Just how this came to be is a narrative that remains murky and – ironically – far from fixed. It's a story that offers insights into the sometimes unexpected pace of technological change, and one that's peopled by unsung inventors and obsessive tinkerers. It taps a fervent debate that most of us are oblivious to.
The earliest typewriters were cumbersome, moody machines but there was nevertheless an order to their keys that any English-speaking user could readily glean: they were arranged alphabetically. So why change this logical layout? Legend has it that Qwerty – known for the jabberwocky-style word formed by the first six letters of its top row – was dreamt up with the express purpose of slowing typists down. One character even lectures another about it in a Paulo Coelho novel.
In fact, the Qwerty layout was concocted to prevent keys from jamming – or at least, that's what most experts have tended to believe. The letters on a typewriter are affixed to metal arms, which are activated by the keys; on early models, if a lever was activated before its neighbour had fully come back down to rest, they would jam, forcing the typist to stop. Enter Christopher Sholes. Born in small-town Pennsylvania in 1819, Sholes was many things, including newspaper editor and Wisconsin state senator. He was also one of a team of inventors credited with building the first commercially viable typewriter. Having already tried to build machines for typesetting and printing numbers, Sholes' adventures in type began in 1867, when he read an article in Scientific American describing the Pterotype, a prototype typewriter invented by one John Pratt. The article sounded the death knoll for that "laborious and unsatisfactory" instrument, the pen, soon to be set down in favour of "playing on the literary piano".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:07AM
Now "Why do we all use bad layouts of leyboards?" is a better question.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:07AM
It has been proven that, regardless of layout, experience typists will perform the same. Querty, Dvorak, whatever, it doesn't matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:59AM
What is easier on the hands, thought?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday December 19 2016, @07:38AM
Yes, thought is easier on the hands, as it doesn't involve them at all. However we don't have the technology to convert thought into text directly.
The ordering of the keys on the keyboard doesn't really make much difference on the hands, as the unnatural position of the hands on the keyboard is dictated by the physical arrangement in rows, combined with the ten finger system that forces you to hold your hands in a position that your fingers can rest on the so-called home row. It is this unnatural position that causes problems. Ergonomic keyboards change this, typically without going away from the qwerty arrangement.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 19 2016, @07:32AM
Which makes me wonder why we have the same old qwerty stories popping up like clockwork ever two years?
Its like See Windmill - Tilt at Windmill, lets dredge up the same old stories about jamming typewriters (these too were largely false), and trot them out again.
I'd wager None of these stories are posted having been typed on non qwerty keyboards. Nobody is putting their fingers where their mouth is.
http://www.economist.com/node/196071 [economist.com] --- Qwerty Myth
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @07:58AM
There may be slight differences, but not nearly enough to justify disrupting the standard for a transition period. It's only worth the cost of standards disruption if the new thing is significantly better.
Brain implants or similar are probably the next "keyboard" anyhow.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday December 19 2016, @08:54AM
A study of 14 typists, conducted for the U.S. Navy in 1944, showed
[...] that it took an average of only 52 hours of training for those typists' speeds on the Dvorak keyboard to reach their average speeds on the qwerty keyboard. By the end of the study their Dvorak speeds were 74 percent faster than their qwerty speeds, and their accuracies had increased by 68 percent.
-- http://web.mit.edu/jcb/www/Dvorak/ [mit.edu]
The study was undertaken by August Dvorak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @09:56AM
Testing on myself with AZERTY to BÉPO, it greatly increased my accuracy, and most of all reduced the pain in my fingers.
Speed was never the issue.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday December 19 2016, @10:36AM
Study run by Dvorak = not particularly objective.
Note that the author of the article was skeptical of Dvorak's claims, and conducted his own, personal test: "During that time, my Dvorak speed increased to 90 wpm, and my qwerty speed reached 80 wpm."
This reflects my own experience, which I posted in another comment to this article.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday December 19 2016, @11:35AM
More recent attempts by more objective researchers have failed to reproduce the increase in speed. I learned Dvorak and used it for a while, but eventually stopped because I often had to type things on other people's computers and so had to switch my brain between QWERTY and Dvorak, which offset most of the benefit. The later studies did show less strain on the hands, but not an increase in speed. I read a few studies when I was considering learning Dvorak (I was suffering from some pain in my middle finger at the time, which I eventually found was caused by the mouse wheel, but tried learning Dvorak to see if it would help) and the one that I most remember tried a set of randomly designed layouts. They found that, with the exception of a couple of outliers, they all converged on about the same speed.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:10AM
like rights for gays, legalized pot, etc.
