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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Many would consider switching from Qwerty to Dvorak a bicycle skill. Typing a blog post or email can take much longer when you're learning to type in a new pattern. For some, the enjoyment of learning Dvorak, or the anticipation of being faster in Dvorak than Qwerty offsets the annoyance at the task's increased duration. For others, they have no such enjoyment or anticipation, and so the task is merely annoying.

People will only pick up bicycle skills where their benefit (or perceived benefit) is greater than the annoyance they deal with.

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Hasn't Dvorak been pretty thoroughly debunked as far as claims of speed? [1] is only the first google result, I can recall seeing quite a few articles on HN.

Dvorak is more unicycle than bicycle.

[1] http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/print

No. That 1996 article is wrong on that point, and fluffy on others. It's straightforward to calculate finger travels for typing words on various keyboard layouts [1], and Dvorak easily comes out on top. Placing e on the home row alone is probably a significant improvement. Compare the home rows:

asdf jkl; aoeu htns

Placement of high-frequency letters, especially vowels, reduces finger movement and eases typing. There's no magic about it.

[1] www.typocheck.co.uk/dvorak/

Does that calculate the way between keys or guess a common hand/finger size to calculate actual hand movements?

How do finger travels affect efficiency? This is not obvious.

OT: I haven't read this specific article, but have been on DVORAk for about a year and am happy about it. But one of the problems i have noticed in arguments for and against these kb layouts is the hand size. they vary from individual, and i can easily see someone with a bigger hand not realizing the same efficiency improvement as i did when i switched over.

*-- I switched over by trying Dvorak for an hour a day instead of the QWERTY i had used for about 3-4 weeks. I was a below average QWERTY user. Touch typist, but not fast/ not a lot of typing experience.

That article is mainly about the strawman argument that if Dvorak is better, then free markets are bad, because they lead to the kind of network effects that gave us QWERTY. (As a happy Dvorak user, I find this argument silly.) The author is very motivated to prove the premises false, for political reasons. I don't think it's very insightful.

Many would consider switching from Qwerty to Dvorak a bicycle skill.

Are you sure? I'd consider typing in Dvorak a non-standard skill that would make me less productive with ~99% of keyboards in existence!

This strikes me as about as worthwhile as learning to ride a non-standard dual-wheel vehicle, as a consequence of which it becomes much harder to ride regular bicycles.

I'm just one data point of course but after the switch I actually type much faster in qwerty as well. No looking, somehow when I need to I just switch without thinking. It's especially helpful when running a VM or when the bootscreen is tied to qwerty only.

Huh. That's interesting. I guess it's akin to learning a second language...? Thank you for posting this -- it's changed the way I feel about learning Dvorak.

I had similar results, and I never even learned to type very fast on Dvorak. I think the key detail is that it forced me to break all of my bad habits I'd developed, and that carried over to qwerty.

After using Dvorak exclusively for two months I can't touch type Qwerty at all. I think you have to use Qwerty occasionally while learning Dvorak if you want to use both (I don't).

But most of your typing is probably on your personal or work computer(s). The rest of the world's keyboards don't matter.

While I concede that I have become slower on qwertz keyboards over years of not using them, your bicycle example is wrong.

I'm an avid fan (and rider) of unicycles and recumbent bikes like the Flevo Racer. The Flevo Racer's pivotal steering makes you have to learn biking again from the ground up. It takes a few afternoons (or faster, if you aren't that clumsy). Riding a unicycle took me two weeks to learn.

Nevertheless, I can still ride a standard upright bike without any problems. And after all this crazy wheeled stuff, even bipedal locomotion still works fine.

Skills don't have to crowd each other out.

I don't think switching to Dvorak is worthwhile. Most people don't have the capacity to actually squeeze out the few extra wpm that Dvorak gives you, and if you do, the benefits aren't extraordinary. Plus if you use Vim, either you'll have to remember where the original keys were on the keyboard and use it solely through muscle memory, or relearn.

Luckily I began the transition to Dvorak before I ever heard of Vim. The process definitely would have proved more painful with an additional set of muscle memory to override.

To me (Dvorak typist for > 2 years), it's not about increased wpm. I'm actually not a fast typist. It's about greater comfort at the keyboard, because ~70% of my keypresses are along the home row, compared to ~30% with QWERTY.

WRT Vim, I made the switch without too much trouble. In fact, I find the j/k on the left hand and h/l on the right hand useful.

And most of us are programmers, right? Beyond some very low threshold I can not imagine WPM factors into programmer productivity. If you are a writer then perhaps it would help.

I type in dvorak. If I don't my hands hurt.

And go install emacs. Its shortcuts are easier to type in dvorak.

> Most people don't have the capacity to actually squeeze out the few extra wpm that Dvorak gives you [...]

For me it's not about speed, but about ergonomics.

Dvorak = old and busted.

Colemak = new hotness.

http://colemak.com/

Seconded, for typing in code (with all the brackets and what not) this worked out better for me.

programmer dvorak is even better... :D

Interesting, first I've heard of that.

http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351059

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Pro...

Colemak puts the colon key above the home-row, and using Shift, which for Vim is rather unfortunate. I guess you can always remap it.

Dvorak is old, yes. But busted? By the way, for international users the NEO keyboard layout might be worth a look, too.

I'm just too lazy to switch from Dvorak to NEO, even though it would make it easier to type German Umlaute. Also my Kinesis Advantage keyboard supports Dvorak out of the box.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend learning Dvorak to anyone employed as a programmer. I would highly recommend it to high school/college students with some free time on their hands. Going from 100WPM qwerty to 30WPM Dvorak while learning was extremely frustrating for just non-critical tasks, such as chatting with friends. I wouldn't be able to handle going so slow when I needed to actually get stuff done.

I learned Dvorak as a student, too, and wasn't any fast at qwertz before.

You can learn Dvorak, even as a professional programmer, if you just reserve half an hour each day on the side for the learning, and keep using your old layout for your day job until you are comfortable.

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