prshnth

Three months ago, I switched to the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout. With the switch, I became a member of an obscure legion of computer users, composed of such figures as Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Bram Cohen, inventor of BitTorrent, and countless lesser-known nerds across the English-speaking world.

Without being too much of a historical bore, the Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and professor of education. It was meant to eventually replace the QWERTY layout on keyboards–the one you’re most likely using at this moment–but even by 1936, with empirical research showing that the alternate layout reduced finger movement, increased speed, and simply made more sense on the whole, the QWERTY layout was already too entrenched with typists and typewriter companies for them to change.

QWERTY is a keyboard layout created in 1874 by Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the first functional typewriter. His first attempts to create a keyboard, unsurprisingly, had the keys arranged in the order of the alphabet, but he soon recognized that the proximity of common English digraphs (s-t, for example) to each other on the layout made it so that the keys would jam when pressed rapidly in succession. So, with the time-proven method of trial and error, he split any problematic key combinations up–read: because of the limitations of the typewriter technology, not because of actual typing efficiency–and effectively created the random arrangement of keys that is QWERTY. This isn’t to say that QWERTY is all bore and no fun, however. Most people aren’t aware of this particular Easter egg, but if you take a look at the top row of your keyboard, you’ll notice all the letters to the word “typewriter” present, an exciting legacy of Sholes’s associate, James Denmore.

By the time Sholes had fixed the key-jamming issue and could devise a more ergonomically sound arrangement of keys, Remington, the gun manufacturer turned typewriter company to which he sold his design, was already minting typewriters en masse and had no use for improvements in the layout. Thus, a century later, the world still types based upon the technological inadequacies of the 19th century.

And now, the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout. Based on usage studies, August Dvorak made a keyboard based a number of ergonomic principles. Foremost, he noticed that QWERTY users tend to type with one hand and spend a lot of time typing on the bottom row of the keyboard, the most inaccessible to reach. To remedy this, he devised a scheme in which the user is forced to alternate typing hands with vowels on the left home row (AOEU instead of ASDF) and common consonants on the right home row (HTNS instead of JKL;). Commonly used keys exist on the home row and upper row, with the hard-to-reach bottom row being relegated to uncommon glyphs, like the semicolon, k, and j. The layout encourages inboard stroke flow versus out-; note that when tapping on a table, it’s easier to go from pinky to index in succession than the reverse.

There are plenty of more wonderful things that Dvorak does to eliminate the inefficiencies of QWERTY, but I could fill volumes bloviating. There are studies which contest that Dvorak increases typing speed, and there’s certainly a bit of ongoing debate in that realm. I think, though, that that’s irrelevant; no studies contest that when typing regular English passages, Dvorak significantly reduces finger movement in comparison to QWERTY, and long-term use of Dvorak, hence, is not only more intuitive but vastly more comfortable. It just makes sense that when the keys are right under your fingers most of the time, you’re going to be more efficient.

I think it’s wondrous that it took me two months learning Dvorak to achieve my prior WPM speed that lifelong typing with QWERTY had yielded. Albeit, that’s not to say that the switch was the most pleasant experience I’ve had.

The story of how I came upon Dvorak is quite mundane and unexciting, really. It was during the later days of past summer, mid-August, that I saw a Reddit article pop up on the front page–though I’d certainly seen it there before–discussing the author’s fascination with the arrangement. I read the comment thread on the post, did some Wikipedia research, read some blog entries, read more articles in publications, and decided that I wanted to switch. Luckily I’d given myself two weeks before classes started to work up towards a decent speed on the layout. I initially just changed my system settings to use Dvorak and referenced a printed-out keyboard image propped next to my display, but a week later, I popped out and rearranged the keys on my keyboard. The first couple of weeks were painfully slow while the QWERTY layout burned into my muscle memory slowly learned to budge aside and allow me to pick up on Dvorak. I avoided IMing like the plague, not wanting to come off as a boor who’d take an hour to type a sentence. But as classes swung around, typing full-length papers and constant immersion in the layout eventually produced results, and what was an acceptable typing speed gave way to an excellent one. Where I sit now, I type 25% faster than I ever did with QWERTY, and I’m still improving. The increase in comfortability in conjunction with speed makes it so that I can type for hours with no fatigue at all, something of a problem I’d had hitherto. I recently bought a MacBook Pro, and the first thing I did upon its arrival was to remove the keys and rearrange it to the Dvorak layout.

It would be a bit dishonest, however, to solely discuss the positives of using Dvorak without mentioning the downsides. None of my quibbles with Dvorak concern the layout itself but rather in being a Dvorak user in a world honed for QWERTY. The most apparent problem is using public terminals. I’m still decent with QWERTY, the oft-used analogy being learning different guitar tunings; you can learn a new one without forgetting the prior, and there are many who regularly switch between a primary and an alternate. This given, there’s a bit of latency for me to get “into it,” a period of maybe a couple of minutes where my brain is still in Dvorak mode and I fumble for keys before approaching full fluency once more. It’s not as much of a problem as it could be, though, because on my USB flash drive that I carry whenever I need work done at public computers, I have a tray app called “dvassist.exe” that switches the layout on Windows for me. It’s convenient in that it works even on computers where access to system preferences is blocked, and I don’t need the keyboard hardware itself to be switched, since I’m a touch typist anyhow. Perhaps if the world predominantly switched to OSX I’d be in a quandary, but most OSX computers don’t block access to keyboard preferences. To be fair, none of this software voodoo is applicable, say, when typing for a moment’s worth on a friend’s computer for something. Another issue is the fact that most mobile devices–even the iPhone, that doesn’t have a physical keyboard–only support QWERTY. So a bit of advice for would-be Dvorak users is to stay dually versed, being a minority in an overwhelmingly backward society.

Given the negatives, of which there are few and negligible, in comparison with the postives, I’d urge any and all to give the Dvorak layout a shot. It’s been great for me, and scientific evidence shows that it’s actually better and easier to learn the QWERTY. If that’s not enough, the world’s fastest typist, Barbara Blackburn, typed at 212 WPM on a Dvorak keyboard. Although a couple of the people I know have been interested by the layout, some even having tried it for a period of time, nobody I know has stuck with it, mainly because they don’t feel that the time spent learning it is worth the hassle. The choice for me was plainly apparent, and the exchange I made for a couple of weeks of slogging was well worth it, for the rest of my life with computers.

So there’s my pitch. You should try it. Only, take the plunge when you have some time off.