Some whiz kid entrepreneur will mandate Dvorak or some other keyboard layout for his product that is pitched to Gen Z. And all the kids will see it as a way of keeping their Millenial parents off their gear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @01:36AM
> Some whiz kid entrepreneur will mandate Dvorak or some other keyboard layout for his product that is pitched to Gen Z.
More like in a generation 99% of users won't even use a keyboard. It will be voice or predictive thumbing on a phone.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @03:32AM
Users, like developers will likely continue using keyboards for the forseeable future because they provide an average performance level well above most users speaking or non-tactile touch performance, and unlike either of those options keyboards for the most part continue to operate efficiently regardless of lag (race conditions in software/broken OS-side buffering are another matter...)
Having become stuck with touchscreen typing due to cheap cellphones dropping keypad/keyboard inclusion and having compared how quickly I can IM someone in the same room a message compared to how long it takes speaking to them in the same room, I can tell you for a fact that a keyboard is an essential tool for productive members of society. CONSUMERS on the other hand, they can be saddled with whatever crap we want to force on them and little productivity will be lost.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday December 19 2016, @12:18AM
I first heard of this in the 70s when I had a TRS-80. Got a program to rejigger my keyboard to Dvorak, dunno if it made me faster or not as I was still learning how to type (first program I bought with that TRS-80? Typing Tutor).
But at work I had a keyboard I couldn't rejigger. So now I've got 2 layouts in my fingers, and I have to use my head to figure out what to do. Then got a job where I lived on a VT-100 at work, couldn't rejigger the keyboard. So QWERTY it is.
For me the big thing with typing is the same as my editor (vim). I don't know how it works. My fingers do. I think what I want and my fingers make it happen. I can do everything I need without leaving the home position.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 19 2016, @12:52AM
Heh. The fingers know it all, that's for sure. If, for some reason, I actually LOOK AT my keyboard, I get lost. The only reason to ever look down, is to find the home position. Found home, look away quick before you screw it up!!
Had one of the guys at work walk up to me one day. He's from Mexico, and moderately literate. He asked me a question, I turned my head and explained what he needed to know, but he wouldn't look at me. He was staring at my fingers on the keyboard instead. "How can you type without looking?" I answered, "Well you can't type when you ARE looking!" "But, how do you know where the keys are?" "They haven't moved since the last time I looked, have they? It's like shifting a car, or a big truck. Think about it, and you'll screw it up.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday December 19 2016, @07:42AM
If, for some reason, I actually LOOK AT my keyboard, I get lost.
Something similar......
I get lost the instant I make a mistake. My fingers freeze, something's wrong, the muscle movement wasn't right, halt halt halt.
Sure enough I will find an error within one character of where the fingers stopped.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday December 20 2016, @01:36AM
I don't freeze when I make a mistake, I know I made it and know why. Typically it's either stretching for a little used key (30%), or right finger wrong hand (e.g. bird finger left hand vs bird finger right hand. Think e vs i). (oh yeah, 70%).
The whole left hand/right hand has plagued me for almost 40 years now. Why? hellifino. Good thing is I know immediately I messed up.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2016, @03:53AM
Societal inertia is a bitch.
Autocad lets you fully customize their interface, so when I did my first big project on it, I did - took my most common commands down from 3 steps to 1, felt like I knew what I was doing, and then.... after about two months of "learning Autocad," I opened my drawings on a colleague's machine - he didn't have (nor want) my keybindings, and I can't remember how to do the most basic drawing manipulations because what I've trained myself to is useless outside of my personal machines.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 19 2016, @04:43PM
That's what's great about the -p parameter in emacs :)
"Hey, open with that user's settings over there, here."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 19 2016, @04:57PM
Should've put this in my first post :P
But most of my custom emacs bindings either fall under
1) Assign a binding to something that doesn't have one, or has a multi-chord binding, to the reserved C-c series
2) Bind a new feature from a plugin.
I try to limit tweaking existing bindings' behavior to do more what I expect, and learn the existing bindings as often as possible unless they're really annoying.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 19 2016, @05:13PM
emacs brands you as a member of a particular cult to start with...
