Just read Cecil’s article. While there is evidence to say that Dvorak proposes no real significant advantage over QWERTY, users of the alternative layouts will be able to testify otherwise. Only just as long as they are using their own systems; both at home and at work.
I was not a touch-typist and I used QWERTY layout for a very long time. But I decided to learn touch-typing and then found about the Dvorak layout. Within minutes my hands were getting used and accustomed to the layout and I was able to start typing properly within a matter of weeks.
This personally was a hugely better than when I shifted from Dvorak to Colemak. I switched because I was used to using keyboard shortcuts and Colemak had them in the same QWERTY positions.
I will testify that I’m now using QWERTY again for the simple reasons that I mentioned in my own blog post. Good Bye Colemak… It’s been fun.
Years ago I read about a keyboard supposedly even more simplified than Dvorak – basically it had only the home row (8-10 keys or so) and you never lifted your fingers off the keys – you just pressed different combinations of keys for each character.
For example, imagine 1234 - 5678 keys. You might use 4 for "A,"but 4+5 for “B,” with simple 5 being reserved for a very common letter like say “E.”
Sounds very weird, but once you memorized the patterns corresponding to the characters/letters, you could in theory type blazingly fast without lifting the fingers or stretching the tendons as you now might do for the tilde character ("~") with your left pinky finger on a QWERTY keyboard.
Sounded intriguing, but I have forgotten the details and the name, making it difficult to research. Anyone heard of this?
Chorded keyboard. Because you’re playing chords instead of single notes.
Never been one that was a noticeable commercial success, because chorded keying isn’t taught and it’s so radically different from any other keyboard you can’t hunt-and-peck, unlike a “normal” keyboard with a different layout. And, because it’s not taught and it’s not common, there’s no standardization for what chords mean what characters.
One notable difference: Stenotypes are chording keyboards, but they also don’t output normal text. So the degree of training and standardizaton available to that implementation is useless for general-purpose (character-at-a-time) keying.
And you can make a chording keyboard much smaller. Problem: you don’t want a keyboard much smaller: you loose it, and it’s not heavy enough to stay in position. Solution: put it in your pocket.
I remember reading a review article in the 80’s where the sales droid / company manager was demonstrating a hand-held personal-assistant chording-device by unobtrusively taking notes with his hand in his pocket.
Of course (pace Samuel Clemens) for all I know he might have just been typing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party”.
Or more accurately, like my wife’s BrailleNote. The Perkins Brailler only outputs Braille, but the BrailleNote puts Braille onto an onboard refreshable Braille display AND stores a digital copy of the text in ASCII that can be loaded into a word processor as plain text.
Or the StenoType machine, which has come up recently in another thread.
I knew Harry Krents ages and ages ago, so, though sighted, I know how a traditional Braillewriter works. Just out of pure, impertinent curiosity, does this modern equipment automatically handle Grade 2 or 3?
It’s able to parse Grade 2 quite easily. Neither of us has ever had a need to learn, let alone master, Grade 3, so I don’t really know about that. Or about Braille music notation.