I’ve heard that the Dvorak keyboard layout (and yes, I know, there are many variations) is more efficient than QWERTY, since QWERTY was designed to accomodate the mechanical failures of typewriters, and computer keyboards do not have this problem. The thing is, it seems to me that they’re talking about the difference in those systems with reference to touchtyping. I hunt-and-peck. However, I’v been doing it for five or six years, and I’ve really gotten pretty efficent at it. Would Dvorak really help?
As a (very) rough measure of my speed and accuracy, I typed “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” as many times as I could in a minute, and got 54 words with three mistakes. This is a slight overestimate of natural typing speed, since I was repeating the same nine words, and didn’t pause to let my thoughts formulate, but I also saw my watch and stopped a few seconds early, so I figure the diference is probably pretty small.
I’ve been using it for about a year now. I was a look and type typist (I used the right fingers for the keys but had to look at the keyboard while typing.) I am now a full touch typist (mostly because I am too cheap to buy a keyboard with a dvorak layout.) My typing speed went from 40 to 50 wpm and accuracy is probably slightly better. I changed because of rsi in one of my wrists which dvorak is supposed to help and it seems to me it really has helped there. OTOH when I need to type on a QWERTY now I am doing real good to type at 30 wpm.
Some of my music-dork friends and I once tried to come up with what keyboard layouts with the names of other composers would be like. The Philip Glass keyboard would only have ctrl, c, and v. The Mussorgsky keyboard would dispense vodka when you hit the space bar. I think those were the only good ones.
It took a good month of painfully slow typing before I started to get anywhere then it picked up to my current level fairly quickly. I guess I will never be a speed typer, but thats alright as my livelyhood doesn’t depend on it. On the other hand I am glad I learned to touch type. It really does make transcribing and even chating much more enjoyable.
Qwerty attempts to split up frequently used pairs of letters, not to slow typing down but to speed it up. Typing using alternating fingers is far faster than hitting sequential keys with the same hand; try typing stewardesses as a test.
This link at least tries to establish that the Dvorak claims are unfounded and originate almost entirely from the inventor and patent holder (to be fair this article disputes all those claims).
Accordimg to everything I have ever heard, QWERTY was designed to avoid jamming the typewriter by slowing typists down. Also, alternating fingers really only help if you touch-type; I use advanced hunt-and-peck (as I said earlier, I can H&P ~50 wpm on QWERTY) and it doesn’t really make any difference. In fact, one easy combination in Dvorak is ‘th,’ which I can do more rapidly than nonadjacent letters simply by rolling my fingers.
Also, seeing as how August Dvorak died thirty years ago, more recent claims can hardly be his work (witness Barbara Blackburn).
I cannot touch-type, and I really have no intention to learn; I can H&P more quickly than many people can type, and I don’t have to endure hours of tedious typing lessons or unfun ‘games.’ And no, I am not asking for recommendations; I was forced to take them in elementary school and I have no desire to repeat the process.
I’ve been typing Dvorak for three years now, ever since reading the article cited above in response to the study by Liebowitz and Margolis. I was a proficient touch-typist before, so the inefficiencies of hunt-and-peck typing did not factor into my decision to switch. Mostly I just wanted to try something new.
After practicing for several months in the summer of 2003, I regained all the speed I had with QWERTY, and then some. My only complaint (with either layout, actually) is that most of the frequently-typed Unix commands are awkward to type, since they often consist of two-letter abbreviations of English words with the vowels deleted. Thus the benefit of alternating hands is frequently unrealized for people who spend more time at the command prompt than in a text editor. ls in particular causes much strain, since on a Dvorak keyboard it requires both letters to be typed with the same weak finger on your right hand.
If you’re hunting and pecking, I don’t think it matters which keyboard you use. The real speed gain comes from touch-typing. I just wish I knew how to go from middling speed of 70 wpm to blazingly fast 120 wpm… But I’m way faster in Dvorak than I am in Qwerty.
Captain Carrot: [QAccordimg to everything I have ever heard, QWERTY was designed to avoid jamming the typewriter by slowing typists downUOTE]
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You’ve been hearing urban legends. QWERTY was designed to avoid jamming the typewriter keys by optimizing the physical arrangement of typewriter keys for the lowest likelihood of them interfering with each other. This only affected the locations of the push-buttons your fingers hit as a side-effect — the focus was on the arrangement of the long bars within the U-shaped valley of keys in the keybed.
While it is true that the keys were therefore not arranged to as to maximize speed, it is untrue that they were arranged to as to deliberately slow you down.
Yes. The basic principle is perhaps best illustrated by the most glaring exception - the T and H strikers are quite close together, and anyone who can type quickly and has used a old manual typewriter can tell you that those two will jam together with some frequency, what with ‘th’ being a very common letter combination in English, as well as being possible to type extremely quickly on a qwerty layout. The principle behind qwerty is to avoid having such letter combinations close to each other to minimize jamming.
Point taken, and this isn’t really the same effect; nevertheless, mechanical failure is not a problem with computer keyboards. Does anyone know if it will make any difference with skilled hunt-and-pecking? After all, I’m getting to know where most of the keys are, so it’s a lot more peck than hunt.
Yeah. It’s like wearing vertical stripes to look thinner when you weigh 350 pounds. I guess maybe hunt-and-peck typing on a Dvorak keyboard might conceivably be faster, but it’s certainly not going to make any significant difference. It’s designed for people to type on. If you have to look for each key to push it, you’re not really typing, and there’s no logical reason why it should make any particular difference.
Also, to the OP, typing the same sentence over and over is not even remotely a test of your typing speed. There’s free programs out there that will test your typing speed if you’re curious about it. Your method simply does not yield any sort of useful measurement.
When I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak, I got quite a bit faster. On the few times that I’ve bothered to take typing tests I tend to score in the 90s - fast, though not remarkable. Whereas before I was probably typing 60 wpm. I’m not sure if that’s because the keyboard really is more efficient - though certainly my fingers don’t have to move as much - or whether I finally learned not to look at my fingers at all, since I was still using a QWERTY keyboard and looking at my fingers just confused me.