazy how keyboard layout has been status quo for nearly 100 years.
I'd really like a keyboard layout optimized for phone usage, particularly with swype or predictive keyboard styles in mind. In particular I think you actually want to go the opposite direction of things like dvorak with such a keyboard because you want to make common motions distinct from each other. With swype, dvorak would leave most common words having a very similar motion profile. Qwerty is perhaps better, but I suspect non-optimal from how often I have to guide it.
While not exactly what you're looking for, on Android I've had a good experience with the MessagEase keyboard. The key idea is to have fewer, bigger buttons, and use swiping motions within those to distinguish other characters. Even after getting used to predictive typing, I quickly came to prefer the MessagEase keyboard, in part because I tend to type weird characters, which are much more bother with the regular keyboard. With all the times I would have to correct swype, I might be as fast or faster with MessagEase. Oh, it also has cursor movement built in.
Fellow MessagEase user here. It's absolutely fantastic. It's great at non-dictionary words and special characters (there's no need to press a magic option key to switch to the symbol set), as mentioned above. Two other things I like: a) It has built in arrow keys, perfect for going back to insert a skipped letter or similar. b) Typing errors occur at the character level, not the word level. And are hence easier to fix. (Or, if left unfixed, are usually still legible.) No damnyouautocorrect moments.
Edit: I forgot to mention one of the most important parts: it's incredibly fast once you know what you're doing.
I think ti could still be a good keyboard for phones but they seem to have died off and the layout is patented or something and so there don't seem to be any versions of it for android.
I like the statistics of the different writings he writes at the end, however I would have liked a comparision of the different layouts while writing different programming languages (C, Ruby, JavaScript, etc).
I've seen two problems with alternative keyboard layouts: a) they are not done for programming (keys ~|!<>_-/"' are oddly laid out) or they are not made for international languages (Spanish in my case, for which ñ,á,é,í,ó,ú are difficult to find. Or worse yet (in case of Dvorak) when using an "international" version, the programming-related keys are horribly placed.
I had a programming layer on my ergodox, but due to some bugs in the firmware haven't bothered with it...
Ideally (when I get time to fix it), I'll have a thumb key to hold down and get any programming symbol (optimized to Python for me) on or nearby the home row.
Summary of that article:
The 'QWERTY was developed to slow down the typist' story is a lie. There is no serious evidence that Dvorak is a 'better' layout. If you were starting from scratch, there would probably be no advantage choosing one over the other, except that QWERTY is the standard. Retraining is a waste of time.
One of the key quotes:
> The study design directly paralleled the decision that a real firm or a real government agency might face: Is it worthwhile to retrain its present typists? If Strong's study is correct, it is not efficient for current typists to switch to Dvorak. The study also implied that the eventual typing speed would be greater with QWERTY than with Dvorak, although this conclusion was not emphasized.
I have no reason to believe that the Workman layout offers any other advantages.
Look at the HN thread about this article [1], specifically the top comment. Among other things, that study failed to take into account the "plateau effect" that occurs in all types of exercise regimens after several weeks of the same type of training.
(EDIT: Downvoting doesn't make the claims in the references comment any less wrong. How about arguing the point instead)
I stopped taking that comment remotely seriously when it claimed:
> As a matter of fact, it is a well known and well documented phenomenon in the literature that if you train at close to maximal capacity on the same training regimen for longer than 3 to 4 weeks, you will stop making gains. You'll see big increases the first 3 weeks, and after that, nothing. This is a nervous system effect.
... which most people who have done heavy weight lifting for example can tell you is at best wildly misleading, and at worst, pure, unadulterated bullshit.
To flatten out after 3-4 weeks would take such extreme over-training, at stress levels way beyond what even most high level athletes would normally even able to achieve in training, that it is extremely unrealistic for most people to every experience it. Certainly not "just" by training at something until you feel you can't do any more. At that point most people are not anywhere near a real maximum.
I don't lift to a "training" 1RM (maximum weight I can at any time lift once) every week, much less manage/try to stress myself into a real max. (the reason for distinguishing these, is that it is normal that you can lift up to 10% +/- more in high stress situations like competitions), so maybe what I do don't count in that guys eyes. But I exercise large compound lifts to near failure (that is, until I have good reason to think that I will be unable to complete the next repetition) every workout - 3-4 times a week. So I'll hit my training 5RM, 3RM, 1RM for the various lifts on consecutive weeks. They are reasonably interchangeable. If I feel good enough, I may go for a 1RM to try to set a new personal record even if it's not the "right week".
