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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

#161

Post by sampo »

blunte wrote: post #115
Kiro wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an aside, why why why do people use the international keyboard layout? That's like saying "why do characters outside standard English exist?". I honestly don't understand what you're complaining about. People use international keyboard layouts because they want to write another language than English.

UK and Netherlands use an international keyboard with a tilda ~ key where the return key should be, and a backslash key where the left shift should be. To hit return requires actually moving the right hand to reach return. How often is that tilda needed? That is a poor trade. Moving the shift key away is even worse, because it's a modifier key. Now you cannot press shift with your left pinky finger while also reachin…

> UK and Netherlands use an international keyboard with a tilda ~ key where the return key should be, and a backslash key where the left shift should be.

That is actually the original IBM PC XT layout from 1981: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Model_F_XT.png

Then in 1984 USA moved to their own layout with the PC AT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Model_F_AT.png

But the rest of the world stayed with the original.

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

#162

Post by dietr1ch »

maskros wrote: post #104
busterarm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's people that remap those on vim, but I found that doing so may force you to start remapping all the keys on every vim-inspired application and plug in.

It happens that "J" and "K" are next to each other and easily reachable, and that "H" and "L" still are 2 columns away and "h" is on the left, so using them in their new position it's not that bad.

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

#163

Post by ustamills »

4thaccount wrote: post #138
busterarm wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or you can get RSI in just a few years (right out of college) using QWERTY. I switched to an ergonomic keyboard and it has helped a lot, but it flares up on occasion....I've considered Dvorak on several occasions, but doubt I have the time to be that inefficient for a few weeks. I also use Vim when testing some of our software and would hate to have to relearn all the things I only know my muscle memory now.

I can touch type both qwerty and Dvorak and have been for almost 30 years. Dvorak definitely saved me from RSI. I was genuinely losing my hand use due to a data entry job in college. As a developer, I would not have been able to continue, successfully, without Dvorak.

I have never been that much faster on Dvorak because I keep stopping to think. Keyboard can't help that.

Beyond all that, Dvorak just feels good to use.

Although phones & other qwerty biased situations are a pain, I still think Dvorak was worth it.

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

#165

Post by WorldMaker »

ustamills wrote: post #163
4thaccount wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can get RSI in just a few years (right out of college) using QWERTY. I switched to an ergonomic keyboard and it has helped a lot, but it flares up on occasion....I've considered Dvorak on several occasions, but doubt I have the time to be that inefficient for a few weeks. I also use Vim when testing some of our software and would hate to have to relearn all the things I only know my muscle memory now.

I can touch type both qwerty and Dvorak and have been for almost 30 years. Dvorak definitely saved me from RSI. I was genuinely losing my hand use due to a data entry job in college. As a developer, I would not have been able to continue, successfully, without Dvorak. I have never been that much faster on Dvorak because I keep stopping to think. Keyboard can't help that. Beyond all that, Dvorak just feels good to use…

Similarly, I credit a switch to Colemak in grad school with narrowly avoiding an RSI that year.

I couldn't touch type QWERTY, and realized I needed to relearn touch typing from first principles and wasn't going to go through all that effort just to relearn QWERTY.

> Beyond all that, Dvorak just feels good to use.

I mention this a lot. Even if the extra efficiencies touted by Dvorak and Colemak are marginal at best (and the evidence goes both ways), the interesting part is that they still feel better / more "fun" to type. There are some words with interesting rolls in Colemak that are just "fun", as silly of a thing to be excited about as that can be. For instance, "start" in Colemak is two left-handed inward rolls on the homerow, like idly tapping your fingers against a desk.

A big thing that convinced me about Colemak in grad school, and help push me to make the switch, was that the typing tutor had none of that asdf;jkjk nonsense of touch typing in QWERTY, from the first four letters on the home row in the "strong positions", S T N E you are spelling full words and never typing nonsense (tents, Tennessee, …). Touch typing training is never "fun", but it is much easier to force yourself to relearn when it answers "when would I ever use this particular exercise" immediately out of the gate.

