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Back and Forth Between Qwerty and Dvorak?
Posted by
Cliff
on Sun Jul 10, 2005 05:32 PM
from the switch-typing dept.
from the switch-typing dept.
jamesh asks: "I'm interested in switching over to an alternate keyboard layout, probably Dvorak, before I begin to suffer any effects of RSI. I'm almost 30 and have been typing since I was about 8, and these days spend most of my workday in front of a computer, typing away at a keyboard. I've searched the Internet and most people's comments are that within a few months they were up to or faster than their previous speed, with better accuracy. I'm mostly a programmer, but I do spend time at client sites and do need to spend time at various users computers to have a look at whatever hole they've dug themselves into, and so I will need to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak mode fairly frequently.
What others have found when switching back and forth, as required? Can you mentally just flip back between them, or do you 'lose' your QWERTY skills and become 'hunt & peck' when faced with the old keyboard layout?"
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Hardware: Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY 663 comments
Michael Pyne sends in an article published at Reason Online 13 years ago, dismantling the entrenched myth that the Dvorak keyboard layout is a superior technology to QWERTY. The odd thing is that this 13-year-old article recaps research (refereed and published in a respected economics journal) 19 years ago. While we have discussed Dvorak many times over the years, I don't believe we have dug into this convincing-sounding refutation of the Dvorak mythology. The article is in the context of arguing against the conventional wisdom of "first mover advantage" — that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece.
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QWERTY not QWERY (Score:4, Funny)
Re:QWERTY not QWERY (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:QWERTY not QWERY (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:QWERTY not QWERY (Score:5, Funny)
When you're done searching, try qwerying.
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Re:QWERTY not QWERY (Score:3, Interesting)
I am guessing that it is much like second language skills- Studies are always showing that the
Re:QWERTY not QWERY (Score:3, Insightful)
Back when I studied Latin, I could converse in it. My vocabulary was never large, about 10k words, but that's pretty much the core of a language that you need to be able to talk to someone else in it.
I maintained this ability for about the 3 years I actively studied it. Now, about 8 years later, I can no longer converse in Latin, and it takes me a few moments to be able to say anything in it, and my 'on demand' vocabulary has dropped to maybe three or four hundred words, tops. I can still translate from
Forget Dvorak (Score:5, Informative)
If you're serious, then rather than Dvorak, choose one of the layouts specifically designed to help RSI. The leading contender is probably the Maltron [maltron.com] layout. The sculpted keyboard helps, too, but they're also available in more traditional flat models [maltron.com] as well.
For anyone suffering from RSI... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:For anyone suffering from RSI... (Score:4, Informative)
And when you can't avoid typing, use better "typing posture". For those who didn't take a proper typing class (my mom forced me to take a course when I was a sophomore[1] in high school so I would be self-sufficient for college term papers. Little did I know I'd be taking Summer courses in LISP and FORTRAN the following year.
Biggest tip: do not rest your elbows or wrists.
I'm willing to wager 99%[2] of the people at a keyboard do not do this and most of the people who have RPI have acquired it because they do rest either joint of their arms.
All that changing a keyboards (different contour, key layout, or both) is doing is changing the posture of your fingers | hands | wrists | elbows | arms. Save yourself the time and just discipline yourself a bit.
The other thing which has been cited in RPI articles is when people spent time moving back & forth between keyboard & mouse repeatedly; i.e. you're better off to use keystrokes as much as possible or mouse as much as possible, but constant switching is not a good thing.
__________________
[1] Yes, that's the correct spelling [tinyurl.com] (for the spelling-challenged)
[2] Those five people who respond with claims they are the exceptions aren't going to disprove it.
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Re:For anyone suffering from RSI... (Score:4, Informative)
1) Regardless of your posture (and yes it matters), make sure you are not sitting in a static position for any period of time. Holding you muscles in a single floating position causes them to -- for lack of a better word -- "seize up" and tighten. Those "ropes" you feel in your forearms are caused by this.
2) Take a break every 10 minutes or so. Just take your hands off of the keyboard, shake out your arms and stretch a bit.
3) Get a deep muscle massage regularly on your back and arms to break up those tense muscles.
4) Find a new line of work
As a recoverer from mild RSI, I made changes before they became serious (as they did for my mother who got surgery). Please do the same so we don't lose great developers to the new epidemic of our age.
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Re:Forget Dvorak (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mod Parent(s) Up! (Score:5, Interesting)
Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration.
Still, the Dvorak story is very interesting to me in a sociological sense. The Dvorak keyboard's superiority has existed as a sort of counter-culture convential wisdom but has all the underpinnings of an "urban legend" -- a false or heavily-embellished story that survives because the story evokes a strong emotional response, serves as a cautionary tale and/or plays into feelings or ideas felt by a community. In this case the Dvorak story survives not because of the flimsy, circumstantial "proof" but rather because it evokes people's sense of outrage of the "Little Guy with new ideas" being unable fight the tide of convention.