I suppose Autocad could make keybindings easier to transfer, say onto a USB stick, or, God forbid, "the Cloud," then you plug that into your colleague's machine and he can temporarily use your bindings. But, then, to make it really "multi-user-friencly" it would somehow need to identify who is driving the mouse/keyboard/tablet at the moment and use their bindings at that time (camera/facial recognition) - that would be a cool system, if it worked.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 19 2016, @08:14PM
If closing and reopening all the necessary files is a big pain, and unbinding and rebinding everything in a running session to a different config doesn't work cleanly, yeah you sound kind of SOL :P
Emacs is supposed to have a "desktop save" feature where you can close and reopen it and it still has all files open but I've never tried it myself. Presumably AutoCAD is slightly more complicated than plaintext files ;)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:19AM
The real problem with life is that it's not just emacs and Autocad, there are dozens of apps out there, and no cohesive system for user customization.
Maybe someday, if we ever get a Linus for the Desktop.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 19 2016, @12:24AM
these days so many of us communicate in writing. Great things are written, and horrible abominations as well.
Some day it will all come to an end, when petabyte drives are sold in gumball machines and we all communicate with holograms, like Princess Leia did with R2D2 in Star Wars.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday December 19 2016, @12:44AM
Bullshit. The written word will never die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:03AM
Who needs holograms, 2D videos seem to be enough for a disturbingly large minority of the population to abandon the written word to an alarming degree.
It's not that I mind videos as such, for entertainment or for information that actually has a major visual component, but so many things that would be better communicated with text and a few pictures are dumped on youtube as unedited rambles.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @11:11AM
They think they are getting *CLOSER* to others by listening to a video'd ramble in comparison to reading correspondence from others in text form (whether written or typed.) Something that I have learned over the years is it doesn't matter whether you spend time in person, via text, or via video. The person presented may still not turn out to be the person you expect, whether because you meet them in-person after exclusively knowing them online, or because you normally associate with them inside of one social construct RL, and when travelling into another social construct their entire demeanor changes. (kink scene popped into my head as an example, but also going to parties with someone you normally know from school, or someone you normally hang out with casually instead being met in a formal or 'clique-ish' social setting.)
The nuance to learning about others can be quite great, but also if your first and second negative experience of them coincide you can probably assume that is how they will always be around you.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday December 19 2016, @07:27PM
it gets me down, it really does, when I'm trying to figure out how to do something, and all I can find is YouTubes.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:26AM
And relearning unnecessary things is a waste of irreplacable time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:39PM
/thread
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 19 2016, @12:45AM
And, if you don't like that answer, ask your father when he gets home!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday December 19 2016, @01:19AM
Why? There isn't anything better as far as I know. There needs to be, or at least it really helps to have, a standard. As far as I know switching to some other layout provides minor improvements if any. From a personal perspective if I sat infront of a non-QWERTY keyboard my typing speed would plummet, it would be three decades of typing just down the tubes. That is an educated guess based on just getting smaller keyboards for laptops where they move the keys just so slightly or make minor modifications to the layout and size of the keys and that alone ruins my typing speed.
Also retraining generations of people that know how to type QWERTY to use something else would probably be a giant waste of time and resources, sort of the same reason why most people still use Windows. It's not the best, but it is good enough and pretty much everyone else uses it.
What I do find curious is that there are not more national layouts and changes. If the layout is designed with english in mind then why are there not more changes to the various national layouts? Your left hand is the dominant keyboard hand, it's where most of the letters are that make up most of the words - while the less common letters are more prevelant on the right side. Word frequency analysis of alphabets and language should show that - example 'H' is a fairly common letter in english (~7%) in most other germanic languages it is drastically lower, usually around 1-2% of a large text mass (actual german is the exception where it is almost as common as in english). Yet H is in the middle of the keyboard pretty much everywhere. Instead they are all more or less QWERTY and if you have some weird extra letters, usually umlauts and such they get stuck on the right hand size of the keyboard or you have to work your best squid moves as you have to press some combo to get them out (or you have to know the ascii code). In some way they all fell victim to standardization.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Monday December 19 2016, @06:14AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday December 19 2016, @07:47AM
Probably the caps lock is where it is because that's the position where it was on typewriters. Remember, that change was done back when computers started to be used also used by secretaries who were used to typewriters. Typewriters had the caps lock above the shift key because it was really a mechanism to lock the shift key, and as such it had to be located at the lever of the shift key.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 19 2016, @06:32PM
Remember those abominations that had the huge enter key and the backslash was located randomly near the spacebar... or even worse, on the same key as the front slash?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday December 19 2016, @08:41AM
I think that we are all make an incorrect assumption - that QWERTY rules the roost. Well it might do in the US, but here in France it is AZERTY, in Russia and eastern Europe it is a Cyrillic variant, and there are numerous others as one looks around the world.
