Is there any evidence at all that they have tons of benefits? I thought there was research that said they were mostly myths.
Decades ago I learned dvorak and used it exclusively for about a year. I honestly felt no benefits. If anything it made things more of a pain in the ass because many common commands (e.g. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) are where they are because of their locations on a qwerty keyboard. You can re-map shortcuts but I still find myself using devices that aren't my own often enough that I find it annoying.
I remember one funny instance where I had to remote desktop into a shared server, and I remapped to dvorak and forgot to change it back, and then when someone else remoted in they thought their keyboard was possessed.
If you are looking at only speed as a benefit, it’s debatable. For ergonomics, absolutely. Look at the hands of someone typing QWERTY, they’re almost bent in half longways for certain key combinations. DVORAK on the other hand allows your hands to stay flat and relaxed.
I learned Colemak in 6 months and I don’t regret it a bit. I don’t have scientific evidence for this, but with Colemak my fingers don’t move anymore most of the time, and when they do it’s a small extension to the upper or lower row. It’s like they are glued to the home row.
When I switch to Qwerty once a month, my fingers are jumping all over the place, and my hands take weird positions to reach those random keys due to them being scattered for every word.
It’s like Qwerty was created to be the most inefficient layout for the users with keys being all over the place for every word (not the fake news about slowing people who use typewriters, it’s really inefficient).
I'm a longtime dvorak user. The shortcut issue is so bad I had to write software that makes the keyboard layout switch while ctrl/alt is held. I've used at least four different implementations of this, three I wrote myself:
Maintaining this has been a big PITA though, and gets harder as operating systems increasingly don't want to support software intercepting keystrokes for security reasons.
I would not recommend learning dvorak, for this reason.
Colemak avoids this problem by leaving the most-important hotkeys where they are, so might be OK? But I haven't tried it, and I am not really sure how much benefit these alternative layouts really bring, TBH.
> many common commands (e.g. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) are where they are because of their locations on a QWERTY keyboard
Is that a fact? I thought they were chosen because it's C for copy, X looks like a pair of scissors, and V looks like a downward arrow (for pressing what you're pasting down). Downward finger traversal (for X, C, and V) is worse than upward, which is worse than no traversal. If they were chosen for their location I'd expect S, D, and F to be used. Or perhaps J, K, and L. The only traversal that's necessary is to hit Ctrl with the opposite hand.
Anecdotal, but back when I had my typing requirement at an Air Force Base which trained all the services for a specific technical task the trainer observed that they had _never_ had a person fail to type out (min. 50 WPM) who had facility with a Dvorak layout.
FWIW, the shortcut issue can be avoided with something like QMK, which supports fancy layers and modifiers, and it places all of that in your keyboard itself
hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago
Decades ago I learned dvorak and used it exclusively for about a year. I honestly felt no benefits. If anything it made things more of a pain in the ass because many common commands (e.g. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) are where they are because of their locations on a qwerty keyboard. You can re-map shortcuts but I still find myself using devices that aren't my own often enough that I find it annoying.
I remember one funny instance where I had to remote desktop into a shared server, and I remapped to dvorak and forgot to change it back, and then when someone else remoted in they thought their keyboard was possessed.
Carrok|1 year ago
I will never return to QWERTY.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B|1 year ago
When I switch to Qwerty once a month, my fingers are jumping all over the place, and my hands take weird positions to reach those random keys due to them being scattered for every word.
It’s like Qwerty was created to be the most inefficient layout for the users with keys being all over the place for every word (not the fake news about slowing people who use typewriters, it’s really inefficient).
kentonv|1 year ago
https://github.com/kentonv/dvorak-qwerty
Maintaining this has been a big PITA though, and gets harder as operating systems increasingly don't want to support software intercepting keystrokes for security reasons.
I would not recommend learning dvorak, for this reason.
Colemak avoids this problem by leaving the most-important hotkeys where they are, so might be OK? But I haven't tried it, and I am not really sure how much benefit these alternative layouts really bring, TBH.
tmtvl|1 year ago
Is that a fact? I thought they were chosen because it's C for copy, X looks like a pair of scissors, and V looks like a downward arrow (for pressing what you're pasting down). Downward finger traversal (for X, C, and V) is worse than upward, which is worse than no traversal. If they were chosen for their location I'd expect S, D, and F to be used. Or perhaps J, K, and L. The only traversal that's necessary is to hit Ctrl with the opposite hand.
rixed|1 year ago
WillAdams|1 year ago
squigz|1 year ago
mkl|1 year ago
I like Workman. With that and a keyboard that has many thumb buttons (Moonlander and Ergodox clone) my wrists are much happier.
I wouldn't recommend Dvorak - it was designed a very long time ago without computers in mind or the in-depth efficiency calculations we can do today.
stavros|1 year ago
Perenti|1 year ago
Dalewyn|1 year ago