That said, there *are* keyboards specifically designed to be easier on your fingers. I like the split keyboards because it's easier to keep my wrists straight.
Parent
Re:Mod Parent(s) Up! (Score:4, Informative)
While this may or may not be true, my personal experiences seem to indicate that dvorak keyboard *is* good for your wrists.
I had a *lot* of 10,000+ word essays to write, my hands and wrists were getting so painful I could barely type, yet the deadlines couldn't be put off.
I switched to dvorak and the pain vanished within about a week of using it.
The vast majority of the keys you use to type the vast majority of words you type are all on the home row.
(If you don't know what 'home row' means then you have NO business criticising the dvorak keyboard, but I digress).
One thing that certainly helped was not just the fact that my fingers no longer had unnatural stretches to perform in typing, but the slowdown I had to endure in getting used to the dvorak layout.
But the home-row layout made things a lot easier.
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Change the initial login window to use Dvorak! (Score:4, Informative)
I had the same problem, using Windows XP at work, and finding that the initial login (naturally) did not follow my personal prefs. My peeve was not so much the userID; rather, it was annoying to hunt-and-peck a *password* on qwerty.
To change the initial Windows XP login window so it uses Dvorak US instead of the standard (qwerty) layout, change the registry key "HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Keyboard Layout\Preload\1" to "00010409". (Actually, in order to support æøå, I've had to replace the Dvorak DLL file with a custom Norwegian variant, so what my XP calls 'Dvorak US' is in effect 'Dvorak NO'.)
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Re:Mod Parent(s) Up! (Score:3, Informative)
The fact that he wanted to make money, and sponsored competitions to prove the layout's worth, may be reasons to be skeptical, but certainly don't prove anything.
I have been using dvorak since sometime in my junior year of college ('97), and can tell you the following:
1. It feels a lot smoother and more comfortable, because of the reduced finger movement. This aspect of dvorak is proven for English.
2. It's a bit less of an improvement over qwerty for coding in something like cpp, because of all the punc
Re:Mod Parent(s) Up! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nonsense. I pasted the text of your article into a keyboard compare applet [vt.edu], which is an objective test. When typing the text you typed, the Dvorak keyboard scores better in ALL the important metrics that it covers, including:
qwerty, 34.06%; dvorak, 67.55%
qwerty, 36.26%; dvorak, 23.40%
qwerty, 5.909%; dvorak, 2.317%
Given that moving from the home row slows you down, and given that alternating hands and (to a lesser extent) alternating fingers gives you a level of parallelism that increases speed (kind of like superscalar processors process parts of instructions in parallel with multiple execution units that each has its own ALU), the Dvorak layout seems to be scoring better.
While we're on the subject of alternating hands, a friend of mine told me an amusing anecdote about some programmers he knew that were having an ongoing typing competition around the office. They had written some program to spit out random text (composed of words strung together from /usr/dict/words, I think),
record how long it takes the user to type
it, and compute and record the score.
One of the programmers hit upon an idea:
he could improve his score if he hacked
the testing program to spit out only words
that had a high degree of alternation between
the hands. That is, one-handed words
"aftertaste" and "lollipop" would be avoided,
and highly-alternating words like
"enchantment" and "proficiency"
would be favored. As the story goes, this
cheat
gave them the ability to get higher scores
than the competition, even when taking the
test while others watched to verify that
nothing fishy was going on. (All that's
necessary is to make the program key off
some environment variable set in your .profile or whatever.)
Though that anecdote is only from memory, ask yourself whether "aftertaste" and "lollipop" are indeed to type on a QWERTY keyboard than than "enchantment" and "proficiency" are. I think you'll agree that maximizing alternation between hands is an important characteristic of a good keyboard layout. Furthermore, based on that applet, it seems clear that the Dvorak layout does a better job than the QWERTY layout does of maximizing alternation between hands when typing English prose.
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Re:Forget Dvorak (Score:5, Insightful)
There's been research that shows that people who use typing a lot in their lives do not develop RSI in any greater percentage than in those who do not.
Just if you *do* have RSI, the keyboards agrivate it a lot.
If this guy has been typing since he was 8, and he's 30 now, he'll likely not develop RSI.
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The Benefits of Dvorak (Score:4, Informative)
1) Less finger movement for typical English sentences. This is easily verifiable, and not questioned AFAIK.
2) The keycaps on typical keyboards don't match the letter assignment, so you aren't tempted to look a the keys.
3) It is supported by modern operating systems and can be used with readily available keyboards.
These are real benefits, and not hype. In contrast, much of the argument against Dvorak is based on hype arguing against hype. Though they argee QWERTY was never optimised for touch typing, Dvorak proponents these days don't necessarily say that the QWERTY was deliberately designed to slow typing down. It is hype to say they are saying that hype.