The important factors here are that keyboard layouts are common standards and what we are already used to. By having a standard that is so widely known in a specific region it makes it relatively easy for employees to be mobile between jobs, for users to do what they want on any machine that is available, and for software writers to choose keys intelligently. Imagine if ESDX - sometimes used in software for movement in cardinal directions - were to be remapped into unrelated positions. How would users of the software learn the new keys? What would be the physical relationship of the new keys to each other, would it be logical and/or intuitive? Of course, keys can be easily remapped, but who would be responsible for rewriting any documentation associated with the software package? If we remap the keys back to the original positions what have we actually achieved?
The various keyboard layouts have become defacto regional standards. Moving away from them is not simply a matter of preference but would also incur a huge cost. Users and operators would have to be retrained, and there would be a corresponding reduction in effectiveness until the new 'standard' became the norm. And how would users be convinced that such a change would be beneficial? People complain when Microsoft changes the user interface on the screen, I believe that there would be tremendous resistance to changing the keyboard layout for little or no gain.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:49PM
Easter Europe here.
Sorry to interrupt, but many of us (as in countries) use QWERTY and not the "Cyrillic variant".
Thank you.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday December 19 2016, @02:12PM
Thank you, my experience is from about 14 years ago. I spent 3 years in Belarus and Russia, and I had to learn to use the cyrillic keyboard almost exclusively. I still own a couple of these keyboards and can still touch-type at an acceptable speed on them. The only place that I found qwerty keyboards was in establishments teaching English to students. Prior to that I had visited Yugoslavia where some had their own keyboard version in what is now known as Serbia.
Times are obviously changing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @12:04PM
please keep in mind that all programming languages of relevance use english words, and english is a de facto international standard in a lot of professions.
I think that is a very good reason to keep national layouts close to the standard english layout.
the second reason is that the PC era was started in the US, so almost everyone started with an english layout, and then it became force of habit etc.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by SomeGuy on Monday December 19 2016, @01:45AM
I'm guessing it is because Microsoft has not yet mined all those telemetry metrics they are collecting, thrown the numbers to the team that developed the MS-Office ribbon and Metro, come out with a new keyboard "standard" that is completely useless garbage, and then cry more about how phones are killing PCs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:55PM
Not flamebait. This is exactly how Microsoft works. If they could justify thinking they could profit off of a new keyboard layout they WOULD introduce it and nag their users to switch and eventually force the switch, REGARDLESS of what the users or sysadmins feel.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday December 23 2016, @02:38AM
You mean like how they introduced the Windows key 21 years ago with Windows 95? And that other useless key which is basically the right mouse button but on the keyboard?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Monday December 19 2016, @02:34AM
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Monday December 19 2016, @03:05AM
Actually, QWERTY is a pretty good layout: keys commonly used consecutively tend to not be placed together, thus they don't interfere with each other. The original reason for that, jamming mechanical levers, no longer applies, but the design still works.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @10:01AM
That's not the only complaint about QWERTY. Another is that most of the most-used keys are placed on the left half of the keyboard (A S D E R T), putting much more strain on the left hand than the right.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday December 19 2016, @07:07PM
What about your mouse usage, eh?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @04:05AM
"In fact, the Qwerty layout was concocted to prevent keys from jamming "
Nope. It was created so that salesmen could demonstrate the typing word "TYPEWRITER" easily. They were all placed on the same row so that the salesmen without typing skills could demonstrate typing TYPEWRITER quickly, creating the illusion that there was little to no learning curve.
(Score: 1) by Frosty Piss on Monday December 19 2016, @04:33AM
Since I never learned to type - I am the master of the "hunt and peck" - I don't care where the keys are.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Webweasel on Monday December 19 2016, @09:05AM
Get a Das Keyboard with blank keys.
I was hunt and peck until I got one, took me about 2 days of using it at work and I could touchtype.
The secret is: Looking at the keyboard won't help, your fingers have to learn. You will be surprised how quickly they do.
