anyone use the dvorak keyboard layout?

[splodenode]

is it any good?

 

[Ariadne]

I tried learning it a few years ago, and gave up after a few days.

 

[DontFeedPhil]

Are you talking about John Devorak from TechTV?

 

[Alaedhros]

^ You're talking about John Dvorak; he's talking about August Dvorak, psychologist and creator of the Dvorak keyboard.

And no, I haven't. From what I read, the gains weren't really worth the effort.

 

[Mr. B]

I'd love to try but realistically i'd only be able to use iot on my desktop computer, maybe work... but probably not my laptop and whatever other computers I use. It would be too hard to switch between both layouts.

 

[LaxScrutiny]

Here's a decent article exploring some of the myths and legends surround the battle of QWERTY vs Dvorak

 

[splodenode]

LaxScrutiny said:
Here's a decent article exploring some of the myths and legends surround the battle of QWERTY vs Dvorak

sweet 40% faster typing

can i just pop the keys off my keyboard and rearrange them or am i gonna have to write over them with a sharpie?

 

[LaxScrutiny]

No, that's just the Dvorak claim, and maybe supported by a suspect US Navy test with poor control groups. Later in the article...

In the first phase of Strong's experiment ten government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over twenty-five days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old Qwerty speed. (Compare this to the claim David makes about the Navy study's results that the full retraining costs were recovered in ten days.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speed Strong began the second phase of the experiment. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of ten Qwerty typists began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did Qwerty typists training on Qwerty keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended that the government provide further training in the Qwerty keyboard. for Qwerty typists. The information provided by this study was largely responsible for putting Dvorak to rest as a serious alternative to Qwerty for those firms and government agencies responsible for choosing typewriters.

Basicly, if you can already type, and train in Dvorak, you're getting retrained. Put the same hours into a QWERTY retraining and you'll improve your typing pretty much equally.

The ergonomic studies note that with QWERTY commonly used letters alternate with the right and left hand, and are spread fairly equally to all fingers, so QWERTY developes full dexterity and allows for typing rhythm. QWERTY is a decent system and wasn't adopted just by accident.

 

[kitsune]

Ten years ago, I frequently suffered from pain in my fingers after long typing sessions.

I switched to a Microsoft Natural keyboard, and that helped a little bit.

Then I learned about the Dvorak layout and reasoned that if my fingers didn't have to move around as much, my finger pains could be reduced. I used the Windows control panel to remap my keyboard to the Dvorak layout. It took about ten days before I could type without looking at a cheat-sheet. Soon I was back up to my previous speed. My finger pains ceased.

Typing is very comfortable for me now. For me, that is reason enough to use Dvorak.

 

[26138]

Toresica said:
I tried learning it a few years ago, and gave up after a few days.

Same here.

 

[splodenode]

26138 said:

Toresica said:
I tried learning it a few years ago, and gave up after a few days.

Same here.

i done give up too

 

[Trekker4747]

splodenode said:

LaxScrutiny said:
Here's a decent article exploring some of the myths and legends surround the battle of QWERTY vs Dvorak

sweet 40% faster typing

can i just pop the keys off my keyboard and rearrange them or am i gonna have to write over them with a sharpie?

You could pop the keys off and rearrange them, but you'll also have to change the setting in Windows to Dvorak, which the option may or not be there.

I've seen it in some Windows options and, as a joke, changed it on friend' computers.

 

[BriGuy]

As a journalist, someone who types for a living five days a week (for going on 15 years), I can type pretty fast and well with qwerty. Trying to change to a different layout now would be pointless, I think.

But I remember being in high school and taking keyboarding class - on a typewriter - and not understanding why we couldn't look at the keys. Now, I'm sure I could type on a keyboard that was totally blank.