Forget Dvorak. I have enough trouble going back and forth between the US and UK/Euro QWERTY layouts!
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
#62I’ve been typing dvorak for the past three years. I can touch type and switch between dvorak and qwerty.
I program in dvorak (vim), but my typing is much faster on qwerty(80 wpm on dvorak and 100 wpm on qwerty).
I also need to type in korean from time to time.
Trying to fit this configuration onto any specific new machine has been a pain. I’ve used karabiner, ukulele and what not for mac, and autohotkey for pc. I forget what I used for linux, but that was also a pita.
So dvorak was useful in speeding up my qwerty, but tbh most of that time was not really for utility that I experience now, but rather for the enjoyment of honing my tools. (The work never ended up getting done :)
So take what you will, I just think thinking about things you take for granted and taking the time to reprogram your mind (and sadistically challenge yourself) is not such a horrible use of your time...!
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#63I'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…
As a Dvorak user who regularly writes other languages, this little gem is my normal layout: `setxkbmap -layout us -variant dvorak-alt-intl -option compose:caps`. Now AltGr + characters around a, o and e in combination with just a couple compose keys (Compose, a, e for æ, for example) serve most of my Norwegian, German and very occasional French needs. Most compose keys are also really easy to remember, since they resemble the building blocks of the characters they result in.
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#64I find it surprising that a person who does not know touch typing would be interested of Dvorak in the first place; I mean for hunt'n'peck the layout does not really matter that much so they could have not understood the relative benefit of Dvorak all that well, and on the other hand learning touch typing (in any layout) would be the obvious first step. But I guess there is all sorts of people. If you are interested…
I was actually surprised by the level of support for Colemak, when I switched two years ago. OSX and Windows support it out of the box, even my Kinesis Freestyle Edge has a preset layout available on the website. The only real annoyance from the software side is videogames defaulting keyboard controls to WASD, but that’s hardly a significant issue. The real problems are on the hardware side; one has to either use blank keys or to hack something up. Even in the mechanical-keyboard communities there is no real attention for non-Qwerty users.
Colemak is awesome, btw. My hands and wrists feel even more relaxed than they did when I first switched to “split keyboards”.
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#65I'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 now use Dvorak German Type II for more than 12 years.
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#66I've been a colemak user for a number of years, which has similar pros and cons. I would say that it is not worth it for most people to change. You could get a lot of the benefit of colemak, with none of the pain, by converting your caps lock key into a second backspace. The benefits are that it is slightly more comfortable, and you'll have less people trying to use your computer. Also, prior to learning colemak, I h…
I’ve spent more years of my life now typing in Colemak than I ever did typing in QWERTY: I switched in about 2004 or so when I was touch-typing full sentences in the dark playing video games and my fingers started hurting even with a natural keyboard. After the switch, the hurt went away and hasn’t returned. I can still touch-type in QWERTY, but oddly enough it depends on the keyboard make and model and my familiarit…
Uhm, last I checked Colemak was available in Windows, but maybe I misremember...?
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#67It doesn't look like anyone has yet addressed my biggest PRO for switching to Dvorak. It has pretty much healed my RSI. QWERTY had caused a huge drain on my ability to type. I was at risk for being unable to continue my work if the pain progressed. I made the admittedly-difficult switch to Dvorak and that went away almost immediately. My typing speed is on-par with what it was with QWERTY. I can type out conversation…
Through my 20years of typing and texting with terrible posture and exercise habits, and bouts of debilitating RSI where I immobilized my arm, and experimenting with Dvorak, I found that the main way to reduce my RSI symptoms was to stop hanging out in areas where people talked about RSI. Even now, just getting into the thread makes my wrists tingle
Yeah, a lot of that seems to be anecdotal evidence. Similar to people claiming mechanical keyboards are better for your wrists, which I find very hard to believe, given how long is the key distance in such keyboards and how much pressure you need to press the keys in such.
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#68It doesn't look like anyone has yet addressed my biggest PRO for switching to Dvorak. It has pretty much healed my RSI. QWERTY had caused a huge drain on my ability to type. I was at risk for being unable to continue my work if the pain progressed. I made the admittedly-difficult switch to Dvorak and that went away almost immediately. My typing speed is on-par with what it was with QWERTY. I can type out conversation…
Imho, this is were alternative layouts really shine: comfort, health.
Typing speed is an overrated fad (and in the worst cases an e-penis length contest) as in most cases when writing stuff (be it fiction, reports, code) your throughput isn't limited by typing speed.
Avoiding injuries on the other hand is invaluable.
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#69Considering 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 also being usable for coding.
I also tried a chorded keyboard (the BAT). With only a little practice I got to 60+ WPM (which isn't bad considering it's a one hand keyboard)... but it was just too laborious to code with since modifier keys and symbols took so much extra effort.
I'm still waiting for a neural interface... although if you give me a neural typing interface, then I'll want a neural visual interface so I'm not limited by monitors.
As an aside, why why why do people use the international keyboard layout? There is no possible way that it is more efficient given that two of the most used keys - left shift and (right) return are reduced in size and pushed further out of reach from home position. Worse yet, their lost space is taken by less frequently used keys. I cannot fathom why that design has remained popular outside the US.
Re: I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and it’s not all that
#70It'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.
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 able to write entire paragraphs or functions based on context and some minor cues. But that's not going to happen.
Where auto-complete becomes valuable is on limited keyboards, such as phones. Even there (on Android), I find it so sub-par that quite often the variant of the word I want is simply not offered to me until I have typed all but the last character. This is maddening.