Down side? Passwords are now in finger memory. I don't know my password, but my hands do. Its rather odd.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @01:37PM
It is odd. I have the same issue. At times I have had to resort to opening a text editor to type out my password to easily see what it was. On my most commonly used accounts, I have completely random passwords because once I use them enough, I remember them. But, sometimes at some point they move into finger memory and I have a real problem trying to remember what they are without typing them. The downside to this is that if the account ever get seldom used, I run the real risk of forgetting the password.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday December 19 2016, @05:58AM
Leave my qwertybabywocky alone! It's enough that I had to learn layouts for three languages.
By now, I probably couldn't care less if I'm writing at 80WPM or 120. Now a neural interface on the other hand...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @05:07PM
Ah, I see, you are into one-handed typing. :-)
(Score: 2) by patrick on Monday December 19 2016, @08:44AM
Most of what is being spread around in the summary, article, and comments are myths. I'm more inclined to trust researchers from Kyoto University, who published a 13 page study, "On the Prehistory of QWERTY" [kyoto-u.ac.jp].
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 19 2016, @09:10AM
Okay, sure, it's possible that QWERTY isn't the most optimal layout. But with modern (as in, at least 15 years ago) features like autocompletion and abbrevs I can reach 150, 200 WPM easily. At that point I am not hurting for faster typing speed, or even more ergonomic typing (when you only need to press 3 keys a second to reach 100 WPM, you don't need to contort or strain your fingers very much).
Given that 100% of keyboards are QWERTY-based (rounding up, including AZERTY), the costs of switching to a different layout completely blow away any potential gains over a single digit number of lifetimes.
Also, with voice typing constantly improving, even professional typists might start switching to microphones in a few years.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday December 19 2016, @10:44AM
Dunno about autocorrect. Personally, I turn it off. With autocorrect, you pretty much always have to look, to see what it's going to do, because different autocorrect systems in different pieces of software do different things, and even the same one may be adaptive, meaning that its behavior changes over time. If I am touch-typing, I never have to look at the keyboard, and looking at the screen is optional. With autocorrect, I have to pause in my typing, and look at the screen to see what's about to happen. This is not a feature, except on my phone, where touch-typing isn't an option.
Voice input? I don't see this being used on any large scale. In a shared office, the last thing you want is everyone talking to their computers. The only people I know who use voice entry are either disabled in some way, or else they work alone, usually in a home-office.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday December 19 2016, @11:26AM
A lot of people in the legal profession dictate their letters, pass the recordings to a secretary who will then take the recording and make a letter out of it. If you could make a recording in your office, and press a button to have an AI turn that into a letter, it would be really useful.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 19 2016, @06:37PM
I'm assuming that you're talking about autocomplete, not autocorrect. Looking at the screen is a small price to pay when you can expand something like s.ae to self.assertEqual. If you still mistrust autocomplete, you can always use more explicit options like Emacs abbrevs, which allows you to explicitly define expansions, for example bc to because.
The net effect is that you end up typing at least double the number of characters per keystroke.
For voice input, one of the nice things is that you don't have to be in the office. Not as suitable for programming, admittedly, but for emails and documents (what most people seem to be doing most of the time) it works fine.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 19 2016, @06:35PM
You abbreviated abbreviation. tehehe
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:43AM
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Abbrevs.html [gnu.org]
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday December 19 2016, @10:31AM
I touch type reasonably well, around 60wpm. Back when I was young and bored, I researched keyboard layouts, put together one that I considered optimal, and learned to type on it. I measured my typing performance on QWERTY first, and then on the new keyboard, after using it for an entire year.
On the optimized keyboard, I was around 10% faster.
That's just not enough to be worthwhile, given the price you pay in compatibility. Sure, if you could get the whole world to change at once, compatibility would not be an obstacle. But you can't, so it is, so changing just isn't worthwhile.
On the subject of international keyboards: I use the US-international layout on my own machines, but many people around me have a German or Swiss layout, so I use those a lot as well. The main difference is that German and Swiss layouts have dedicated keys for accented characters. This sounds like a good idea, but it's actually horrible - even when typing German (which I do a lot) I prefer the US layout. To get one accented character, you have to hit two keys in sequence - but these are normal, easily reached keys, so this becomes second nature, and part of your touch-typing.
