The real problem with current keyboards is the physical arrangement of the keys. Staggered rows instead of columns make them less ergonomic, the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard. The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text. While the weak pinky finger has to cover more keys than the others. These things are more significant than qwerty vs dvorak.
Need to type faster? Spend some time practising every day and you will gain more speed within weeks than from just switching layouts. Most people don't as speed often isn't actually that important. I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed. Need less hand movement? Placing symbols, arrow keys etc as secondary function onto the central keys with a programmable keyboard helps with that, changing to dvorak doesn't as much because on a modern keyboard you can reach all letters without hand movement either way.
I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed.
If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers, you are being bottlenecked by your typing. Most people think and speak faster than they can type, especially in short bursts; and I'm saying that, as someone who can comfortably type at ~160-180wpm and burst over 200 for a few seconds at a time, I still find myself waiting for my fingers. Holding a conversation over IM is one of the most common places where this bottleneck becomes very noticeable.
> If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers
I'm not sure, I don't think that happens a lot to me, especially because I speak and type in multiple languages. I as well, feel bottlenecked by the brain, not typing speed. Even when I use voice-to-text software, I struggle to speak out loud my thoughts in a well-structured and well-paced manner, which somehow doesn't happen during normal conversations, only when I'm trying to write my thoughts down.
That being said, as someone who keeps their hands on the keyboard a dozen hours a day, of course I would love to find a way to type much, much faster and more accurately. I bet it comes in very handy when taking notes during Zoom meetings, etc., but my vim-muscle memory freaks out even thinking of having to rebind hjkl keys to something else. I wonder if vimmers who switched to Dvorak or Colemak can share their perspective. I've never gotten brave enough to give them a try, always felt like a waste of time for questionable benefit, but that's probably how most people think about vim-navigation, which has become an inextricable part of my keyboard workflow and I am very grateful for my younger self for learning vim-navigation.
That key makes up about 15% in English text, and it could be covered by 10% of fingers but instead it's 20%. Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. Altough I haven't looked at actual keypress stats and how those are distributed across fingers. Might be interesting to look into.
On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.
I still miss a Compaq keyboard I had with a split spacebar. You could choose various options; I had the left side as backspace.
I don't agree with your statement about switching though. I was a very good Qwerty typist, but I'm much faster and more accurate on Dvorak. Switching was one of the most useful things I have ever done.
The much reduced hand movement is extremely comfortable, paying dividends every day. And it fixed my RSI.
Of course over long periods of time we're bottlenecked by our brains. But the things to write come in bursts, and typing speed blocks there. Also transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed.
My experience completely contradicts your assertions.
The part about hand movement confuses me. On qwerty you can reach all letters without moving the hands. On both qwerty and dvorak you still need to move or stretch the hands to reach backspace, arrow keys, escape etc. So how does dvorak reduce hand movement?
> the things to write come in bursts
In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me.
> transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed
That's a very specific use-case and I wouldn't type fast enough for that no matter what layout. At that point I'd probably learn stenography instead.
The stagger is beneficial for the right hand but makes it harder for the left hand. An ortholinear layout is not more comfortable, ideally there should either be a symmetrical or columnar stagger.
I switched to Dvorak around five years ago now. I decided to switch at the same time as switching to a columnar split keyboard (specifically the ZSA Moonlander, which is still my primary keyboard (my secondary is the ZSA Voyager for travel)). I did this switch at the same time, because I felt like it would be a sufficiently different keyboard that I wouldn't have as concrete of muscle memory, and I wouldn't be fighting my QWERTY instincts as much.
A big part of why I wanted to make the switch at all is because I was experiencing fatigue in my hands, and I felt that it could be due to my improper typing habits that I developed from mostly learning to type through playing videogames. I wanted to properly type from the home row, and the split columnar keyboard basically enforces that, and Dvorak makes it even easier.
I will say though, I type at about the same speed that I did before I made the switch. Switching layouts almost certainly will not enable you to type faster. Switching layouts encourages you to deliberately practice typing on that layout (I did lots of typing challenges while learning) which will make you faster. The biggest benefit for me has actually been in my back! The split keyboard allows me to rotate my shoulders back a lot more, which makes me feel way better at the end of the day. My hands are less fatigued too, but I don't feel like that was as big of a deal for me.
