I should be homeworking
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If you’ve used a computer in my apartment, you probably know that I use a different keyboard layout than most people. I have a regular qwerty keyboard, but when I hit, say, the S key, it types an O. The D key types an E, the F types a U, and so on.
The Qwerty keyboard was invented around 1900, because typists were typing too fast. Typewriters were getting jammed because of this fast typing, so the creator of the typewriter moved keys around to slow the typist down.
Somewhere around the 1950’s, this guy named Dvorak decided that this was stupid, and set out to make the optimal keyboard layout. It’s best to keep your fingers on the home row. It’s hard to move your fingers to the bottom row, and easier to move them to the top. Alternating hands is best (one hand types a key, then the other, then the first, etc) because it gives the fingers time to get in place. He went by a few more rules, but anyway. If you notice, in the english language, the high majority of words have a consonant then a vowel then a consonant then a vowel, etc. Soooo….put all the vowels on one hand, and the most frequently used consonants on the other hand, and you’re getting somewhere with the alternation. Put the most frequently used consonants on the home row, and the least used on the bottom row. Put the least used consonants on the left side, since the left hand is busy typing vowels.
So Dvorak did all this and made the layout that I showed above. Try this link for an example of the efficiency. Paste some english text into the box and hit calculate. For normal text, you’ll see that the home row usage is MUCH higher on dvorak, and the distance traveled is usually around half of the distance traveled using qwerty.
I printed out a full-page pdf version of the keyboard layout, and changed my keyboard layout in linux and windows to dvorak. It took me about a week to memorize where all the keys were. I basically went cold turkey to dvorak, and it was quite painful. But in about a month I was up to my previous speeds in qwerty. And no, I can’t really type in qwerty anymore. If I have to then I look at the keyboard, or if I’m going to be using it for a while, it takes about 2 minutes in windows to add the dvorak layout as an option.
So anyway, what prompted this whole post was that I maxed out at about 65WPM (words per minute) on qwerty, and now here’s what I’m getting now with dvorak after using it for a year or two:
