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

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

#41

Post by kesslern »

dmaa wrote: post #23

I was motivated to learn Dvorak in order to get rid of bad keyboard habits. And happily stuck to it. Not sure that I type any faster, but it feels somehow as a more rhytmical, much more pleasant experience.

This mirrors my experience. When I was a teenager I could type rather quickly using only two fingers on each hand. I figured I'd be typing a lot my whole life and it'd be easier to re-train proper typing habits on a whole new layout rather than trying to adapt my QWERTY habits I picked up while playing Runescape in elementary school.

It took about a month to learn, but on the side it largely fixed my QWERTY habits too, and I can freely switch between them pretty easily.

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

#42

Post by TheRoque »

vintermann wrote: post #16

I don't have a particular beef in the great Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate. But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another. Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's op…

My first layout was AZERTY (french one), and I added Colemak 4 years ago. I am slightly faster in AZERTY compared to Colemak still (100wpm/90wpm), I never lost the AZERTY, the key is to just use both all the time. I have a shortcut and I alternate constantly, because I need to write french, or because I wanna code.

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

#43

Post by dylan604 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #35
k__ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ke…

> 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.

As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. It's like a novice golfer complaining that it hurts their hips when they rotate through the swing, or a tennis player complaining that trying to add spin with a wrist twist feels weird, or any millions of other example of "feels weird without practice". Hell, most people can't do the most basic of yoga poses without practice. Muscles need to be stretched and trained into doing what you want them to do. Once they are, all of the complaints go away and things feel normal.

Is QWERTY the most efficient, no. But as someone else commented, speed is not my issue. Thinking what needs to be typed is definitely my speed regulator. If I were to just do basic text dictation or re-typing while reading a direct source, my speeds increase dramatically.

I find that most typing complaints are from those that never had formal typing instruction and are self taught with games or similar. I was fortunate to have one full year of typing while in high school, and it is by far the most used class instruction I've ever had.

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

#44

Post by anon84873628 »

angiolillo wrote: post #29
vintermann wrote: post #16

I don't have a particular beef in the great Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate. But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another. Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's op…

> I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... Perhaps, but as someone who has been proficient in QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, and who now uses Colemak-DH I can say that I leave my phone and small tablet keyboards on QWERTY. The separation of common letters in QWERTY forces your finger to move farther when swiping, but that provides a bit more dist…

Same here. I adopted Dvorak as a youth, so when I got my first smartphone I put the keyboard in Dvorak.

That only lasted a few days for two reasons:

1) What you said about the mistakes. It is so much easier to fat finger in a way that makes autocorrect clueless.

2) The muscle memory doesn't translate at all anyway. Obvious in retrospect, but typing with your thumbs is a completely unrelated skill to touch typing. Turns out both live separately and equally in my brain.

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

#45

Post by anon84873628 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #36

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 e…

Not only are Ctl+C and Ctl+V not next to each other, but they move next to other shortcuts that are annoying to mis-hit, like the one to close a browser tab...

Remapping the shortcuts is possible but too much effort; I just live with it.

Fortunately, modern video games seem to understand different layouts and automatically change their input to match the actual finger placement rather than what they QWERTY letters would be.

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

#46

Post by anon84873628 »

lagniappe wrote: post #26
comrade1234 wrote: post #2

Yeah but with QWERTY you can type out the word 'typewriter' using only the top row of the keyboard; so if you're a typewriter salesman QWERTY is the way to go. (Been using Dvorak for 25 years now. Doesn't matter what the physical keyboard layout is - currently I'm using a Swiss layout)

There are no more typewriter salesmen.

I believe this was a reference to one of the origin myths discussed in the article.

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

#47

Post by anon84873628 »

opan wrote: post #9
antiquark wrote: post #5

In a tech support scenario, Dvorak is always troublesome. You sit down to type at someone's computer, and random characters start popping out.

People make this argument a lot, but you should optimize for the most common situation before an edge case. I am usually at my own PC/keyboard and I greatly enjoy my weird keyboard and layout. I can't type qwerty as well as I used to, but I rarely have to. (If I had to do it more I'd probably retrain it to make switching back and forth less troublesome). It reminds me also of people who swear by using default setting…

The only time I have to use QWERTY is the occasional touch screen kiosk or something. And you're not exactly touch typing an essay in that scenario.

Back in the in-person days when sharing a keyboard with a coworker was more common, you have the very handy switcher icon in the taskbar.

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

#48

Post by WorldMaker »

vintermann wrote: post #16

I don't have a particular beef in the great Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate. But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another. Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's op…

> Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...

This seems to be an interesting place where the type bar optimization problem of the earliest typewriters came back in a new weirder form. For swiping keyboards to work the words need recognizably different shapes and for irregular pairs to be closer together (just as with the type bar problem) and so QWERTY is very strongly and weirdly optimized for swiping even though it seems very unlikely its inventors could have ever imagined swipe typing.

I can anecdotally admit that touch typing and swipe typing are extremely different muscle memory. I touch type Colemak and swipe type QWERTY. (One of the things that prompted the move to Colemak for touch typing was that I needed to unlearn a ton of bad muscle memory from self-taught/self-"optimized" QWERTY, as it was inflaming RSI/RSI-like symptoms, so the loss of "fluency" there was a requirement/feature for me.)

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

#49

Post by WorldMaker »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #36

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 e…

It is one of the things I like about Colemak that it takes into account QWERTY's dominance in computers and intentionally doesn't move a lot a shortcut keys and punctuation. Semicolon is the most obvious punctuation mark that does move, most of the rest stay where they are. The big list of shortcut keys that stay the same place includes AZXCVBMWQ. XCV not moving is especially a big deal, as you also mention copy and paste as key shortcut examples.

In general Colemak doesn't move keys to radically far from their QWERTY positions (many stay on the same finger, even), so I've heard using it and QWERTY together isn't too bad. In my personal case, I had a terrible QWERTY form and realized I don't have to do anything but "hunt-and-peck" in QWERTY when using other people's machines. I may feel a bit like an idiot doing it, but it turns out, most people don't even notice if you touch type or hunt and peck (partly because so many more people hunt and peck than you tend to realize; even in a world where QWERTY touch typing has to be taught in schools, I think it is still a skill like Cursive that you think everyone else uses once you learn it, but you forget how hard it was to learn in the first place). It's more "my guilt" that I "use QWERTY poorly" than anything anyone else actually cares about.

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

#50

Post by WorldMaker »

grim_io wrote: post #7

I've tried to switch to Dvorak, but after a year I was just tired of the universally shitty default keybinding experience. Either customize every app to better match the layout, or live with the afterthought UX. Oh, and gaming. Better get used to switching to qwerty.

In gaming, my solution to "I'm tired of always rebinding keys and/or finding games that don't support easy key rebinding" became "I'll just play with an Xbox controller by default". My home is full of Xbox controllers anyway and PC game support for them has been really good for a while (and even better now post-Steam Deck).

I know it is not everyone's favorite solution, but it is fun for me.

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