LeeMobile

A West Coast Trail trip report will come soon, I swear.  Well, I hope I get it done before I forget all the detail of the trip.

Anyhow, for some reason or another I read up on the Dvorak keyboard layout this morning.  Basically, all the keyboards we use today are based on the QWERTY configuration, which is a configuration dating way back to the days of the old mechanical typewriter when they were first invented in the 19th century.

Typing too fast on the big clunky machines would often cause the machine to jam.  So what they did was configure the keyboard in such a way to reduce typing speed as best possible to avoid jamming.  Yes, that’s right, the keyboard you are using today was designed to SLOW your typing speed down and not actually speed it up.

Ever wonder why the letter ‘e’, the most frequent letter in the English language, is placed on the top row?  We rarely use j or k, why not swap those two keys around?  It would make a lot more sense to keep the most frequently used keys on the home row, that way your fingers don’t have to move as much and are often resting (to reduce muscle strain and to improve efficiency).

August Dvorak designed a keyboard layout that would place the most frequently used letters on the home row and the least frequently used letters on the bottom row.  He also designed it in such a way that hands would often alternate between keystrokes.  Try typing the word “minimum” on the QWERTY keyboard.  Notice how you only use one hand to type with it.  That’s incredibly slow.

So Dvorak is a layout that was designed with efficiency, speed, and ergonomics in mind.  The Guinness World Record for fastest typist is held by a woman who can type over 210 words per minute.  She’s a Dvorak user.
The only real reason why QWERTY keyboards dominate the world today is that the company that sold the typewriter with the QWERTY board dominated typewriters back when they were new.  QWERTY was only one of many layouts available at the time.  But eventually, that one brand of typewriter gained such a huge popularity that other typewriters used the same layout so that typists who were trained in QWERTY could also buy their brand too.

It’s a prime example of inferior technology becoming popular and entrenched (like Microsoft, *cough* :-p).
I was taught to use the QWERTY layout as a kid because I didn’t even know alternatives existed.  It is, afterall, the standard layout for all keyboards.  However, Dvorak layout can be turned in really easily on any modern operating system.  In Windows XP it takes a whole 60 seconds to goto the control panel to switch things over.

So, with this in mind… I’m going to try to teach myself how to use the Dvorak layout and switch over.  This is mainly because as a programmer I do a lot of typing and over the  years I’m sure I’ll get some repetitive strain with my fingers.  Also, Dvorak will supposedly boost your typing speed by a good 4-20%.  Of course your mileage may vary, and the faster you are at typing the less of a gain you’ll get.  I type well over 100 words per minute so I don’t believe I’ll be gaining much.  But for the same reason that I use Emacs and it’s crazy shortcuts, I’m gonna learn Dvorak.

At the same time, knowing Dvorak will increase my geek level by 4 points.  I’m surely on my way to becoming an uber geek soon enough!

This evening I downloaded an open source typing tutor program that has dvorak lessons.  I switched my Windows XP over to dvorak, and began the slow process of rewiring my brain to type in dvorak.  To my delight, I’ve already discovered that some very common words are really fun to type in the new layout.  I don’t even have to lift my fingers off the home row and I can hammer out with pleasure some of the most frequent words.

Maybe in a month or two I’ll get my typing speed up to 40 words per minute with it :-S

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.