A Dvorak Diversion
November 8th, 2007I’ve been using computers ever since I was a little kid. But it wasn’t until about a decade ago that I learned to “touch-type”, or type without looking at the keys; I’ve probably “point and pecked” longer than most chickens. Learning to touch-type was no mean feat, but it only took me a month or so of practice to churn out a brisk 70 words per minute. Not too shabby.
With an increase in typing skill, however, came an increase in typing. When I was a senior in college (years after I’d learned to touch-type) the flurry of papers I had to write for school really started making my wrists hurt. Jokes about contributions from college-age libido notwithstanding, I was sure a nasty case of carpal tunnel was on the way. I’d logged some 200,000-250,000 words just writing papers in college and I was desperate for an alternative.
It just so happened that right around then an economics class of mine began discussing the Dvorak keyboard layout. The Dvorak layout (named for its creator, a U.S. professor by the name of August Dvorak) is simply a rearranging of the keys from standard QWERTY, the default we all know and love. You can see from the Wikipedia link where the actual placements of the keys are. The vowels are on the left home row, well-used consonants (d-h-t-n-s) are on the right, and so on. (Sorry, “Wheel of Fortune” watchers, “r” and “l” are top row right hand reaches. Obviously Mr. Dvorak takes some issue with their claim of the most common consonants being r-s-t-l-n.) Most of the punctuation is clustered in the upper left, and the less important letters are scattered on the top and bottom rows. The only letters that are in the same place as QWERTY are “a” and “m”, which can create a fair bit of confusion during the learning period, actually.
The Dvorak keyboard layout is a common example, in Economics classes and elsewhere, of network externalities (a.k.a. “The Bandwagon Effect”) and market failure. The basic idea is that the QWERTY layout snowballed as it became adopted. People kept jumping on the bandwagon, as it were, which in turn encouraged others to do so. Lacking such a network of users, the Dvorak layout (having been developed over 40 years later) couldn’t stand a chance. Thus, people still continue to learn and use the “inferior” QWERTY today, “locking in” its supremacy.
But this new layout was interesting to me. Dvorak users claim a variety of benefits to switching, including faster typing speeds, more comfortable typing, greater “nerd credibility”, and most importantly, less wrist motion and “finger travel”. I’d always been curious about Dvorak anyway (it’s one of those things you often hear about in passing), so I figured it was worth a shot. If I’m willing to do something crazy like learn the entire Facial Action Coding system so that I could read faces better, you know picking up a new keyboard layout is well within my reach. (Get it? Reach? Keyboard reach? Ok, maybe that joke was a bit of a reach.)
The first thing I did was replace all the keycaps on my keyboard to match the new layout. It’s pretty easy to change your keyboard layout in Windows, but I thought it would be fun to actually change the physical keys, and I thought maybe it would help me learn better at the same time. (By now I’m sure many of you know what my sick definition of “fun” entails.) Switching the key caps was simple enough, because I was using a old IBM “Model M” keyboard, made in the mid-eighties. (Oh yeah, and I’m also an old keyboard enthusiast. Ask me how much I love the “Windows” key. Go ahead, ask. Rest assured that it ranks slightly above doing my taxes in the middle of a root canal.)
Next up was finding a way to learn the new layout. Though there are several ways to go about this, the best I found was a neat site called “ABCD: A Basic Course in Dvorak”. I can’t say enough good things about the site. It has a bunch of actual typing examples (not just typing gibberish), in much the same way that professional typing textbooks have. It’s really simple to use; the site’s mostly just a small collection of forms, so you can take the whole course via that web site. Best of all, it’s free. (The guy who runs the site is pretty cool too. After I finished the course, I sent him an email thanking him, and he responded warmly.)
With my keyboard swapped and ABCD loaded in my browser, I was ready to go. I spent the next 2-3 months really drilling myself on how to use Dvorak.
I’m not going to lie, it was rough. The worst thing about using Dvorak is definitely the early learning stages. What often happens, in my experience, is that the first couple of days are fun. You can type some basic words fairly quickly and it’s easy to feel accomplished. You say to yourself, “Oh yeah, I’ll be going full speed again inside of two weeks.”
But, as the days progress and you learn more and more letters, fatigue sets in. It’s tempting to remember how easy typing is in QWERTY. It’s like a smoker trying to quit with a pack of cigarettes right in front of them (and knowing that 99% of the rest of the world smokes them). All you have to do is reach over, light up, and the pain is over. Or, in this case, simply switch layouts. Call it “QWERTY withdrawal”. (Believe me, try it yourself and you’ll understand why the drug metaphor is justified here.)