I also do not agree with TFA that the keyboard layout does not really matter.
I have switched a few years ago to Dvorak. I do not think that this has changed much my typing speed, which has never been important for me. However, it has greatly increased my typing comfort.
Now I consider that switching to Dvorak was one of my best decisions and I only regret that I have spent decades using Qwerty without trying alternatives.
Of course, using an ergonomic keyboard is at least as important as the key layout.
Same for me. I’ve got a Voyager as my main keyboard and I use Colemak. I didn’t have any fatigue or anything, I was just curious what all the hype with alternative layouts was about.
I’m about the same speed as I was on qwerty, but my back and shoulders feel a lot better with the split keyboard. It feels really good to type with an alternative layout, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, the learning process was pretty arduous for me, and I’ve kind of lost my ability to use qwerty.
I would definitely recommend a split keyboard though. The ergonomics are much better.
> the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard
This is what puzzles me most of the mechanical keyboard market: you can have whatever shit cramped in on a 60%/75% keyboard but the spacebar is still the long slab.
Eg: Shurikey Hanzo 001 65% is especially... bold in this
What puzzles me about the mechanical keyboard market is why they go for the small keyboards to begin with. I can't imagine anyone has a desk so small that the handful of inches shaved off really makes a difference. So why subject oneself to having to relearn all the muscle memory, and the lack of useful keys? It makes no sense to me.
NiZ manufactures a reprogrammable 75% split keyboard in their L84 series. Granted this isn’t mechanical, but a (subjectively suprerior) electrostatic capacitive switch keyboard.
Yeah but with QWERTY you can type out the word 'typewriter' using only the top row of the keyboard; so if you're a typewriter salesman QWERTY is the way to go.
(Been using Dvorak for 25 years now. Doesn't matter what the physical keyboard layout is - currently I'm using a Swiss layout)
I was motivated to learn Dvorak in order to get rid of bad keyboard habits. And happily stuck to it. Not sure that I type any faster, but it feels somehow as a more rhytmical, much more pleasant experience.
This mirrors my experience. When I was a teenager I could type rather quickly using only two fingers on each hand. I figured I'd be typing a lot my whole life and it'd be easier to re-train proper typing habits on a whole new layout rather than trying to adapt my QWERTY habits I picked up while playing Runescape in elementary school.
It took about a month to learn, but on the side it largely fixed my QWERTY habits too, and I can freely switch between them pretty easily.
The rhythmic feeling is Dvorak's hand alternation. I use Colemak because it is better for my native tongue, but I really would have preferred the rhythmic typing of Dvorak had it worked as well for other languages.
I don't have a particular beef in the great Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate.
But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another.
Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's optimal for a swiping keyboard is probably quite different from what's optimal for a typing keyboard.
> I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...
Perhaps, but as someone who has been proficient in QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, and who now uses Colemak-DH I can say that I leave my phone and small tablet keyboards on QWERTY.
The separation of common letters in QWERTY forces your finger to move farther when swiping, but that provides a bit more distinguishing information for identifying words. When I tried swiping with Colemak and Dvorak my finger basically scrubbed back and forth across the home row and words were often mis-identified.
There are slightly improved swiping input methods like 8pen, Typewise, Hero, etc but if you are entering enough text to be able to amortize their learning costs you might be better off getting a portable Bluetooth keyboard or just using voice dictation.
Same here. I adopted Dvorak as a youth, so when I got my first smartphone I put the keyboard in Dvorak.
That only lasted a few days for two reasons:
1) What you said about the mistakes. It is so much easier to fat finger in a way that makes autocorrect clueless.
2) The muscle memory doesn't translate at all anyway. Obvious in retrospect, but typing with your thumbs is a completely unrelated skill to touch typing. Turns out both live separately and equally in my brain.
> Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...
This seems to be an interesting place where the type bar optimization problem of the earliest typewriters came back in a new weirder form. For swiping keyboards to work the words need recognizably different shapes and for irregular pairs to be closer together (just as with the type bar problem) and so QWERTY is very strongly and weirdly optimized for swiping even though it seems very unlikely its inventors could have ever imagined swipe typing.
