Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

aresluna.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 105 posts

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#31

Post by lgunsch »

gwd wrote: post #19
pmarreck wrote: post #14

Decided to try Colemak-DH after reading this article and googling: https://andre-wagner.medium.com/colemak-dh-my-journey-to-cha... The only problem I can find is that the only Mac mod I can find with this layout that is not completely custom has an annoying and minor difference with the Windows and Linux versions of the same type of mod.

So did you actually get any faster? I switched to Colemak pro'lly 15 years ago, and while my fingers certainly move around a lot less, I don't think my top speed on typeracer.com has improved over what I was able to do on QWERTY before switching, nor do I seem to make fewer errors. On the whole 1) I do like Colemak a bit better, but 2) I don't think it was worth the switch, although 3) it's certainly not worth a swit…

I'm happy I switched to Colemak around 13 years ago. Mostly due to elbow pain. I do find it made a difference there.

In general, I do type faster than before, and faster than many people around me. That's likely only because I actually had to practice.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#32

Post by goosedragons »

IAmBroom wrote: post #18

According to this article, "a 1936 book called Typewriting Behavior" made "comparisons of the new keyboard to a jeep and the old one to an ox". Jeeps were invented in 1941. Some origin theories of the name date back as far as WW I (but for recruits, not vehicles). If the author truly used this comparison in 1936 it would be a tremendous citation for the word's origin. Or perhaps the comparison was made in a later edi…

Popeye introduced a character named "Eugene the Jeep" in 1936. Could have also been the origin of Jeep for the vehicle.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#33

Post by ThisNameIsTaken »

gwd wrote: post #19
pmarreck wrote: post #14

Decided to try Colemak-DH after reading this article and googling: https://andre-wagner.medium.com/colemak-dh-my-journey-to-cha... The only problem I can find is that the only Mac mod I can find with this layout that is not completely custom has an annoying and minor difference with the Windows and Linux versions of the same type of mod.

So did you actually get any faster? I switched to Colemak pro'lly 15 years ago, and while my fingers certainly move around a lot less, I don't think my top speed on typeracer.com has improved over what I was able to do on QWERTY before switching, nor do I seem to make fewer errors. On the whole 1) I do like Colemak a bit better, but 2) I don't think it was worth the switch, although 3) it's certainly not worth a swit…

As a Colemak (DH) user for ~5 years, I share these experiences.

I did a monkeytype benchmark before switching, and I still barely hit the same numbers, so it's certainly not a magic fix for more typing speed. What is left then is the argument concerning ergonomics: which I am not sure is worth the trade-offs.

Every time I now sit at another's computer I am unable to type without glancing at the keyboard. Moreover, I am trying to switch to (n)vim, and am completely at a loss navigating, as the hjkl keys are now scattered across the keyboard -- beating their purpose.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#34

Post by mechanicum »

IAmBroom wrote: post #18

According to this article, "a 1936 book called Typewriting Behavior" made "comparisons of the new keyboard to a jeep and the old one to an ox". Jeeps were invented in 1941. Some origin theories of the name date back as far as WW I (but for recruits, not vehicles). If the author truly used this comparison in 1936 it would be a tremendous citation for the word's origin. Or perhaps the comparison was made in a later edi…

I think they mixed up their sources. The jeep/ox comparison appears to be from the 1944 US Navy report: https://archive.org/details/APracticalExperimentInSimplified...

(Typewriting Behavior, for the curious: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74878/page/n11...)

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#35

Post by alpaca128 »

k__ wrote: post #17
alpaca128 wrote: post #13

The real problem with current keyboards is the physical arrangement of the keys. Staggered rows instead of columns make them less ergonomic, the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard. The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text. While the weak pinky finger has to cover more keys than the others.…

"The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text." To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.

That key makes up about 15% in English text, and it could be covered by 10% of fingers but instead it's 20%. Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. Altough I haven't looked at actual keypress stats and how those are distributed across fingers. Might be interesting to look into.

On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#36

Post by Ajedi32 »

I tried Dvorak for a while but gave up after I realized:

1. Not only are the key positions for typing different, but all the keyboard shortcuts I know needed to be re-learned too, and were often in much worse locations (as just one of many problems, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are no longer next to each other)

2. I still need to be good with QWERTY because basically everything uses it.

It's a shame, because it does seem more efficient (you can type a lot of words without having to move your fingers from the home row), but I just felt like it was too much work for too little gain.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#37

Post by gwd »

lgunsch wrote: post #31
gwd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did you actually get any faster? I switched to Colemak pro'lly 15 years ago, and while my fingers certainly move around a lot less, I don't think my top speed on typeracer.com has improved over what I was able to do on QWERTY before switching, nor do I seem to make fewer errors. On the whole 1) I do like Colemak a bit better, but 2) I don't think it was worth the switch, although 3) it's certainly not worth a swit…

I'm happy I switched to Colemak around 13 years ago. Mostly due to elbow pain. I do find it made a difference there. In general, I do type faster than before, and faster than many people around me. That's likely only because I actually had to practice.

Right -- see, I basically maxed out "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" in high school. (That is, I practiced with it regularly until it couldn't find any particular problem with my typing, and resorted to giving me practice typing symbols, at which point I got bored and quit.) What prompted me to look at Colemak (and mechanical keyboards) was when some friend/colleagues at work were playing with typeracer.com, and I clocked in at 120WPM on one of the first races. One of my friends didn't really believe it and asked me to repeat the performance in front of him, which I did.

That made me think, maybe if I switched to Colemak and got a better keyboard, I could go even faster. I did both; and though my forearms certainly feel less tired on the odd occasion that I have long bouts of continuous typing to do, I'm neither noticeably faster nor more accurate.

So, both our anecdata seem to match the conclusion of the 1956 study mentioned in this article: That it was the intentional practice that primarily resulted in the improvements, not the keyboard layout; intentional practice on QWERTY would probably yield similar speed improvements to practice on Colemak or Dvorak.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#38

Post by mechanicum »

fsiefken wrote: post #4

I feel the Dvorak layout has a bug. In both English and my native language, the letter 'I' occurs much more frequently than 'U', so I've switched the 'U' and 'I' keys. Does anyone know why this issue seems to have been overlooked by August Dvorak & William Dealey, or was it by design? Perhaps it's to make typing the relatively common English digraph 'ou' a comfortable inward roll, but for me, that doesn't outweigh st…

It’s common niggle but, as far as I know, nobody is sure of the precise rationale for placing every key, only the broad explanations of the layout that Dvorak published and promoted. The layout wasn’t based only on letter frequency but they attempted to account also for bigram frequency, frequency of repetition within words, frequency with which words are used, and with an objective of rhythmic alternation between hands.

Consider also that it was developed in the 20s and 30s. Nowadays you could throw some moderately hefty compute at almost everything of note written in the English language and come back to an error-free analysis after lunch, but who knows how representative was the corpus they analysed, painstakingly and manually. It might have made perfect sense with their data set.

Ultimately, the English language didn’t evolve to be easy to type, there will always be compromises somewhere, and the English of today isn’t the English of a century ago anyway. I imagine you’d get quite a different layout if you based it on Gen Z text messages or something.

Personally, I can’t help but note that Dvorak’s first name was August.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#39

Post by zibzob »

For everyone complaining about the issues with app shortcuts when using Dvorak, the solution is to use a keymap that switches to QWERTY when you hold down the CTRL or CMD key. It is a bit unfortunate that common CLI commands (`ls` is the worst offender) and semicolon usage in programming languages are designed around QWERTY, but I still prefer Dvorak.

Re: Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY (2023)

#40

Post by horacemorace »

1123581321 wrote: post #22
gwd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did you actually get any faster? I switched to Colemak pro'lly 15 years ago, and while my fingers certainly move around a lot less, I don't think my top speed on typeracer.com has improved over what I was able to do on QWERTY before switching, nor do I seem to make fewer errors. On the whole 1) I do like Colemak a bit better, but 2) I don't think it was worth the switch, although 3) it's certainly not worth a swit…

I type Dvorak around my old qwerty speed. It’s probably not possible to be faster. For really fast qwerty typists, the brain has multiple fingers with the right hand contortions in motion, hitting keys in order, just in time. Dvorak eliminated hand pain by reducing motion, but it didn’t give my brain the ability to orchestrate my fingers with tighter timing.

The less-movement thing is also why I switched. Wrist pain instantly gone and never returned. Qwerty is torturous.
Post reply on HN