Typing full time on Dvorak for the last 12 years has, I'm convinced, saved me some wrist and finger pain.
Every time I'm forced to jump back onto qwerty for a co-worker or my wife's laptop, I hate it with a passion. It feels like I'm doing finger gymnastics the whole time, rather than actually typing.
For what is worth I've been finger typing on Qwerty for the last 11 years and I've never had wrist pain. My average is about 90 WPM when doing relaxed typing and over 120 when I stretch myself, and I never felt the need for going faster.
My main problem with Dvorak, that often goes unmentioned: it saves you finger stretches ONLY if you're typing English words, being optimized for English and my native language isn't English.
The keyboard for my native language is still Qwerty. The Dvorak-equivalent on the other hand is completely different from normal Dvorak.
Maybe Qwerty needs a replacement, but Dvorak ain't it.
> For what is worth I've been finger typing on Qwerty for the last 11 years and I've never had wrist pain. My average is about 90 WPM when doing relaxed typing and over 120 when I stretch myself, and I never felt the need for going faster.
It's not about the speed (well, I was a hunt-and-peck typist on QWERTY and I switched in order to break the habit, so it was about the speed, just not in that way). It's nice that you don't have any wrist pain, but are you sure that will always be the case? Even a little tiny bit is enough to put me off writing code and both of us will due the bulk of our typing in the future.
> Maybe Qwerty needs a replacement, but Dvorak ain't it.
I agree, but only because the barrier to learning Dvorak is rather large and would apply to any Qwerty replacement. It took concentrated effort over the course of months just in order to reach my speed on QWERTY and I'm not sure it was worth as much effort as it took. Still, I'm fairly certain that if you could snap your fingers and use Dvorak/Colemack/Whatever you would.
I wonder about the extent to which this is due to the keyboard layout itself. For example, I've been using Kinesis Advantage keyboard for the last couple years (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/further-thoughts-on... for some of my thoughts on it) and find very little wrist movement when using it.
The Advantage is ludicrously expensive for a keyboard, but I also often use it for 40 or more hours per week, and, unlike many default keyboards, its keys don't become sticky or break after a year or two.
* Having difficulty finding symbols because the keycaps no longer match (I don't know why they don't memorize them after all these years)
* Not knowing what mode the keyboard is in to type one's password.
* Having to use someone else's machine and being startled by the switch, or someone uses their keyboard and switches it back.
* On Windows, in particular, the settings seem to flicker back and forth between Qwerty and Dvorak between programs, and between invocations of the same program. No idea why it's not a global system setting. * Have to reset the keymappings in most video games.
I suppose if you were a full-time typist these inefficiencies would be made up for by the increased comfort of the bulk of your day. But for everyone else -- who spend less than 10% of the time typing English sentences -- the standard is probably easier overall.
Having to think about which keyboard layout I was using added more time and stress than was ever going to be repaid by the supposed benefits of using Dvorak.
I gave up after about 3 months, reverting purely to using Qwerty.
However, this can be pretty easily mitigated by setting a shortcut to change the keyboard layout (usually CTRL+Space on Windows or CMD+Space on Mac). This way if someone uses my computer I quickly change my keyboard setting in less than a second. No inefficiencies.
In addition, I find myself frequently using a shortcut like this when I need to change back and forth between typing English and Chinese (Dvorak feels very naturally for typing with Hanyu Pinyin - a method of typing Chinese using the Roman Alphabet, so it's not just good for English sentences).
> I suppose if you were a full-time typist these inefficiencies would be made up for by the increased comfort of the bulk of your day.
Lastly, I can verify this on a personal level. I can type 80+ WPM on either QWERTY or DVORAK, but DVORAK is way more comfortable to type on. Would I recommend everyone switch? No. But, I find it to be worth it.
That's quite odd. Maybe it's because I'm a programmer, but I had the symbols down just as fast as the letters.
> Not knowing what mode the keyboard is in to type one's password.
There's no reason to have both modes on one's personal machine, and I'm very hesitant to type my password on someone else's. If anything, it actually makes me think more carefully on whether I actually want to do that.
> On Windows, in particular, the settings seem to flicker back and forth between Qwerty and Dvorak between programs, and between invocations of the same program.
Windows keyboard management is a nightmare, but that shouldn't be a reason to avoid the layout. It's a lot smoother on Linux and OS X.
This becomes particularly obnoxious when Explorer is somehow "partially" switched to a different keyboard, such that minimizing everything sometimes will and sometimes won't switch you back to the layout you're using in Explorer.
Not to mention that it's really easy to accidentally switch layouts. I've certainly done it a number of times.
In the end, it's just far less of a hassle for me to stick to QWERTY on Windows.
I have memorized my password in both modes.
All it takes is a quick glance at the keyboard to know which "mode" I'm typing in. Because whenever I type dvorak the keyboard looks Dvorak, when the keyboard looks qwerty it switches my brain that way.
I don't have Qwerty as an option on my computers. It's dvorak only.
http://arcavia.com/kyle/Projects/ProgrammerKeyboard.html
"This was a humongous waste of time. The program to do the analysis is about 700 lines of code, and went though about 3 iterations. I am most disappointed by the lack of benefit offered by a more efficient layout; even when considering a purely optimized layout you only get 21% savings over Qwerty."
Of course, there are other ways we could change keyboards. For example, accepting even more data from your digits could be a useful avenue to explore. 20% improvements are not that spectacular, maybe there's a contraption that is conceptually like a keyboard but is 10x faster (so 12 cps -> 120 cps?).
Alternatively, plover. but then custom dictionaries and bleh..
When you talk about efficiency, you need to be more specific.
It's not just that Dvorak's superiority over Qwerty for regular typing is very far from being clearly established, Dvorak is terrible for writing code, which requires a lot of non-alphabetical symbols such as {}, (), [], etc...
I do not find myself hampered at all when writing code in Dvorak. If anything, it's better since 90% or so of what you write is identifiers, which are basically just short English phrases. Sure, it's possible to make a more optimized keyboard layout for writing code for a specific lannguage, but I find it to be great all-around.
I'm a little sad about where : is (ViM uses it extensively, Go uses it pretty frequently), but alternating hands completely makes up for it (e.g. how often have you typed minimum in code; that by itself can cause RSI in Qwerty).