I can anecdotally admit that touch typing and swipe typing are extremely different muscle memory. I touch type Colemak and swipe type QWERTY. (One of the things that prompted the move to Colemak for touch typing was that I needed to unlearn a ton of bad muscle memory from self-taught/self-"optimized" QWERTY, as it was inflaming RSI/RSI-like symptoms, so the loss of "fluency" there was a requirement/feature for me.)
I switched to Dvorak at the same time as switching to a split, columnar keyboard. I have never used Dvorak on a traditional staggered keyboard, and I have never used QWERTY on a split columnar keyboard. By separating the layout usage on such distinct form factors, I haven't lost QWERTY even after not using it as my primary for years :)
I also do still use QWERTY for touchscreen devices, because you can't keep your hands on the home row on touch screens, so you lose the benefits of Dvorak (and I actually found the common letter combos being near each other to be way more cumbersome on a touch screen).
My first layout was AZERTY (french one), and I added Colemak 4 years ago. I am slightly faster in AZERTY compared to Colemak still (100wpm/90wpm), I never lost the AZERTY, the key is to just use both all the time. I have a shortcut and I alternate constantly, because I need to write french, or because I wanna code.
I feel the Dvorak layout has a bug. In both English and my native language, the letter 'I' occurs much more frequently than 'U', so I've switched the 'U' and 'I' keys.
Does anyone know why this issue seems to have been overlooked by August Dvorak & William Dealey, or was it by design? Perhaps it's to make typing the relatively common English digraph 'ou' a comfortable inward roll, but for me, that doesn't outweigh stretching my left index finger all the time reaching for the I.
It’s common niggle but, as far as I know, nobody is sure of the precise rationale for placing every key, only the broad explanations of the layout that Dvorak published and promoted. The layout wasn’t based only on letter frequency but they attempted to account also for bigram frequency, frequency of repetition within words, frequency with which words are used, and with an objective of rhythmic alternation between hands.
Consider also that it was developed in the 20s and 30s. Nowadays you could throw some moderately hefty compute at almost everything of note written in the English language and come back to an error-free analysis after lunch, but who knows how representative was the corpus they analysed, painstakingly and manually. It might have made perfect sense with their data set.
Ultimately, the English language didn’t evolve to be easy to type, there will always be compromises somewhere, and the English of today isn’t the English of a century ago anyway. I imagine you’d get quite a different layout if you based it on Gen Z text messages or something.
Personally, I can’t help but note that Dvorak’s first name was August.
The Workman layout (much newer, to be fair) "solves" this. Right hand homerow is NEOI, with U on the top row and pressed by the middle finger. I've been using Workman for a few years and would recommend it. I used Dvorak for maybe 1.5-2 years before it.
According to this article, "a 1936 book called Typewriting Behavior" made "comparisons of the new keyboard to a jeep and the old one to an ox".
Jeeps were invented in 1941. Some origin theories of the name date back as far as WW I (but for recruits, not vehicles). If the author truly used this comparison in 1936 it would be a tremendous citation for the word's origin.
Or perhaps the comparison was made in a later edition of the book. Don't know.
For everyone complaining about the issues with app shortcuts when using Dvorak, the solution is to use a keymap that switches to QWERTY when you hold down the CTRL or CMD key. It is a bit unfortunate that common CLI commands (`ls` is the worst offender) and semicolon usage in programming languages are designed around QWERTY, but I still prefer Dvorak.
The issue with all the layouts for me is the challenge of buying a device with them. I use Neo2 daily (I changed due to injuries and it has helped me recover and still be able to type) and the only method I enjoyed was getting a blank keyboard on a Framework Laptop (as stickers all over the place is not for me) and I bought an MNT Research Keyboard in a Neo2 layout. Regular usage is key, and a desire/need to change keyboards. I previously tried to switch to Dvorak on one of those Typematrix keyboards and never kept it up as the pain of switching wasn't worth it.
