

Evolving a better keyboard layout - bdfh42
http://klausler.com/evolved.html

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rarrrrrr
I switched to the dvorak layout in my early twenties and it's been well worth
it. It's not so much about speed, as it is about accuracy, and especially
about comfort.

I would recommend in switching that you do NOT move your keycaps around, or
draw new letters on your keyboard, or any other mental crutch, but instead
simply memorize the new layout mentally. It won't take long, and that small
step will hasten your transition.

There were a few interesting side effects however. For the first couple of
days, I realized that I could no longer spell some words -- my life is so
terminal oriented that much of my rote spelling knowledge was based on muscle
memory.

In the first couple of days while feeling really inept at the keyboard, that
feeling also carried over into regular voice conversations -- I had to remind
myself that I wasn't speaking impaired, only typing impaired.

I easily exceeded my old qwerty performance within the first several days.

During the transition, it was an added challenge to do everything, and that
reminded me the previous generation of punch card programmers describing their
work. Suddenly it became more efficient to think about the problem harder
before trying solutions, rather than just firing rapidly from initial thoughts
until I had bludgeoned a solution.

It's amusing to secretly change some unfortunate person's keyboard to dvorak,
watch the bewilderment, then type a few sentences, and walk away. "Works fine
for me. I don't know what your problem is..."

~~~
pmjordan
I'm currently transitioning to a (German) dvorak variant - I'm about 2 weeks
in and pretty happy with my typing speed. (I was never as fast as most
programmers seem to be to begin with, 50-60 wpm) The reason I've switched
though is recurring wrist pain. I've got all the ergonomic gear, but
programming on QWERTY/QWERTZ is just plain bad. I've actually modified the
layout slightly: specifically, I've mapped caps lock to be a left 'Alt Gr'
key, and mapped [({<>})] to Alt-gr+homerow. All in all, hand travel is
noticeably reduced.

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albertni
I swear that when I have kids, I'm going to them multiple keyboard layouts at
a very young age so that they'll be able to switch back and forth effortlessly
when they're older (similar to learning a few languages at a young age). At
least, I'm assuming that's how it'll work!

~~~
PieSquared
You assume keyboards will be still around then! Who knows... maybe they'll be
obsolete in a decade.

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burke
I've considered switching to dvorak or colemak or otherwise, but the main
thing that always holds me back is emacs. Have any of you emacs users out
there used an alternate layout? What was/is your experience with it?

~~~
a-priori
So I don't repeat myself: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424891>

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cturner
I suspect touch-typing-optimised keyboard layours are not as relevant now as
they would have been for the typewrite generation.

My default home position has my right hand in the conventional position, but
my left hovering over the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. I spend far
more time using those meta keys than typing. Ctrl+e and ctrl+y (vim scrolling
keys) and alt+tab (window switching); ctrl+pageup/down (browser switching) and
ctrl+a (gnu/screen escape key) than I do bulk entry of text. It also puts me
closer to the escape key. In Windows I heavily use control characters based on
win+r, win+e, and tab and shift-tab. I suspect the reason I have the right
hand in the 'correct' position is because the dimple on the keys there allows
me to consistently return to a known position in between occasional mouse
usage. A small change to the keyboard layout (e.g. trying to use a UK English
keyboard when I grew up with US English) is annoying not only because of the
different positions of some control characters I use a lot, but also because
it changes the feel of the keyboard and gives a different feel when I'm trying
to return to a known position. I can't slide along the left shift there to
navigate my left hand to the right position.

I suspect I'd have an easier time learning a different combination of
alphabetical characters than I'd have adjusting to changes in the shape of the
keys. I've not seen a typing survey about 'optimal layout' that considers such
things, and given how individual it is I'm not surprised. The only reliable
way to get figures out would be to take different populations of people at
birth and grow them into different layours. With the entrenchment of qwerty
and the tie between applications and particular layours (e.g. navigation keys
in vim, popular positioning cut/copy/paste hotkeys in qwerty and the important
role those keys play in users moving away from the mouse and to keyboard
control) I doubt such a study would be practical.

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psadauskas
I'd like to see this done with some of the lesser-used keys that get used
heavily in coding: [ ] { } " ' , . <Tab> <Esc>

I wonder if he used source code as the primary input into his algorithm, how
the results would change. I can't type on the home row in qwerty, because my
right hand is always shifted right about 2 keys, because I use those other
keys so often.

