Hacker News Reader

Comment by benbenolson | Hacker News Reader

Great writeup, although it bothers me that he dismisses Dvorak so quickly. Although I've never personally used it, reading articles tells me that it's been regarded as the "best" layout for many use cases for a very long time. He said that he typed one command, `ls -latr`, shook his head and dismissed it. Can anyone clarify as to why?

View on HN

That particular sequence uses the right-hand pinky finger a lot. I think 'L' and '-' would be better on Dvorak if they were swapped. But throwing out the whole layout because of one UNIX shell command seems to me like he was looking for a justification. Dvorak gets all the basics right and can be found everywhere; to me, the differences with other ergonomic layouts are probably less than the error of measurement.

Yup.

  alias ao='ls'
  alias aoe='ls -l'
  alias aou='ls -a'
  alias aoeu='ls -la'

Problem solved!

Yeah, it does seem like that command is rather arbitrarily chosen. Most people don't type `ls -latr` over and over again.

Those keys would produce P; 'PAKO on Qwerty, try typing that.

I prefer "ls -lrta", since LRT is easier to type (Qwerty: POK). Having said that, on systems I used frequently, I have some aliases defined:

  alias h=ls
  alias hh=ls -l
  alias lrt=ls -lrt
  alias lrta=ls -lrta

I've used Dvorak for about a decade, and have never looked back. It occasionally annoys colleagues, but I have

  alias aoeu='setxkbmap gb -option'
  alias asdf='setxkbmap gb dvorak -option compose:menu,ctrl:swapcaps'

for easy switching. (No doubt KDE/Gnome offer something to do this, but 12 years ago when I added these aliases I was using a wide variety of machines at university.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com