Dvorak Users Oppose Qwerty Layouts on Smart Phones
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
But if you're doing most of your typing on a smartphone, you'll quickly have more pressing RSI issues...
I took a few typing classes in school as a kid, but of course didn't pay attention. Like a lot of people I learned qwerty by osmosis, not through proper training, and so I accumulated all sorts of terrible habits: reaching across, shifting with the same hand, etc. I got to be really fast but this was just amplifying the damage. Right about the time things were getting really painful I picked up vim. For me at least, it wasn't so much that vim (or Dvorak or whatever) really makes all the difference, it's just that it forces a clean break with your old muscle memory. And because the pain is the reason you're willing to put in the effort to re-learn, you're damn sure to learn it properly this time. That's all it took for me. No pain since, still on a standard rectangular qwerty keyboard.
I'd love to see Apple ship a Dvorak layout with the iPhone, but I think one of the big barriers is how the iPhone keyboard is normally laid out.
Dvorak has two extra letters on the bottom row and more punctuation on top. In QWERTY they get rid of the punctuation on the bottom row and put shift and delete in the extra space.
Look how ugly — and how much less usable — this is: http://kasperowski.com/2009/03/iphone-dvorak-for-real.html
To do it properly they would have to move shift and delete to the top row...
Add a good in there.
I touch type Dvorak and I have no idea what the keyboard layout looks like. I use standard QWERTY keycaps. My fingers know, so I don't have to.
On the iPhone you're not using the home row and touch typing, you're peck typing either with one finger, or two thumbs on a soft keyboard that can reconfigure at will and guess what you're typing, but that has no physical feedback on position. Clearly something other than Qwerty or Dvorak, something designed for this technology is the way forward.
I think studies have shown that for simple touchscreen or stylus keyboards a simple A-Z grid outperforms Qwerty. I'm hoping the Android approach lets some innovation happen here.
I remember someone (on HN?) saying this.
I don't type with my fingers on the home row, but rather floating over the keyboard.
With querty the keys are far enough apart that I switch between hands, so while one hand is pressing one key, the other is getting the second one ready.
With dvorak I would sort of mentally "jam", since you can't get the next keystroke ready while typing the first.
I know I don't type in a conventional way, but I type very fast.
This is achieved mainly by having all the vowels on the left hand, and the most used consonants on the right. Natural languages take care of ensuring a good alternation between consonants and vowels.
The only people who don't like talking about why better solutions failed in the market place are free market fundamentalists. The source of all this alleged debunking was an article by economists:
I think when you switch to Colemak or Dvorak you probably want some base competence with QWERTY still just so you don't look like an idiot when you use other people's computers or whatever.