And see slow but steady improvement for months on end before I shake anything up, and when I do change things, it is mainly for other reasons - some progressions may follow the same program for years. Changing too often does not help - it just confuses you tracking.
Most people are far more likely to run into limitations due to form/technique failures or lack of flexibility that they need to fix than due to any CNS limitations.
Gains do slow down as you get closer to your limits, and you certainly can over-train, but it takes a lot to over-train so badly that you stop seeing gains after 4 weeks even when you massively brutalise major muscle groups on a semi-daily basis. I can't even imagine what you'd need to do to overload your nervous system from typing in that short time-span.
What a terrible article. First off, I was frustrated by how they quoted research but did not actually cite it. For example:
>For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing."
OK, great. What was the name of the paper? Was it even in a peer reviewed article, or was it an op-ed? And when did they say it? The rate of research into keyboard layouts has been a trickle. If they said that in 1975, then it's not particularly useful today.
In fact, there have been a few studies that have in one way or another demonstrated superior qualities of Dvorak:
(admittedly both of those were published after the Reason article, but I'm not going to spend all night looking for pre-1996 articles)
The article also claims that studies show only "a few percentage points" difference between QWERTY and Dvorak. How can this be, when the total typing distance for QWERTY was nearly twice that of Dvorak on Don Quixote?
So why are we seeing quote and number mining, more typical of political discussions, in an article about keyboard layouts? Well, to understand that, we need to understand Reason's bias, and then read the last paragraph.
And then all becomes clear. This isn't about uncovering the truth about ergonomics and keyboard layouts. It's about scoring a few points for the ol' free market. My guess is that one of the authors was having an argument at a party, and someone drunkenly suggested that QWERTY vs. Dvorak was a great example of the free market failing. "This will not stand!" the writer shouted at the sky, and then proceeded to write a five page article about how "nuh uh".
Of course I'm interested in reading it, or at least the parts relevant to ergonomics. And I did.
As it turns out, my suspicion was correct: the quote mentioned was from 1977. Unfortunately, that paper's brief mention of keyboard layouts is then based entirely on "Human factors in international keyboard arrangement", which was published in 1975 and does not seem to be available online.
The Fable authors mention fatigue early in the paper, but fail to provide any evidence on this point. Their section on ergonomics focuses exclusively on the question of whether Dvorak is faster.
> There is no serious evidence that Dvorak is a 'better' layout.
The typing speed record, while it still existed, was held by a dvorak typist. I can type at 130-140wpm using qwerty and feel like it's almost impossible to go any faster, while it's not uncommon to see dvorak users typing 160wpm+. If anything, the reduction in total finger travel is enormous.
Without seeing some kind of properly conducted scientific test that examines a range of conditions (age, native language, current typing ability on QWERTY, typical typing material, etc) it doesn't seem worth the effort. If Dvorak (or Workman) is that much better, then it's surprising nobody has been able to conduct such a study.
All of the evidence out there, however limited, is in favor of Dvorak (that 1996 Reason article you linked not withstanding). Lower finger travel = less strain = less RSI.
The advantage of Dvorak is no more "theoretical" than the theory of evolution. Whether it's "worth it" for you to switch is aside from the inherent performance of either layout. I can say that Dvorak is better, while not being worthwhile for you to learn, though it was worthwhile for me.
The 'QWERTY was developed to slow down the typist' story is a lie. There is no serious evidence that Dvorak is a 'better' layout. If you were starting from scratch, there would probably be no advantage choosing one over the other, except that QWERTY is the standard. Retraining is a waste of time.
The last sentence isn't supported by the prior, assuming you want to improve your typing.
Let's say that dvorak and qwerty just as "good"/"bad" and that there would be no advantage choosing one over the other. Then retraining is probably not a waste of time because when retraining you don't pick up bad practices, like you did when you first started to type (not knowing better).
It probably is easier to start from scratch than trying to relearn some subtle parts of something you've done every day for for over a decade. Also, the motivation to learn qwerty better isn't as big compared to dvorak where you are forced to make progress to be able to do anything useful.