Progress tends to be slower at that point, and some people actually get worse in QWERTY during that time. Some people can’t gain that skill back without effort. The temptation is there to start banging on the keys like a barrelhouse piano singer, but you have to stick with it during this trying time.
Chatting over something like AOL Instant Messenger is by far the hardest part, and your best real-world test. Everything is in real-time and chatters do not like to wait forever for you to respond. As I often say, if you can chat in Dvorak you can handle anything. It’s a trial-by-fire for sure, and when I was comfortable chatting in Dvorak, I felt I had actually learned it, much more so than when I just completed the course.
2-3 weeks later, most of the hard times were over. I could imagine the Dvorak layout in my mind and I hardly thought about typing anymore. I was back up to my old speed of 70 words per minute and life was peachy. It was a lot like learning a new language, but since you’re using the same letters and everything, it’s a much simpler process.
I was lucky to be able to do this in college. Most people who use computers (especially at work) can’t afford to type slowly for that long. (”Oh, sorry the project’s late boss, I’m learning a new keyboard layout.” “WHAT???”) The worst part is, if you switch back to QWERTY during this crucial period, a lot of your gains will be erased. To use the drug metaphor again, it’s like backsliding on your sobriety - you go right back to the beginning again. It’s only after you learn Dvorak solidly that switching back and forth is really possible, I think. If you want to learn Dvorak, this is a major issue you have to overcome (though if you want to, you can probably find a way).
A few months after I started, it was safe to say that I was “fluent” in Dvorak. Since then, I’ve never looked back. It’s been about five years now and I still use Dvorak 99 percent of the time for most of my daily tasks. Which brings us to the most relevant question for you, the reader: “How beneficial is it to switch?”
Let me clear up some misconceptions first. I agree in a few ways with that Reason.com article I linked before. Probably the biggest misconception is that you type faster. My personal experience suggests otherwise. I still type about the same speed as I did before, and so do the handful of Dvorak switchers I’ve converted. I don’t think you go any faster, really. Though your hands move less in Dvorak, you also constantly switch hands while typing. So your hands move less (which is faster), but they build up less “finger-momentum”, making it harder to hit letter combinations (which ends up being slower). I think it’s about a wash, overall. I know the typing world record holder types in Dvorak (some 212 words a minute!), but your average convert doesn’t see that kind of increase. Still, you certainly shouldn’t type any slower after a month or two.
Another issue Dvorak lovers often fail to notice is that it’s best used for natural speech. If you type conversationally and in full sentences, Dvorak is great. But if you have to use a lot of specialized lingo, acronyms, or have to hit weird keys (like in programming), Dvorak is probably not optimal. Typing weird words in Dvorak is very much a conscious process that seems foreign to me. Still, I program all the time in Dvorak and I make out fine. (As Wikipedia mentions, you can type in Programmer Dvorak in a pinch, but it’s less widely supported in various operating systems. Sorry for dashing any dual-nerd’s hopes out there.)
But where that Reason article probably goes wrong is their discussion of comfort and ergonomics. The original paper that Reason article quotes is much closer to the mark, I believe. That is, the studies that suggest Dvorak is no better ergonomically are inexact and inconclusive. If you decide to take a statistical approach, there’s more evidence for the better ergonomics of Dvorak.
There are a lot of statistics floating around the net about QWERTY-Dvorak comparsions. Very few say where their data comes from or how they calculated it. Better to take some practical examples instead. This Dvorak site is a great place to start. You can look at QWERTY vs. Dvorak statistics (as well as other formats) for a variety of texts, including the full works of Shakespeare and “The War of the Worlds”. If you’re still skeptical, you can type or paste in any text you please, up to 20,000 characters, and run an analysis on that. (Feel free to try it out with this post and pretend to be a writer. Just like me!) The only real assumption is that the distance between keys (or to press the same key twice) is 1.8 cm, which seems reasonable enough.
The site has an elegant summary of their conclusions at the bottom:
“The big question: is Dvorak better than QWERTY and by how much? Definitely. It reduces finger work by 25%, reduces awkward combinations of keys by around 66%, and does a better job at balancing the keys between fingers and hands (by about 20%).”
A quick look at any of the statistics for the sample texts confirms these facts. As a backup to the claim that QWERTY has more wrist movement and awkward key combinations, here’s another approach, using some of the most commonly used English words. Anyone who’s typed “and”, “the”, and “you’ in either keyboard layout can appreciate that link. The difference is night and day.