But still, Dvorak was designed with touch typing in mind and without the constraints of key jamming, and althogh not the best possible design, it is more efficient. I would expect it to be the most efficient layout possible when walking up to a stock computer with XP on it and adjusting settings. So it isn't the most optimal data entry method possible, but it is still the best without going to custom hardware and/or software.
The link you give seems to just be hype debunking things that people didn't believe in the first place. Even Dvorak proponents will believe that widely spaced common letters is good, and that is one of the things that the Dvorak keyboard does do even more than qwerty.
So what you are doing is inventing extra "benefits" that can be disproved, and then based on than, extending it to say that all benefits are disproved.
It's like saying "A security vulnerability was found in Linux, so it is isn't secure after all, and so most the benefits of Linux are hype. You should be concerned with the architecture of the computer as a whole rather than just the operating system."
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How does any switch in configuration help? (Score:4, Insightful)
How is using a different layout going to prevent RSI? Isn't the use of ANY keyboard going to be repetitive?
BTW, doesn't most of the pain come from using the mouse at improper angles?
It's all moot if you slouch in your chair or are way above it, start with getting sitting right, then go from there.
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...yes... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you considered carrying a USB dvorak kbd with you to your client sites? ;)
Re:...yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:...yes... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:...yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not even sure it's that dire a circumstance. When I'm on qwerty, I don't think I make any more typos than I did before I started using Dvorak.
For me, the only effects I've noticed is typing the first few words in the wrong layout immediately after switching and having to delete them.
(Windows's treatment of layouts exacerbates this problem because it keeps the active layout on a per-application instead of a system-wide ba
Similar scenario (Score:5, Interesting)
In the end, I really just stopped using Dvorak. I got over the beginning effects of RSI by not typing much and keeping my wrists straight when I did. Posture's important, too. But my typing speed in Dvorak never exceeded my Qwerty speed, so I just stopped using it. I can still type around 20 wpm with Dvorak, but I really don't have a use for it.
For linux users: "setxkbmap dvorak" and "setxkbmap en_US"
Re:Similar scenario (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been using Dvorak for over 2 years now. I seriously doubt it would be any help against RSI, but I find that it is more "relaxed" to type using the Dvorak-layout, as the most-used characters are in the center row of the keyboard. So in that sense, it might make a bit of a difference. Probably, the real causes of RSI are more related to stres
Re:Similar scenario (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, mousing was a big part of the problem--I developed severe pain in my right arm all the way up to my shoulder. Dvorak layout is obviously irrelevant for mouse-related RSI. For a while I seriously doubted whether I'd be able to remain in IT or even work on coding projects for fun.
Happily, I no longer experience any pain. What happened? Well, the solution for me was not a $200 keyboard or a $1200 office chair or a funky tedious-to-learn key layout. Instead, I bought some thinking putty [thinkingputty.com] for 8 bucks. Not only does the stuff help you chill out when stressed, it helps you develop more muscle strength in your hands. I think that must make a huge difference. Playing with thinking putty while waiting for stuff to compile possibly saved my career. Kinda silly, but I've had other people tell me it helped them too. It's definitely worth a shot (and no, I'm not a shill. Just sharing what worked for me).
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Re:Similar scenario (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Similar scenario (Score:5, Interesting)
And a cute trick that someone pointed out to me:
asdf() { setxkbmap dvorak; }
aoeu() { setxkbmap en_US; }
(This is the bash version, obviously.)
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Query on Qwery.. (Score:4, Funny)
Many of your answers (Score:5, Informative)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/ 14/126222&tid=227 [slashdot.org]
After I learned to drive a car... (Score:5, Funny)
Go for it! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Go for it! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Tip For Mac OS X users... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tip For Mac OS X users... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Tip For Mac OS X users... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Example of how easy it is (Score:5, Funny)
Dvorak (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, you might not be quite as good a Qwerty typer as you were originally, just like how learning a new language occasionally introduces a little bit of confusion in your mind. For the most part you're just as proficient though and potentially better off because of what knowing something new (language or keyboard layout).
It's like a second language (Score:5, Interesting)
With that said, if you totally switch over to Dvorak, your Qwerty skills will get rusty - just like if I don't speak a foriegn language for a while I'll start to forget parts of it. My solution is to have my main machines Dvorak, and let the lesser used machines, and machines that would be hard to switch (like laptops) stay Qwerty. That way, I get practice in both layouts on a daily basis, while still enjoying the benefits of Dvorak most of the time.
Re:It's like a second language (Score:3, Interesting)
DVORAK's supperiority is a myth (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DVORAK's supperiority is a myth (Score:3, Informative)
When I first learned Dvorak, the more frequent alternation in Dvorak was a problem, leading to frequent transpoistio
An Arguement for Dvorak (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if slashdot fans are as tender about linking to Kuro5hin as Kuro5hin fans are about linking to Slashdot. Let's find out.