I found this to be true. I typed Dvorak for a few years while in University, but switched back to QWERTY when I entered the workforce. I was pleasantly surprised that the increased speed and comfort I had attributed to Dvorak was maintained when I went back to QWERTY. It may have been less efficient than putting the same time I to traditional typing training would have been, but it definitely did increase my general skills as a typist to practice a new layout "from scratch".
In my experience typing on dvorak is much more comfortable. Speed wise i maybe reached the same level as my qwerty after almost a month but for me the biggest wow factor was the comfort. Your hands are really never twisting, most of the time you are just using the home row. It's like holding a gamepad where all the keys you need are designed to be in just the right position, not having jump and fire mapped to the start and select-button.
In the end i still switched back to qwerty because I'm using way to many other computers than my own throughout a day and need to be fast on all of them.
Yes, I tried, and I switched back for the same reason as you. The amount of time I spent trying to work out whether I was on QWERTY or Dvorak, and in that case where was the full stop, far outweighed any possible benefit in typing speed.
When people tell me that QWERTY is uncomfortable, slow, etc, I honestly have no idea what they're talking about. For me, the problem is sitting in a chair staring at a screen all day.
Laying in bed all day listening to the radio gives less 'finger distance travelled' but doesn't mean greater productivity. I'm being facetious to point out that 'finger distance travelled' is not a meaningful measurement (at least not to me).
Laying in bed all day gives you zero MPG. It doesn't mean that your bed is the most efficient vehicle in the world, it only means you fail at basic logic.
"Finger distance travelled" is a proper metric. If you have a better one, write an article and see how it does.
For those unfamiliar with Reason, it's a libertarian publication.
You might then wonder why they are so concerned with typewriter ergonomics.
The reason is that it's a popular example of path dependence, where previous decisions affect the best possible current choice. This undermines their economic theories (the authors are economists). So don't expect them to be an unbiased source on this.
They also, for example, claim that Windows is the best OS, and that network effects have no impact on people choosing to use it
The article was from 1996, I think you'd be hard pressed to suggest an OS that was better suited for the average user than Windows 95 was at the time. I say this as someone who was still running OS/2 at the time (with a Dvorak layout of course), but that was due more to me being ideologically driven (go Team OS/2!) than Reason. Network effects are only one feature that appeals to end users, but they aren't the first.
Here is an "economic" explanation that suggests that both QWERTY and Windows are the worst available alternatives of their respective domain, simply because they are the most popular. Basically, it boils down to "You can survive by being popular, or you can survive by being good."
As a keyboard layout aficionado, I appreciate the thinking that went into this keyboard layout.
I've been a fulltime dvorak user for over 10 years. I also tried Colemak but found that many motions felt awkward while using it.
Anyways, I thought I'd give this one a try just for the hell of it. And... so far I am quite pleasantly surprised. I fully memorized the layout in about half an hour. It feels comfortable to type on, just like Dvorak does.
Typed up this comment with the Workman-P layout, and seriously considering switching to it now...
>QWERTY was supposedly designed for typewriters to solve a very specific problem–to keep the types from jamming against each other. The most frequently used keys were placed apart from each other to prevent them from jamming. This results in a non-ergonomic layout. However, there are alternatives.
That paper presents a good case that the layout was influenced by feedback from telegraph operators, but it doesn't really do much to refute the idea that changes were also being made for the purpose of preventing jams.
Obviously the claim that it was intended to slow typists down is unlikely. If the layout was rearranged in part to prevent jams, then it would have been rearranged so that nearby letters weren't hit in sequence. Without careful study of ergonomics, one wouldn't necessarily realize that that would slow a typist down. But it would probably prevent jams.
I also found some of the claims made in the paper very odd. They claim that because "SE" and "Z" are easy to mistake in Morse code, that those letters were placed near each other. How this would be helpful eludes me.
my classmate's half-sister makes $72 every hour on the internet. She has been without a job for eight months but last month her payment was $16159 just working on the internet for a few hours.Here's the site to read more......
Although it's great that you shared this article so more people know about the history of QWERTY, I don't think it should be the top voted comment; what QWERTY was or wasn't designed for is interesting, but what matters is what it is like to use it in practice now. I am more interested in a discussion about whether or not this Workman layout works as advertised and is worth the effort of switching to.