~~~
lallysingh
There's a variant called "Programmer Dvorak"
<http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/>

Most relevantly, it puts the brackets, parens, and other programming symbols
as primary on the number keys, and the digits themselves as the shift-modified
versions.

Seems like it'd make lisp/scheme/etc a good amt easier to type :-)

I'm up for doing a conversion experiment on myself, once I figure out what my
new work keyboard's going to be... And if they're going to stop me from
swapping it for a kinesis.

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PieSquared
I was thinking about switching, so googled up on it a bit, and found this:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/455525/is-the-switch-
to-d...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/455525/is-the-switch-to-dvorak-
worth-it)

What do people here think? Is it worth the time investment to switch?

~~~
silentbicycle
This is kind of a holy war-ish question, FWIW. People have strong opinions,
and the Qwerty vs. Dvorak thing has been tangled up in some academics'
arguments about whether the Free Market is always right.

I've used Dvorak for over two years now, and in my experience:

1\. If you spend a lot of time typing on computers _you have control over_ ,
particularly if your career involves typing, it will probably pay off within a
few months. (It works _very_ well with Emacs, IMHO.) If you spend much of your
time fixing other peoples' computers or something, it probably won't help you
much.

2\. If you're genuinely curious about whether it would be worthwhile, it
probably will be, even if only for the experience of shaking up really deeply
wired habits.

3\. Don't do it if you have deadlines coming up! Seriously, don't. Plan on a
week or so of typing 5-15 wpm, and any "cheating" during the first week or two
will really confuse you. (You'll probably also feel really stupid at first,
like you've forgotten how to talk. It will pass.)

4\. You will be able to type on a Qwerty keyboard, but switching back and
forth _within the first month or two_ will really confuse you. It's not a big
deal once you're used to it, though. Having contextual associations ("my
keyboard is Dvorak, the one in the school lab (or whatever) isn't") also
helps.

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travisjeffery
I'm fast enough with Qwerty and with the tools of today (text editors with
completion & snippets and such) programmers do less and less typing. Plus
unless you're multiple computers and most of those aren't your own it can be
difficult switching back and forth.

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markup
I’ve got a keyboard layout kind of fetish, but I have realized there’s no
perfect keyboard... there should be a keyboard layout for every specific task
you need to accomplish on a computer. If you are just a writer you have very
different needs from a programmer, and a SOMELANGUAGE programmer will have
different needs from SOMEOTHERLANGUAGE programmer. So I still have my fetish,
but I just gave up looking for my own graal

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steveblgh
<http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/>

this is quite similar.

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gcv
Aren't non-QWERTY layouts strictly for people who never use other peoples'
computers, and never let other people use theirs? I just swap Control and Caps
Lock to their traditional Unix positions (helps relieve stress tremendously),
and it already makes using someone else's keyboard incredibly painful.

~~~
tome
No, they're for people who choose to take twenty seconds to choose a different
keyboard layout in the OS control panel to save the health of their fingers,
and a bit of typing time too.

~~~
gcv
It takes more than 20 seconds to install a keyboard layout switcher on an
unfamiliar Linux distribution, or, for that matter, on a poorly-set up Windows
installation. Also, if you just need to type for a few minutes on someone
else's machine to help out briefly, it's rude to install or switch a
fundamental setting like that. "Can you help me out with this..?" "Sure, let
me first install my custom keyboard layout on your box."

~~~
tome
If you're typing for a only few minutes then type QWERTY looking at the keys.

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Hexstream
My post got a bit out of hand so I submitted a new topic:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439515>

It's somewhat related to keyboard layouts and efficiency...

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jesseendahl
For anyone curious about the true history of QWERTY vs. Dvorak, check out this
article:

<http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html>

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emullet
I'd be interested to see results using the Colemak layout.

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ajkirwin
Having tried dvorak, I still find myself liking qwerty better. It just feels
more.. right, to me.

Different strokes, I guess!

(Plus, my WPM is already plenty good. I can hit over 100WPM.)