When you re-purpose additional keys for accented characters, the accented characters are easier, but there are too few keys left for special characters like {[|~]}. These get shoved onto multifunctional keys where you have to hold some weird machine- and OS-specific combination of ctl/alt/cmd to get the character you want. This inevitably takes you away from the touch-typing position, and you pretty much have to look at the keyboard. It not only slows your typing, it also breaks your train of thought, because you're too busy tying your fingers into knots. Even people who are used to these layouts often switch to the US layout for programming.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by hellcat on Monday December 19 2016, @02:14PM
Been using DVORAK layout since the late 80s. Roughly doubled my typing speed.
In my best days I could bang out about 60-80 wpm in qwerty. Averaged 120 to 150 in Dvorak.
Nowadays I have to lurch between many keyboards, mostly coworkers qwerties (is that a word?) so my average speed is much lower. Mistakes higher.
My memories of the origin of qwerty are that the character order was based on the pigeonholes of the old lead typesetters. The type was kept in cubbies where the character order helped them minimize mistakes in laying the type. It basically maximized their arm movements, but labor was cheap. Since they were the primary market when the mechanical typesetters came out, late 1800s, it made sense to maintain the character distribution.
The Navy in the 50s and 60s initiated the Dvorak studies, seeking to enhance the productivity of clerks. I learned this in a business class focusing on industrial organizational productivity - time motion studies. If you don't know what that is, watch "cheaper by the dozen," an old movie that focuses on an icon of the discipline.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Monday December 19 2016, @07:38PM
I didn't learn to type until I was in my 30's (20 years ago). My top speed in QWERTY was not much, so I tried Dvorak. It didn't improve my speed much, but when I have to type a lot, it seems much more comfortable for my hands.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday December 23 2016, @02:47AM
I've been typing on Dvorak on my computers now for about 20 years. I may or may not be much faster than on qwerty, but whenever I have to use a qwerty keyboard for any non-insignificant amounts of typing it just feels like my hands and fingers are flying all over the place. To me Dvorak is more comfortable and much less tiring for long periods of typing which is why I prefer to use it.
(Score: 1) by oldmac31310 on Monday December 19 2016, @05:15PM
Ha, ha.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @09:52PM
Because I can type 60-90 words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard. Without giving the slightest thought to where my fingers are going on the keyboard. I just type.
And after having done so for thirty three years, I damn sure ain't changing now. New generation wants something different? Go for it. :) Just leave me my QWERTY. And get off my lawn.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Tuesday December 20 2016, @12:52AM
In the 1970's, typing was a reasonably uncommon skill. Sure, there were a lot of office workers, and some kids would type school reports and things. But you could go your whole career without ever needing to learn to type well. In the 1990's, pretty much everybody knew how to type. Kids would chat with each other on AIM and ICQ. Adults without office jobs would still occasionally need to use a computer, and office jobs became more common. Executives that used to hand off things to a secretary were much more likely to reply to their own email.
In the 1980's, there was a moment when somebody could have come out with a computer system and advertised a better keyboarding system for the future and been taken seriously. Change was rapid and constant, and tons of computers were essentially for kids with no previous typing experience for the first time. If such a machine had caught on and been successful, we'd be using that layout today. But the mainstream computer companies wanted to tap into the business market, and that meant making Qwerty machines that business users would find somewhat familiar.
(Score: 1) by jtgd on Wednesday December 21 2016, @05:42AM
I'd be curious to see that old layout that jammed all the keys, before QWERTY. Maybe it's a good place to start.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26 2016, @08:08PM
i found dvorak pretty trivial to learn, just kept a reference up on the screen while i forced myself to do my main bulk of daily typing on it. i did this on a qwerty keyboard, which is just as well since you shouldn't ever look at it anyway. it's usually a simple and easily-retoggleable software setting available on most OSes, though windows might need its disk the first time.
what's the point, though? well i dunno about speed per se, i don't generally go for typing at hyperspeed, though i can do so if i like... regardless of what speed i'm going for, i find dvorak simply way more comfortable. qwerty is like playing torturous twister with the fingers, while dvorak is more of a lyrical dance.
tbh, i think the left hand home rows are far more apt designators… (try to) call qwerty by "ASDFG" cause that's about what it feels like to type on, compared to dvorak's "AOEUI" which sounds aptly smooth, like an over-buttered french affirmation.
so keep torturing your tendons or take a week or 3 to get back up to speed and let your fingers dance, that's all.