No, I'm pretty sure he got it right. That article's correct in saying it wasn't intentionally designed to slow typists down. It was however arranged so that letters frequently typed after one another weren't on neighbouring typebars, because that did cause jams in early typewriters.
Also, the correlation between the position of the bars and the position of the keys were not obvious in the first Sholes & Gidden typewriter. Some bars for adjacent keys were actually very far from each other.
By the way, the jamming problem basically went away with the Remington II. QWERTY was obsolete less than 20 years after its inception.
QWERTY was designed so that all the characters in the word "TYPEWRITER" were located in the top row :) And this is quite easy to verify - coincidence? Does it improve its ergonomy? Well I'm not typing "typewriter" all day long, but first salesmen who marketed the device - did :) They're long gone, however, but suboptimal layout remained. As the man said, there's nothing more permanent than temporary solutions...
One thing that struck me is that this layout is immediately intuitive. Unlike Dvorak and of course QWERTY or any other popular layout, I can already picture myself typing in it (of course I learned on QWERTY, so I wasn't in-tune with key familiarity before that).
I can't explain why exactly, but this layout just makes sense. Can't wait to try this out.
I realized [my fingers] were moving too much laterally [...] Just ask yourself, how often do you type ‘the’, ‘these’, ‘them’, ‘when’, and ‘where’, etc. on a day-to-day basis?
All of these words are typed in Dvorak without any lateral finger movement, and only two letters outside the home eight.
'ls' is, however, awkward to type. That's why I alias it with 'd'; problem solved.
It is much more efficient to ride the momentum of a single arm or wrist stroke and type a combo rather than just one key.
This is not my experience:
An example of this is the word OPERATION. If you were to type this in Dvorak, you could type it as o-pe-r-a-t-io-n where each grouping is a hand stroke–a total of 7 hand strokes.
The letters 'pe' are the slowest typed for me when typing 'operation'. I strongly prefer alternation, as the finger on the opposite hand can be lined up on the upcoming key just as the current key is being typed. Having to move the hand around for keys that are on one side slows things down.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the norman layout here. I consider it to be an improvement over colmak and workman.
Using it on my ergodox (and I know another relatively prominent geek doing the same), and really enjoying it.
There was another that was truly optimized for use Coders, that is not Dvorak based. It had the Option key (⌥) as part of its modifiers. I assume it was called something like the coders layout? I don't recall. If any one can recall it, that would be awesome.
I used it for some time and I quite liked it, more than Colemak. I was reaching 80-90 wpm (I'm about 140-150 wpm on QWERTY). However English is not my native language and since QGMLWY is optimized for English, it wasn't a viable alternative for me in long run. Interestingly, even though I quit typing on QGMLWY long ago, when I occassionally switch to that layout (I still have it installed), I'm able to type on it. Muscular memory dies hard. I do make typos, but I feel that if I returned to practice, I'd pick it up again quickly.
The Norman layout [1] beats Workman at it's own metrics (or so it says on the tin), and from brief experimentation makes more sense to me.
I've always wanted to try an alternate layout, and this post led me to find minimak [2]. I'm typing with it right now and really enjoying the similarity to qwerty (only 4 keys changed) with reduced movement, plus 99% of my shortcuts remain the same.
I'm tempted to try out minimak. My only concern is that... do the numbers that get thrown around about percentage improvement only apply to touch typists?
I've never been strict enough with myself to learn touch typing (I still hit 120WPM so speed isn't an issue) and worry that the benefit won't be as obvious.
The metric I lean on the most is the one published by Andong at http://www.andong.co.uk/dvorak/Default.aspx. I guess that's odd since I spent the least amount of time talking about it and put it at the bottom of the page. It is focused on metrics of efficiency and effort. If you wanted speed, you might want to look at things like finger distance and home row usage more closely, in which case Arensito or Colemak might have an edge.
I must confess, since I swapped R and H in revision 2, Workman usually gets the edge on Norman using Workman metrics, depending on the input text. I guess I'll hunt down whatever text revisions are appropriate on normanlayout.info.
I feel like improvements over Colemak are going to be pretty incremental at this point. In this case, there's a pretty big trade-off on leaving home row for the sake of not reaching for the H.
What I'd like to see is some proper innovation like good programmer-usable chorded layouts that work with existing inexpensive hardware (I don't mind buying a good non-ghosting keyboard, but I don't want to pony up a few grand for a Velotype).