My anecdotal experience confirms these findings. Within weeks of switching to Dvorak, my wrist pain practically went away. I felt like my wrists and fingers were hardly moving most of the time. And when I tried to switch back to QWERTY, it was quite awkward. Not because I couldn’t do it, but because the way you have to contort your hands to type in QWERTY was clear to me then. It kind of feels like trying to make gang signs with your fingers. Very unnatural. (For me, anyway. I’m clean now, clean!) Everyone I’ve converted to Dvorak has agreed that it feels much nicer, for what that’s worth. My twin brother doesn’t even use QWERTY at all anymore, and he works with computers for a living.
I might sound a little preachy here, I know. But I’m not a serious Dvorak evangelist. Learning Dvorak is a hard thing to do and it can really be unsettling. And whenever you use other computers, you have to go through the minor annoyance of switching the layout (though this is easier than you might think at first). Several friends audibly sigh every time they sit down at my computer, start typing, and remember it’s Dvorak. Keyboard layouts are one of those things people just take for granted. In fact, a couple of folks have gotten downright angry about it at my machine when they figure out what’s going on. (Though this is funny in its own way. Helpful comments such as “Just type words with only ‘a’ and ‘m’ in them” can be very amusing.)
I tell anyone that’s interested in Dvorak the same thing: if you’re having wrist pain and are excited about learning something new for its own sake, go ahead and try Dvorak. If your wrists feel fine or you’re happy enough with QWERTY, so be it. That covers the majority of people. I don’t have any grand delusions. I know Dvorak is for a certain minority at best. For the rest of you reading, the idea here is just to familiarize you with Dvorak and tell you about my experience with it.
And if you’re on the fence about switching, there’s one other advantage to Dvorak that no one talks about: security. If someone takes your computer, they’ll have a hell of a time figuring out what’s going on, especially if you have the computer password-protected. And if you have nosy roommates/siblings/parents/significant others, using Dvorak will go a long way toward keeping them off your computer (especially if you don’t switch the keycaps). On the other hand, they’ll probably think you’re weird. Thankfully, I got used to that one years ago.
Additional Links:
An excellent Slate feature on Dvorak
Dvorak in a web browser (ironically enough, if I try typing in Dvorak there, it gets all screwed up)
Dvorak book Amazon link, with Dvorak study data (this will probably be the basis of a follow up post on this topic)
Colemak, the keyboard layout for the people that even Dvorak wasn’t good enough for (that main stats site I linked to suggests otherwise)
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November 8th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
You may not care for it, but I use Winkey shortcuts constantly. It does much more than pulling up the start menu in Windows - Winkey+e opens an Explorer window for instance, whilst Winkey+f will produce a search window and Winkey+r is for the run command. Using keyboard shortcuts like these instead of clicking through menus with the mouse makes me faster at these tasks.
Greg, that’s an excellent point. Maybe I will try and incorporate them at some point in the future. More likely, though, I would turn those same functions into mouse gestures. Even if that’s the route I pursue, I appreciate making me aware of it.
- Dave
November 9th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Another good article, Dave. Nice job.
November 10th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I haven’t read your post yet but it looks like you put a lot of work into it. Anyway I use Dvorak and winkey shortcuts too. I like winkey+l to lock the computer when I step away from my desk at work. I don’t always do it, but if I’m going to lunch or something I usually do. I may have more to say about Dvorak later…
November 10th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I would add that I switched to Dvorak. I don’t think it made me faster, but I decided to learn it on a whim just for the sake of doing something different. I am a bit frustrated with the new ’s’ key location to this day, but that may be because I don’t follow proper typing rules (I use whatever finger I feel is best for the job). In fact, I realized that I never typed properly in QWERTY in the first place. Despite that I have always been a decently fast typer. I guess I got really used to “finger momentum” or whatever it’s called in QWERTY. I don’t hunt and peck like some people but I never really use my pinkies either. I think if I learned to use my pinkies, the ’s’ key issue would go away (it’s where the ‘;’ key is on QWERTY for reference).
If you use all your fingers properly in QWERTY and are willing to type with equal care in Dvorak, I would definitely recommend giving it a try. If you do hunt and peck or non-pinkies just keep in mind that keyboard layouts are not really designed for you.
Anyhow, learning new keyboard layouts is super-easy since it’s always just going to be one-to-one mappings of 30 or so keys. Or at least that has been my experience.