I can still use qwerty due to muscle memory when I need to, I just find myself making dumb mistakes initially. As others have said, typing speed is not a focus due to my ability to only think at a specific pace.
At least for me, achieving blind touch typing has been much easier with Dvorak than with Qwerty.
I have used Qwerty for decades, but I was still looking from time to time at the keyboard. After switching to Dvorak on a Qwerty marked keyboard, I have never needed to look at the keyboard again, so there is no point in having a Dvorak-marked keyboard when a standard keyboard is fine.
So a good ergonomic keyboard should be used, but how the keys are marked should not matter.
Readit News
Need to type faster? Spend some time practising every day and you will gain more speed within weeks than from just switching layouts. Most people don't as speed often isn't actually that important. I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed. Need less hand movement? Placing symbols, arrow keys etc as secondary function onto the central keys with a programmable keyboard helps with that, changing to dvorak doesn't as much because on a modern keyboard you can reach all letters without hand movement either way.
If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers, you are being bottlenecked by your typing. Most people think and speak faster than they can type, especially in short bursts; and I'm saying that, as someone who can comfortably type at ~160-180wpm and burst over 200 for a few seconds at a time, I still find myself waiting for my fingers. Holding a conversation over IM is one of the most common places where this bottleneck becomes very noticeable.
I'm not sure, I don't think that happens a lot to me, especially because I speak and type in multiple languages. I as well, feel bottlenecked by the brain, not typing speed. Even when I use voice-to-text software, I struggle to speak out loud my thoughts in a well-structured and well-paced manner, which somehow doesn't happen during normal conversations, only when I'm trying to write my thoughts down.
That being said, as someone who keeps their hands on the keyboard a dozen hours a day, of course I would love to find a way to type much, much faster and more accurately. I bet it comes in very handy when taking notes during Zoom meetings, etc., but my vim-muscle memory freaks out even thinking of having to rebind hjkl keys to something else. I wonder if vimmers who switched to Dvorak or Colemak can share their perspective. I've never gotten brave enough to give them a try, always felt like a waste of time for questionable benefit, but that's probably how most people think about vim-navigation, which has become an inextricable part of my keyboard workflow and I am very grateful for my younger self for learning vim-navigation.
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...
To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.
On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.
I don't agree with your statement about switching though. I was a very good Qwerty typist, but I'm much faster and more accurate on Dvorak. Switching was one of the most useful things I have ever done.
Of course over long periods of time we're bottlenecked by our brains. But the things to write come in bursts, and typing speed blocks there. Also transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed.
My experience completely contradicts your assertions.
> the things to write come in bursts
In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me.
> transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed
That's a very specific use-case and I wouldn't type fast enough for that no matter what layout. At that point I'd probably learn stenography instead.
A big part of why I wanted to make the switch at all is because I was experiencing fatigue in my hands, and I felt that it could be due to my improper typing habits that I developed from mostly learning to type through playing videogames. I wanted to properly type from the home row, and the split columnar keyboard basically enforces that, and Dvorak makes it even easier.
I will say though, I type at about the same speed that I did before I made the switch. Switching layouts almost certainly will not enable you to type faster. Switching layouts encourages you to deliberately practice typing on that layout (I did lots of typing challenges while learning) which will make you faster. The biggest benefit for me has actually been in my back! The split keyboard allows me to rotate my shoulders back a lot more, which makes me feel way better at the end of the day. My hands are less fatigued too, but I don't feel like that was as big of a deal for me.
I have switched a few years ago to Dvorak. I do not think that this has changed much my typing speed, which has never been important for me. However, it has greatly increased my typing comfort.
Now I consider that switching to Dvorak was one of my best decisions and I only regret that I have spent decades using Qwerty without trying alternatives.
Of course, using an ergonomic keyboard is at least as important as the key layout.
I’m about the same speed as I was on qwerty, but my back and shoulders feel a lot better with the split keyboard. It feels really good to type with an alternative layout, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, the learning process was pretty arduous for me, and I’ve kind of lost my ability to use qwerty.
I would definitely recommend a split keyboard though. The ergonomics are much better.