Switched to Dvorak after plateau-ing in typing speed and experiencing pain in my hands and wrist. Helped immediately, but what also hleped almost as much was:
- Aliases for frequent shell commands
- Remapping 'caps lock' to 'control' (on US keyboards)
I'm a happy user of the Neo layout. It's very different from QWERTY (or rather German QWERTZ) but optimised for English and German bi- and trigrams as well as programming.
184 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] threadSo when I learned Dvorak, through touch typing, it affected my QWERTY skills exactly not one bit. The only way in which my QWERTY skills are now bad is through attrition, but it's still no problem to accomplish a reasonable percentage of my previous speed. It just comes up pretty rarely that I have to type on QWERTY these days, and if I do for a few minutes it's no problem.
It's as if the two are in completely different areas of my brain, and for anyone wanting to learn Dvorak, then this is a very easy way indeed.
I have one of those old indestructible IBM model M keyboards with removable keycaps. I love that keyboard. I decided I'd try to learn DVORAK and work with it regularly, so I did so. And I realized something: every time I'd work with a keyboard, I _will_ be working with QWERTY. There's no way I would request to an employer that I have a special keyboard just for me, or try to reconfigure software to support it.
So I went back to QWERTY. May not be ideal but I know everyone supports it.
The best part for me was when I first started having dvorak reflexes on a qwerty keyboard.
The point about the keycaps is valid, but ideally you shouldn't be looking at them anyways. Additionally, I learned Dvorak an a QWERTY labeled keyboard, and found that eventually I just associated the labels I saw with what I was actually typing.
Why not?
> or try to reconfigure software to support it.
Why not?
If there's a much better alternative out there that can make you more productive - and Dvorak has been one of those things for me - your employer should be jumping up and down in joy at throwing however many $10 keyboards at you as you're asking for.
There are also plenty of USB devices that convert between the two, or keyboards with hardware switches. Or, of course, in software. I use AutoHotkey, because keyboard layout switching in Windows is completely broken, and it works pretty well.
If that's your excuse for not using Dvorak rather than anything else, you're doing both yourself and your employer a huge disservice, especially if you're going to take that attitude to other things.
I tried switching to Dvorak many moons ago, I'm feeling it may be time to have another crack at an alternative layout, both out of interest in improving efficiency and reducing strain.
I don't know if QWERTY is even a good layout but what does it matter? Isn't the best keyboard layout the one you already know?
Thinking about it now, I can't think of any common digraphs or trigraphs that are inconvenient to type on a qwerty keyboard. Don't fix what ain't broke.
Changing your keyboard layout isn't going to fix bad habits and the things you have to do to stay healthy (stretching, taking breaks, and strengthening).
I also changed my typing style to use my arms to slide my wrists around the keyboard a little rather than overextending fingers, and I rotated my hands inward about 30 degrees (maybe less, never measured it). I still keep about 60-ish WPM with this method, even at 42 years old.
Anyway, I like the Workman layout a lot, especially that the common move for index fingers is down, and the common moves for middle and ring are up. Great thinking!
Yes, this. I've been typing this way my entire computing life (22 years) and have yet to develop symptoms of RSI from typing. (Note: I have developed RSI symptoms from mousing -- and relieved them by using a trackball.)
What does the alternative look like? My google-fu brings me to lots of temperature graphs..
However, just switching keyboard layouts doesn't fix things. I once switched to Colemak for a couple of months. My hands felt better, and typing on my own machine was way more comfortable. But every other keyboard I interacted with made me look like a dude twice my age with some kind of senility disorder.
To really get the benefits of a better layout, you have to not switch, but rather add a new keyboard fluency, while maintaining QWERTY proficiency. That made the cost-benefit equation very different for me... and I went crawling back to my old abusive partner, QWERTY.
Source?
After years of using Colemak (and not practicing QWERTY regularly), I've found that QWERTY is actually getting easier again. I'm not fast with it, but I no longer have to think hard to recall positions or look down at the keyboard. It feels like my brain said "Oh this is how keyboards work now" and rearranged the QWERTY structure in my brain to do Colemak instead. Now after years of having to occasionally use QWERTY, my brain seems to have built a semi-competent second typist, so to speak.
The three most common english digraphs are TH, HE, AN, and they all require moving off the home row to type in qwerty. I consider this an inconvenience, one that doesn't exist in other layouts.
Of course there is a cost to learning a new layout, but if you're probably going to be typing for much of the rest of your life, the cost is very small.
Of course, now I know how to touch-type and I'm quite comfortable with Dvorak, so I'm not sure I could muster the mental energy to switch to this Workman layout, pleasant-looking as it is. The biggest drawback of Dvorak is indeed the L and R keys... but I guess my finger muscles have strengthened or I'm just more used to it now, so it no longer bothers me.
- My laptop keyboard
- My iPhone keyboard
- My iPad keyboard
- Car navigation keyboard
- Keyboard on my Google TV remote control
- Keyboard on copy machine at work
It's somehow impossible to change all those keyboard layouts and if you change a few of them then you will be confused when typing.
Though, now that I think about it, alternating between keyboard layouts is really no different than using a modal editor like vim -- after a while it just becomes second-nature.
(These environmental cues can be funny sometimes - if I use emacs for editing C++, which I do only very rarely, I keep missing out semicolons. Because most of the time, if I'm programming, and my eyes can see emacs, my fingers know I'm using python.)
I'm building a custom mechanical keyboard (with blank keycaps) and I have changed the various function layers several times and had no problems with adjusting to that. It all comes down to the question what you do mostly and how easy you can get used to new layouts both physical and in software.
But, to be fair, typing is (or should be) a tiny fraction of your coding time. Even in Java.
I never learned how to type "properly", i.e. "home-row" typing: my hands rest naturally somewhere between the middle and upper row at maybe 30° angles from the vertical, and some keys I strike with either hand depending on the word (e.g. t/y g/h b/n).
Yet I type faster than most people I know, and have had no RSI issues due to typing almost daily for 22 years. (I have had RSI issues due to using (gripping) a mouse; replacing the mouse with a trackball / no mouse eliminated this.)
This "nontraditional" method of typing leaves my wrists straighter and reduces repetitive motion, to which I credit my fortunate freedom from RSI.
The downside is that I am unable to use so-called "ergonomic" split keyboards, as my fingers are trained to work both sides of the keyboard.
(And I say "ergonomic" in quotes, because while most "ergonomic" keyboards, such as the Kinesis, are designed to reduce movement, my personal experience is that ergonomics is all about making more varied movement.)
Edit: I forgot to mention one of the most important parts: it's incredibly fast once you know what you're doing.
I think ti could still be a good keyboard for phones but they seem to have died off and the layout is patented or something and so there don't seem to be any versions of it for android.
I've seen two problems with alternative keyboard layouts: a) they are not done for programming (keys ~|!<>_-/"' are oddly laid out) or they are not made for international languages (Spanish in my case, for which ñ,á,é,í,ó,ú are difficult to find. Or worse yet (in case of Dvorak) when using an "international" version, the programming-related keys are horribly placed.
Ideally (when I get time to fix it), I'll have a thumb key to hold down and get any programming symbol (optimized to Python for me) on or nearby the home row.
Summary of that article: The 'QWERTY was developed to slow down the typist' story is a lie. There is no serious evidence that Dvorak is a 'better' layout. If you were starting from scratch, there would probably be no advantage choosing one over the other, except that QWERTY is the standard. Retraining is a waste of time.
One of the key quotes:
> The study design directly paralleled the decision that a real firm or a real government agency might face: Is it worthwhile to retrain its present typists? If Strong's study is correct, it is not efficient for current typists to switch to Dvorak. The study also implied that the eventual typing speed would be greater with QWERTY than with Dvorak, although this conclusion was not emphasized.
I have no reason to believe that the Workman layout offers any other advantages.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=438124
I stopped taking that comment remotely seriously when it claimed:
> As a matter of fact, it is a well known and well documented phenomenon in the literature that if you train at close to maximal capacity on the same training regimen for longer than 3 to 4 weeks, you will stop making gains. You'll see big increases the first 3 weeks, and after that, nothing. This is a nervous system effect.
... which most people who have done heavy weight lifting for example can tell you is at best wildly misleading, and at worst, pure, unadulterated bullshit.
To flatten out after 3-4 weeks would take such extreme over-training, at stress levels way beyond what even most high level athletes would normally even able to achieve in training, that it is extremely unrealistic for most people to every experience it. Certainly not "just" by training at something until you feel you can't do any more. At that point most people are not anywhere near a real maximum.
