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I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

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Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#101

Post by busterarm »

oarsinsync wrote: post #96
userbinator wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have observed many others who complained about their hands hurting after typing for a short time, and the one thing that stands out is they all seem to have an unusually "tense" posture and almost "attack" the keyboard whenever they type, striking the keys much harder than they need to and making excessively abrupt movements. They also wonder why they can't type very fast and tire quickly, while others like me can…

> Use a softer keyboard if you can This. I dislike mechanical keyboards largely for this reason. Apple's "modern" laptop keyboards (pre-butterfly) are the best I've ever used. For me, they have the right amount of pressure required and key travel to be able to type very fast (>100wpm) at very low effort.

Ever tried topre?

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#102

Post by thecreamedcorn »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #52

For computer programming, a rarely mentioned advantage of Dvorak is that it makes typing underscores much easier. For lisping, hyphens. That's a great choice of a home row punctuation key.

I used to dread snake case before I switched to dvorak

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#103

Post by melling »

blunte wrote: post #70
coldtea wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a sidenote: we worry about "singularity AI" and expect "SAE level 5 driving cars"... How about we solve the much easier problem of "typing much fewer words"? We don't even have a good auto-complete story yet in most IDEs, even less so a general purpose predictor that puts whole worlds at our disposal as we type.

I'm not convinced that auto-complete will ever become more useful than the costs it imposes on the user. Even when the suggestion is correct, it still causes a mental interrupt to shift from thinking about whatever virtual problem you were solving to validating some UI behavior. To me it's just another source of distraction. If auto-complete could reach the point where it was near perfect, then it should probably be…

I’m quite capable of dealing with the mental breaks and prefer an editor that can save me some typing. The only improvement for me would be able to say “switch statement (3 cases, no default)”

swi

switch {

case :
default:
}

Actually, if I could say “switch on enum X” then have all cases generated, that would be a huge productivity gain.

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#104

Post by maskros »

busterarm wrote: post #97
cecilpl2 wrote: post #11

I've been typing dvorak primarily for about 20 years, also since I was in high school, and I highly recommend it. I agree that switching is a pain in the ass. It will make you essentially unable to type for about 2-4 weeks. Ctrl-C/V/X is a valid concern. I fixed it by mapping mouse buttons to copy/paste, and also getting an Advantage2 Kinesis into which I've programming custom keybinding for Undo/Redo/Copy/Cut/Paste.…

I've been on a computer pretty much 12-16 hours a day for 30 years now. Dvorak only makes sense to me if you only have to use a single keyboard/workstation for all of your computing time consistently. On my own I have four different machines/OS and I frequently have to type at other peoples'. I spent 10 years in Dvorak, Colemak and a variety of modified Colemak layouts before settling back on qwerty. I never noticed…

"Using vim with dvorak is a real pain."

That is not my experience, at all.

Then again, I don't use Vim like notepad with "hjkl" instead of arrow keys... All the powerful movement and editing commands (b, w, $, 0, /foo, *, #, %, cw, dd, ^], ^t, cib, ., etc.) work just as well with dvorak as with qwerty.

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#105

Post by flemming_geir »

blunte wrote: post #69

Considering the author did not begin the Dvorak journey as a touch typist, their experience doesn't carry much weight with me. I took the time to learn Dvorak (years ago), and I found it very much nicer for typing prose. However, I couldn't code with it (and I didn't try a code-focused version). Perhaps I should have tried different Dvorak variations to find one that was still better than QWERTY for writing while als…

> Worse yet, their lost space is taken by less frequently used keys.

Which keys are these in my international layout and how often do I use them?

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#106

Post by maskros »

busterarm wrote: post #101
oarsinsync wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use a softer keyboard if you can This. I dislike mechanical keyboards largely for this reason. Apple's "modern" laptop keyboards (pre-butterfly) are the best I've ever used. For me, they have the right amount of pressure required and key travel to be able to type very fast (>100wpm) at very low effort.

Ever tried topre?

Topre are really nice, but for softer keys, Cherry MX reds are possibly even better.

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#107

Post by JdeBP »

blunte wrote: post #69

Considering the author did not begin the Dvorak journey as a touch typist, their experience doesn't carry much weight with me. I took the time to learn Dvorak (years ago), and I found it very much nicer for typing prose. However, I couldn't code with it (and I didn't try a code-focused version). Perhaps I should have tried different Dvorak variations to find one that was still better than QWERTY for writing while als…

> return [is] reduced in size and pushed further out of reach

Actually, that's how the return key originally was on the PC/XT model F keyboard, except that it was only 1 unit wide on both rows. It actually changed in the opposite direction with the PC/AT, and largely only on the U.S. variants if memory serves. The non-U.S. variants retain the PC/XT's original double-row return key, and make it wider (and make the keys next to it narrower, down to 1 unit).

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#108

Post by ZeroGravitas »

coldtea wrote: post #15

It's not yes. It was non-scientifically created and self-promoted to hell from the inventor in the early 20th century, for commercial interests. And there are a lot of myths about Qwerty too: https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html Not to mention that for programmers it's even more complicated. Most of our symbols we use most of the time (e.g. { } ; -, _) have nothing to do with DVORAK vs QWERTY, and the distri…

Worth noting that article is written from the perspective of the market never being wrong. They're not keyboard or ergonomic experts talking from that experience, they're economists who believe the market works in a certain way and if Dvorak is better than Qwerty and still failed then their economic theories would be wrong. So they set out to prove its not better, not to investigate whether it was better or not.

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#109

Post by eloisant »

oarsinsync wrote: post #95
cecilpl2 wrote: post #11

I've been typing dvorak primarily for about 20 years, also since I was in high school, and I highly recommend it. I agree that switching is a pain in the ass. It will make you essentially unable to type for about 2-4 weeks. Ctrl-C/V/X is a valid concern. I fixed it by mapping mouse buttons to copy/paste, and also getting an Advantage2 Kinesis into which I've programming custom keybinding for Undo/Redo/Copy/Cut/Paste.…

Counterpoint to the people agreeing here at having a much higher dvorak typing speed vs qwerty speed, I've never tried dvorak, but I have a >100wpm typing speed on qwerty (every time I do a challenge with people at work on typeracer.com, I flag their bot-check validator/captcha process) having learnt to touch type as a teenager juggling multiple msn-messenger conversations without wanting the counterparty to be aware

I've been using Dvorak for about 5 years, then went back to qwerty because I'm doing all my typing on a laptop and I'm not 100% blind-typing. I also stopped because dvorak is not great for programming; you don't get as much as the benefits when you're not writing texts in English (as I did during my Ph.D, writing research articles) but you suffer because all shortcuts are designed to be convenient on a qwerty.

I still miss dvorak, but for me it's not about typing speed as much as "hand movement". On a dvorak, most typing happens on the center row, on the stronger fingers, so I find it much more confortable to type. On a qwerty I feel like I'm constantly streching my hands around the keyboard while on a dvorak it's much more static.

Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that

#110

Post by JoelTheSuperior »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #17

I'm disappointed that this article is no different from all the other articles on keyboard layouts that I've ever encountered and ignores non-English uses. Obviously, a post written in English has no good reason describing a Norwegian-specific alternative to QWERTY, but it still manages to ignore half of the population of English-speaking people by not taking into account using multiple languages on the same keyboard…

I think it depends largely on what OS you're sing. On macOS it's really a non-issue because it handles alt + whatever key remarkably well. Windows can be a huge pain however.
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