Mar
13
Dvork Keyboard Simply Better
Filed Under technology
Imagine that you walk to work. Each day you could take the route which meanders over sixteen miles of winding roads, or you could take the short-cut, which delivers you directly to your place of employment in one mile. Which route would you take most often? Believe it or not on the standard (QWERTY) keyboard a fast typist, in eight hours, will move his or her fingers sixteen miles. On a different, much more efficient, keyboard that same typist will travel only one mile. Which would you choose?
What a difference a change in layout of the keys makes. The short-cut keyboard is called Dvorak, after the man who invented it. It has the keys you use the most on the home row. Have you ever noticed that the standard QWERTY keyboard puts keys you don’t use often right at your finger tips?
The Dvorak layout was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout was introduced in the 1860s, being used on the first commercially-successful typewriter. The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would alternate between each side of the keyboard so as to avoid jams of the mechanical arms as they reached up to slap the metal shape of the letter onto the ribbon of ink putting the imprint onto paper and slide back into place allowing the next mechanical arm to make its way to the paper.
So much has changed since then, but our keyboards haven’t. The standard keyboard was designed to make typing as slow as possible. Dvorak not only noticed this, he did something about it. Patented in 1932, this “new” keyboard was designed to make typing more economical, more fun, faster, and simply better.
There was a problem though, and it wasn’t with the new keyboard, it was that people who already knew how to type on the slow, outmoded keyboard, who didn’t want to learn the new one. Oddly they still don’t. It takes two weeks to learn to type on the Dvorak keyboard and you don’t have to buy a new keyboard. Windows Regional Settings allows your current keyboard to simulate the Dvorak keyboard. Mac has settings for Dvorak as well.
Not only is the keyboard much better than the standard, it may reduce carpel tunnel syndrome and other conditions that result from overuse of our precious digits. It may also result in your typing faster and it will certainly amuse your friends if they try and type on it.
Here is a simple sentence typed on the Dvorak keyboard: The dog jumped over the white picket fence.
Here is that same sentence typed on the QWERTY keyboard: Kjd hsu cfmrdh s.do kjd ,jgkd rtivdk ydlide
As you can see, very few of the keys are the same. Can you tell which key is the same? While working out the code may be difficult for you, the actual learning of the Dvorak keyboard is really easy. (A: the letter “m”)
Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles:
- Letters should be typed by alternating between hands.
- For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
- The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
- The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
- Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers.
- Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.
You can continue to walk sixteen miles to work, or, with a little retraining and relearning, you can walk one mile to work. Older versions of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing actually have the option to learn the Dvorak keyboard.
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2 Responses to “Dvork Keyboard Simply Better”
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The speed with which you “thrash” at a keyboard is in all likelihood far less important that what you actauly spell out to the reader.
And as such I am befuddled as to what the promotion of a market failure keyboard layout has to do with being 6 inches to the left (or is that the right) of enlightenment.
Most people don’t care about the technology that never made it.
And from certain perspectives … it is a reasonable attitude to take.
I myself like to create my own “non mainstream” technology and then use it usefully.
PS by the way Jerry your “channeling of Dobson or was that Erickson (probably Dobson) on your taped “seminar” (very important patterns I think it was) … was as bad an example of inefficient usage of mimicry that has ever been heard. Just my “mercilessly honest opinion” .. your own unique style doesn’t need the (Bandler type ) mimicry.
I would listen to you … as you … delivering “you” .. well before I resorted to putting up with the dross of NLP that re presents itself in different voices saying the same things.
So I await your response.
Regards to you and yours.
I am going to begin practicing and switching over to dvorak.
It will makeit more efficient and fun to visit my favorite sites such as http://www.jbs.org