I don't lift to a "training" 1RM (maximum weight I can at any time lift once) every week, much less manage/try to stress myself into a real max. (the reason for distinguishing these, is that it is normal that you can lift up to 10% +/- more in high stress situations like competitions), so maybe what I do don't count in that guys eyes. But I exercise large compound lifts to near failure (that is, until I have good reason to think that I will be unable to complete the next repetition) every workout - 3-4 times a week. So I'll hit my training 5RM, 3RM, 1RM for the various lifts on consecutive weeks. They are reasonably interchangeable. If I feel good enough, I may go for a 1RM to try to set a new personal record even if it's not the "right week".
And see slow but steady improvement for months on end before I shake anything up, and when I do change things, it is mainly for other reasons - some progressions may follow the same program for years. Changing too often does not help - it just confuses you tracking.
Most people are far more likely to run into limitations due to form/technique failures or lack of flexibility that they need to fix than due to any CNS limitations.
Gains do slow down as you get closer to your limits, and you certainly can over-train, but it takes a lot to over-train so badly that you stop seeing gains after 4 weeks even when you massively brutalise major muscle groups on a semi-daily basis. I can't even imagine what you'd need to do to overload your nervous system from typing in that short time-span.
>For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing."
OK, great. What was the name of the paper? Was it even in a peer reviewed article, or was it an op-ed? And when did they say it? The rate of research into keyboard layouts has been a trickle. If they said that in 1975, then it's not particularly useful today.
In fact, there have been a few studies that have in one way or another demonstrated superior qualities of Dvorak:
http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~buzing/Articles/keyboards.pdf
http://atri.misericordia.edu/Papers/Dvorak.php
(admittedly both of those were published after the Reason article, but I'm not going to spend all night looking for pre-1996 articles)
The article also claims that studies show only "a few percentage points" difference between QWERTY and Dvorak. How can this be, when the total typing distance for QWERTY was nearly twice that of Dvorak on Don Quixote?
So why are we seeing quote and number mining, more typical of political discussions, in an article about keyboard layouts? Well, to understand that, we need to understand Reason's bias, and then read the last paragraph.
And then all becomes clear. This isn't about uncovering the truth about ergonomics and keyboard layouts. It's about scoring a few points for the ol' free market. My guess is that one of the authors was having an argument at a party, and someone drunkenly suggested that QWERTY vs. Dvorak was a great example of the free market failing. "This will not stand!" the writer shouted at the sky, and then proceeded to write a five page article about how "nuh uh".
As it turns out, my suspicion was correct: the quote mentioned was from 1977. Unfortunately, that paper's brief mention of keyboard layouts is then based entirely on "Human factors in international keyboard arrangement", which was published in 1975 and does not seem to be available online.
The Fable authors mention fatigue early in the paper, but fail to provide any evidence on this point. Their section on ergonomics focuses exclusively on the question of whether Dvorak is faster.
The typing speed record, while it still existed, was held by a dvorak typist. I can type at 130-140wpm using qwerty and feel like it's almost impossible to go any faster, while it's not uncommon to see dvorak users typing 160wpm+. If anything, the reduction in total finger travel is enormous.
Without seeing some kind of properly conducted scientific test that examines a range of conditions (age, native language, current typing ability on QWERTY, typical typing material, etc) it doesn't seem worth the effort. If Dvorak (or Workman) is that much better, then it's surprising nobody has been able to conduct such a study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Comp...
The advantage of Dvorak is no more "theoretical" than the theory of evolution. Whether it's "worth it" for you to switch is aside from the inherent performance of either layout. I can say that Dvorak is better, while not being worthwhile for you to learn, though it was worthwhile for me.
The last sentence isn't supported by the prior, assuming you want to improve your typing.
Let's say that dvorak and qwerty just as "good"/"bad" and that there would be no advantage choosing one over the other. Then retraining is probably not a waste of time because when retraining you don't pick up bad practices, like you did when you first started to type (not knowing better).
It probably is easier to start from scratch than trying to relearn some subtle parts of something you've done every day for for over a decade. Also, the motivation to learn qwerty better isn't as big compared to dvorak where you are forced to make progress to be able to do anything useful.
Major comfort benefit. Then I re-trained with http://bepo.fr
I got a smaller, but noticeable additional comfort.
