

Qwerty vs Dvorak: Dvorak cooked the books - shawndumas
http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors

======
pbbakkum
I'm a Dvorak user; I think the article is statistically correct but misses the
broader point.

\- The most important part of the Dvorak keyboard is that the most frequent
English letters are on the home row with the vowels pushed to the left. This
means that you're less likely to move your fingers from the home row and more
likely to switch between hands for each letter. Thats the theory of why Dvorak
is faster and more comfortable. It's a little crazy that E isn't on the Qwerty
home row.

\- It was much harder to switch to a new layout than I expected. It took about
a month of typing with Dvorak every day and destroyed my ability to type on a
qwerty keyboard. For a period during this transition I couldn't really type
well on either keyboard, not fun, and not easy to explain to my boss why I
couldn't fucking type. Interestingly I can still type fine on my iphone qwerty
keyboard, so it is apparently a separate process in my brain.

\- I think the article is similar to saying "there's no statistical proof that
using the metric system is faster". Using the metric system is the kind of
thing that makes sense intuitively, but if you took 100 scientists using
imperial measurements and retrained them to use the metric system, it would be
hard to conclusively prove that it is _BETTER_.

\- To extrapolate a little bit, there I think there is a broader point here
that statistics are usually used to make an argument, often deceptively. It is
incredibly hard to create a clean sample in the real world, and even then its
difficult to really extract meaning from those numbers. Remember, the average
person has less than 2 legs.

\- My personal feeling is that Dvorak is a LOT more comfortable and I type
maybe 10% faster with it, though I can't really back that up. Maybe its just
the fact I learned it second, or maybe I'm just fooling myself, who knows. But
I spend like 10 hours a day typing, so if I type 10% faster over my lifetime
then I've... turned a profit? Maybe I'll spend those extra days at the end of
my life doing a better study about how much faster sailors can type on Dvorak.

Even if you don't use Dvorak, I HIGHLY recommend switching your Escape and
Caps-lock keys, especially if you use Vim. Think about how much more you use
Escape than Caps-lock. I use something called PCKeyboard Hack to configure
that feature and Dvorak on OS X. On Windows, theres something called Auto
Hotkey.

~~~
adamconroy
I struggle to imagine why the caps lock key exists, and if so I can't imagine
why it is typically so big and placed in one of the best spots on the
keyboard. The only time I ever use the caps lock key is to turn it off after I
have accidentally pressed it.

~~~
pbbakkum
Agree

------
groundCode
Tum te tum..."answer a question to read the rest of this article".....pants to
that.

~~~
karnajani
Good lord that was awful. I had to think long and hard about whether or not I
really wanted to read the article.

~~~
jbuzbee
That was enough to make me hit the back button. Do they really think that is
going to leave a good impression on readers and make them want to come back?

~~~
yashodhan
I choose the most nonsensical answer to throw off their results.

------
ochs
A kernel of information in a sea of free-market propaganda.