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

#166

Post by blunte »

melling wrote: post #103
blunte wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. I guess it depends a lot on the language.

I use mostly Python, Elixir, and Clojure (my unnaturally desperate love, which I don't use much). For those languages, the syntax is either less verbose (python/clojure) or less predictable (elixir).

If I were doing Java or C/C++, I would probably learn to love templates and expansions.

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

#167

Post by blunte »

valerij wrote: post #145
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…

> why why why do people use the international keyboard layout speaking as someone who switched from DE_DE to US_INT_W_DEAD_KEYS it was to actually programming easier. i did not need special german keys (äöüß) often while coding so having programming relevant `[]{}'\"|` at their expense, while still being able to access language specific symbols via dead keys, was preferable. international layout also gives me the abi…

Sorry. So that's my blind spot... English-focused keyboard needs. When I encounter a UK or Dutch international keyboard, I find them almost identical to US keyboard except for a couple of keys; so the layout makes no sense to me.

For people who need more modifiers and accents, my experience is less relevant.

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

#168

Post by userbinator »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #136
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.

> butterfly Using this worries me so much that I'm just planting a ticking time bomb of RSI. I a slight ache every time I use it because you have to hit the keys so hard to ensure they register and the stop is so abrupt as paper thin plastic smacks against the metal. Previous gen feels so gentle compared to it, and this is coming from someone who likes tactile mech keyboards.

because you have to hit the keys so hard to ensure they register and the stop is so abrupt as paper thin plastic smacks against the metal

I've heard others similarly complaining that the key travel being too low is like the feeling of running barefoot on a hard surface, and I agree --- on a good keyboard the actuation travel has to be very low to not tire the fingers, and a small tactile bump there is not bad, but the total travel should be relatively long and "bouncy" at the end to cushion the momentum of the fingers.

All rubber-dome keyboards are not alike either; some are stiffer than others, and some have higher actuation travel --- contrary to common advice, you don't have to "bottom out" a rubber dome switch if the inner membrane-actuating protrusion is long and "squishy" enough. Once it touches the membrane the switch actuates, but there's still a cushioning end-stop effect as the protrusion continues to deform.

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

#169

Post by WorldMaker »

audunw wrote: post #120
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…

> That said, there are better researched layouts that DVORAK, with actual modern research behind them. From what I've read the difference between from Qwerty to Dvorak is much bigger than from Dvorak to the more optimized layouts. They add marginal improvements. As you say yourself, no layout can be perfect in every context. So since Dvorak is built in to most OSs these days, it's a very good compromise. Dvorak isn't…

Colemak made it into out-of-the-box Linux and BSD keyboard layout lists and from there to macOS and even iOS, Android. The obvious key holdout left is Windows and that's probably something like just a handful of User Voice votes from making the cut.

It has some small advantages to Dvorak as a good "compromise" for programmers in that a lot of the major shortcut keys stay in the same place (the left-hand bunch of AZXCVB, especially), and almost all the punctuation (the big obvious move being ; moves up a key out of the home row).

(I also like that it has a better "wheel of fortune" score than Dvorak, not that it hugely matters, but all but L in RSTLNE are on the home row, and L is in one of the easiest reaches [up on the right, where QWERTY has U]. Not everyone believes that crowd-sourced wisdom of a decades old game show is useful efficiency data, but it's still an amusing thing to take into account.)

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

#170

Post by WorldMaker »

coldtea wrote: post #33
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…

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.

Recent-ish builds of Windows 10, I forget where the cutoff is (might be as old as last March's release?) have an option to turn on the mobile keyboard autocomplete predictor above the insertion point when using even a regular (hardware) keyboard.

(Search for autocorrect in Settings and scroll down to hardware keyboard.)

It's interesting to try to use. I type faster than it is useful to me.

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