My conclusion is that touch typing is more important than layout. Layout is icing on the cake. Not essential for me, but damn useful.
In my experience typing on dvorak is much more comfortable. Speed wise i maybe reached the same level as my qwerty after almost a month but for me the biggest wow factor was the comfort. Your hands are really never twisting, most of the time you are just using the home row. It's like holding a gamepad where all the keys you need are designed to be in just the right position, not having jump and fire mapped to the start and select-button.
In the end i still switched back to qwerty because I'm using way to many other computers than my own throughout a day and need to be fast on all of them.
When people tell me that QWERTY is uncomfortable, slow, etc, I honestly have no idea what they're talking about. For me, the problem is sitting in a chair staring at a screen all day.
Yes, there is, and it's even presented in the article. Finger distance traveled if horrible for QWERTY compared to other layouts.
"Finger distance travelled" is a proper metric. If you have a better one, write an article and see how it does.
The reason is that it's a popular example of path dependence, where previous decisions affect the best possible current choice. This undermines their economic theories (the authors are economists). So don't expect them to be an unbiased source on this.
They also, for example, claim that Windows is the best OS, and that network effects have no impact on people choosing to use it
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hd/the_majority_is_always_wrong/
I've been a fulltime dvorak user for over 10 years. I also tried Colemak but found that many motions felt awkward while using it.
Anyways, I thought I'd give this one a try just for the hell of it. And... so far I am quite pleasantly surprised. I fully memorized the layout in about half an hour. It feels comfortable to type on, just like Dvorak does.
Typed up this comment with the Workman-P layout, and seriously considering switching to it now...
Nope: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-li...
Obviously the claim that it was intended to slow typists down is unlikely. If the layout was rearranged in part to prevent jams, then it would have been rearranged so that nearby letters weren't hit in sequence. Without careful study of ergonomics, one wouldn't necessarily realize that that would slow a typist down. But it would probably prevent jams.
I also found some of the claims made in the paper very odd. They claim that because "SE" and "Z" are easy to mistake in Morse code, that those letters were placed near each other. How this would be helpful eludes me.
------------------->http://www.works23.com
By the way, the jamming problem basically went away with the Remington II. QWERTY was obsolete less than 20 years after its inception.
Oh, and here is the obligatory link: http://www.dvzine.org/
I can't explain why exactly, but this layout just makes sense. Can't wait to try this out.
All of these words are typed in Dvorak without any lateral finger movement, and only two letters outside the home eight.
'ls' is, however, awkward to type. That's why I alias it with 'd'; problem solved.
It is much more efficient to ride the momentum of a single arm or wrist stroke and type a combo rather than just one key.
This is not my experience:
An example of this is the word OPERATION. If you were to type this in Dvorak, you could type it as o-pe-r-a-t-io-n where each grouping is a hand stroke–a total of 7 hand strokes.
The letters 'pe' are the slowest typed for me when typing 'operation'. I strongly prefer alternation, as the finger on the opposite hand can be lined up on the upcoming key just as the current key is being typed. Having to move the hand around for keys that are on one side slows things down.
https://normanlayout.info/
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization
Take not of the script you can download to pipe your scripts to, and learn what is the best layout you actually need:
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?requirements
Here's a list of them:
http://deskthority.net/wiki/Keyboard_layouts
There was another that was truly optimized for use Coders, that is not Dvorak based. It had the Option key (⌥) as part of its modifiers. I assume it was called something like the coders layout? I don't recall. If any one can recall it, that would be awesome.
I've always wanted to try an alternate layout, and this post led me to find minimak [2]. I'm typing with it right now and really enjoying the similarity to qwerty (only 4 keys changed) with reduced movement, plus 99% of my shortcuts remain the same.
[1] http://normanlayout.info
[2] http://minimak.org
I've never been strict enough with myself to learn touch typing (I still hit 120WPM so speed isn't an issue) and worry that the benefit won't be as obvious.
What I'd like to see is some proper innovation like good programmer-usable chorded layouts that work with existing inexpensive hardware (I don't mind buying a good non-ghosting keyboard, but I don't want to pony up a few grand for a Velotype).
- Aliases for frequent shell commands - Remapping 'caps lock' to 'control' (on US keyboards)
Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Neo
Or take a good look at its multilevel layout here: http://neo-layout.org/ ("Ebene 3" is especially interesting for programmers…)