This is what puzzles me most of the mechanical keyboard market: you can have whatever shit cramped in on a 60%/75% keyboard but the spacebar is still the long slab.
Eg: Shurikey Hanzo 001 65% is especially... bold in this
(Been using Dvorak for 25 years now. Doesn't matter what the physical keyboard layout is - currently I'm using a Swiss layout)
This is in the article.
It took about a month to learn, but on the side it largely fixed my QWERTY habits too, and I can freely switch between them pretty easily.
But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another.
Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's optimal for a swiping keyboard is probably quite different from what's optimal for a typing keyboard.
Perhaps, but as someone who has been proficient in QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, and who now uses Colemak-DH I can say that I leave my phone and small tablet keyboards on QWERTY.
The separation of common letters in QWERTY forces your finger to move farther when swiping, but that provides a bit more distinguishing information for identifying words. When I tried swiping with Colemak and Dvorak my finger basically scrubbed back and forth across the home row and words were often mis-identified.
There are slightly improved swiping input methods like 8pen, Typewise, Hero, etc but if you are entering enough text to be able to amortize their learning costs you might be better off getting a portable Bluetooth keyboard or just using voice dictation.
That only lasted a few days for two reasons:
1) What you said about the mistakes. It is so much easier to fat finger in a way that makes autocorrect clueless.
2) The muscle memory doesn't translate at all anyway. Obvious in retrospect, but typing with your thumbs is a completely unrelated skill to touch typing. Turns out both live separately and equally in my brain.
This seems to be an interesting place where the type bar optimization problem of the earliest typewriters came back in a new weirder form. For swiping keyboards to work the words need recognizably different shapes and for irregular pairs to be closer together (just as with the type bar problem) and so QWERTY is very strongly and weirdly optimized for swiping even though it seems very unlikely its inventors could have ever imagined swipe typing.
I can anecdotally admit that touch typing and swipe typing are extremely different muscle memory. I touch type Colemak and swipe type QWERTY. (One of the things that prompted the move to Colemak for touch typing was that I needed to unlearn a ton of bad muscle memory from self-taught/self-"optimized" QWERTY, as it was inflaming RSI/RSI-like symptoms, so the loss of "fluency" there was a requirement/feature for me.)
I also do still use QWERTY for touchscreen devices, because you can't keep your hands on the home row on touch screens, so you lose the benefits of Dvorak (and I actually found the common letter combos being near each other to be way more cumbersome on a touch screen).
Does anyone know why this issue seems to have been overlooked by August Dvorak & William Dealey, or was it by design? Perhaps it's to make typing the relatively common English digraph 'ou' a comfortable inward roll, but for me, that doesn't outweigh stretching my left index finger all the time reaching for the I.
Consider also that it was developed in the 20s and 30s. Nowadays you could throw some moderately hefty compute at almost everything of note written in the English language and come back to an error-free analysis after lunch, but who knows how representative was the corpus they analysed, painstakingly and manually. It might have made perfect sense with their data set.
Ultimately, the English language didn’t evolve to be easy to type, there will always be compromises somewhere, and the English of today isn’t the English of a century ago anyway. I imagine you’d get quite a different layout if you based it on Gen Z text messages or something.
Personally, I can’t help but note that Dvorak’s first name was August.
Jeeps were invented in 1941. Some origin theories of the name date back as far as WW I (but for recruits, not vehicles). If the author truly used this comparison in 1936 it would be a tremendous citation for the word's origin.
Or perhaps the comparison was made in a later edition of the book. Don't know.
(Typewriting Behavior, for the curious: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74878/page/n11...)
I personally prefer reuse of the existing word "jeep" meaning "new recruit" to mean "new vehicle". But that's just an opinion.
I can still use qwerty due to muscle memory when I need to, I just find myself making dumb mistakes initially. As others have said, typing speed is not a focus due to my ability to only think at a specific pace.
I have used Qwerty for decades, but I was still looking from time to time at the keyboard. After switching to Dvorak on a Qwerty marked keyboard, I have never needed to look at the keyboard again, so there is no point in having a Dvorak-marked keyboard when a standard keyboard is fine.
So a good ergonomic keyboard should be used, but how the keys are marked should not matter.