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December 09, 2004

Dvorak

QWERTY is not the best arrangement of keys on the keyboard.

QWERTY is a deliberately awkward arrangement of keys, originally intended to keep typists slow (back in the dark ages when typewriter mechanisms would jam if they worked too fast).

Why we are still enslaved to QWERTY is a mystery. It slows you down, wasting hours of your time. And if you touch-type, it is straining the tendons in your fingers. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are other options.

Dvorak is a superior arrangement of the keys, named after the man who devised it. This puts all the vowels together on the middle row of your keyboard on the left hand side, and the most frequently-used consonants on the right. So 70% of your typing is done on that one line. Your fingers hardly have to move!

Using Dvorak, you tend to use your left and right hands alternately, so you can type faster than you ever could with QWERTY.

To try Dvorak, tweak your Windows settings as described here (don't worry - it's easy to toggle between the two arrangements)

For more on Dvorak, Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard is very helpful. And ABCD is a Dvorak tutorial, which will help you learn the new positions of the keys.

I am now using Dvorak, and I love it. It is comfortable and fast and I recommend it. It will free up hours of your time, which you can then profitably use reading things like this and this.

Have you tried Dvorak yet? If so, what do you think of it? If not, what's stopping you?

Posted by sahelsteve at December 9, 2004 06:18 PM