Keep your wrists straight (Score:5, Informative)
The "natural" keyboards that split in the middle try and do that as well, but it's completely unnecessary to split the keyboard. It's just a matter of getting used to your hands at an angle to the keys.
I think tendon stress and inflammation comes from forcing the tendons to bend while using your fingers. Seriously -- the layout doesn't matter as much as your wrist position (think about it -- it's the pressing of the keys, not the moving of the fingers
SafeType (Score:4, Interesting)
It gives you ergonomic benefits that no "ergonomic" bump-in-the-middle keyboard comes close to.
Besides, does Dvorak make that much of a difference? Sure, the layout might be marginally better but you're still twisting your wrists 90 degrees to make your hands parallel with it (pronation [safetype.com]), you're then angling your elbows in 45 degrees and your hands back out 45 degrees to line up with it (deviation [safetype.com]), and you're still, likely, tilting it (extension [safetype.com])putting even more stress on.
A better arrangement of keys is only going to do so much for you. At the end of the day, you've still got extension, deviation and pronation going on - even if you're marginally reducing stress within those three.
The SafeType sorts all three out. Lower your arms by your sides. Now lift your forearms up so your elbows are at 90 degrees. Nothing else. That's it. You're done. Your arms are in a massively more neutral position, your carpal tunnel is now straight, letting the tendons run through without rubbing against it, all is good in your world. Wouldn't you prefer a keyboard like that to one that's just as bad as every other keyboard with a marginally better layout?
The other advantage of the SafeType is that, if you can already touch type, once you stop overthinking it, you can already use it. All the keys are still in the QWERTY position - they're just broken in to two vertical blocks. Most people I've watched are up and using it within ten minutes, typing naturally within an hour or so.
That advantage translates in to backwards compatability - you're still using QWERTY so you can transfer to a client site without ever having to make a mental switch.
I've tried a lot of ergonomic options and this one's by far the best. It's not cheap - at about $300. Then again, if you're worth anything as a developer, you likely earn that in a single day or less. Isn't one day's pay worth ensuring your career last another 20 years? One day's pay is a lot less than no more days' pay.
(Note: I reviewed the keyboard for one of the IEEE magazines. At the time I was impressed but had enough minor issues that I regarded it as only useful for those who had problems they needed to immediately address. After the review, I kept using it - and I'm completely willing to admit I was wrong. It's a great keyboard and, honestly, well worth the price for anyone who works with computers all day every day.)
Touch vs. hunt-and-peck (Score:3, Insightful)
It took a good month of practice to get my speed up, and probably a year before it really felt comfortable. I don't remember how long before my wrists felt better. They don't bother me now.
For a while, I think I felt physically a bit worse, because I carried slightly more tension when I was learning. I've had no reason to want to switch back.
Instead of Layout (Score:5, Interesting)
Things like making sure your desk and chair are the right height? Also it might make sense for you to not just change the layout, but change the keyboard. Either use a Microsoft Natural Keyboard or something like this: Maltron Keyboard [maltron.com]
Layout isn't important. (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find interesting is that pianists tend to not have RSI or carpal tunnel, even though their repertoire might primarily be Chopin. They do get arthritis, though that's usually from age and a matter of nutrition. But for a pianist, posture is extremely important in producing the right sounds. Wrist and forearm strength is necessary for dynamics. As well, having excellent control of their strength is very important. Of all these things, I think both the posture, and the way power generation is spread throughout the arm accounts for why pianists aren't as prone to RSI.
Power isn't really something we are in control of, as no one really wants their keyboard to be the length of an upright, or even close. I doubt anyone would like their keyboards to type like a piano either. The largest discouragement would be the necessari investment in developing agility and strength in their hands just to type up a 2-page essay.
As I mentioned before, posture is something we are fully in control of. And for those of us who are physically lazy (read: those of us who sit on our asses all day
Of course, if the special keyboards are too expensive, just type using only one or two fingers. That moves most of the stress to the forearms though perhaps at the cost of speed.
Just do it, I use both. (Score:3, Interesting)
I use QWERTY at work and when I'm doing work on other people's PCs. I do fine on QWERTY for letters for the most part but have a little more difficult time finding punctuation marks without looking for them.
Dvorak is ideal for programmers and anyone who uses brackets etc... since they seem to fall in more ergonomic places.
I was having to do some PHP coding on someone else's computer with a QWERTY layout and my only issue was when I had to put in quotation marks and curly brackets. Other than that, I type about 70wpm (QWERTY), a far cry less than the 140 I used to go at, but when I'm at home it's a different story.
try this (Score:3, Informative)
It's great for rsi but my qwerty is shot...but my hands still work