Ask HN: What needs to be happen to make Dvorak more popular than QWERTY? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What needs to be happen to make Dvorak more popular than QWERTY?

1 pointeimrine10 comments

The August Dvorak's layout is just better than QWERTY one. It is faster for typing, easier to learn touchtyping, and having several layouts for different kinds of people (like programmers who needs symbols as often as letters or persons with only one hand functional). It is not a layout with least finger travelling possible (BTW, QWERTY's finger travelling is tremendous), but a killer feature of Dvorak layout is hand alteration while typing because of location of aoeui keys. This handy feature makes my typing on English language even more comfortable than typing on my mother language.

AFAIK, in some schools there is typing lessons - but why no one learns Dvorak mandatory? Why there is so hard to find a keyboard with Dvorak layout instead of QWERTY? And the main question - is there any hypothetical ways of breaking the QWERTY monopoly which exists for no good reason?

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What needs to happen to make right-hand drive cars more popular than left-hand drives? RHD is safer for driving, easier to control, and works better for one-handed people.

The reality is - there is no significant improvement between QWERTY and Dvorak. At least, not one which is worth the cost of switching.

Some countries have switched from LHD to RHD. But it is complicated.

These days, nothing is stopping you using Dvorak. Either buy a USB keyboard or switch your virtual one.

Thank you for your great analogy.

There _is_ significant improvement between QWERTY and Dvorak, and I covered them in my question (just did not bother with links, but I can bother if the question will be popular). This difference is much deeper than difference between RHD and LHD, because as for cars there is better to have one standard for every country than two standarts, no matter what standard it is. And as for keyboard layout, we _already_ have one standard - but since it has been produced for reasons different from efficiency of typing, my opinion is that it must be changed for more efficient one.

Nothing can stop me from using Dvorak, you are right, and I even do not need another hardware keyboard for this reason. But my question is about future generations of typers. I am interested in getting rid of needness of learning bad layout, which occurs mandatory. I am seing very similar situation in the "experiment with monkeys and bananas" and this experiment is irrelevant to RHD vs LHD problem. Do you really think that we must use inefficient standard before the end of civilisation, having a better one but ignoring? For the sake of...?

Average QWERTY typing speed is roughly 50WPM. How much faster is Dvorak? 10%? 50%? 100%?

Let's say that it takes a couple of years of retraining from QWERTY to Dvorak until a typical user can reach a 10% improvement. How much typing will they have to do in order to regain that lost time?

Typing, nowadays, isn't the bottleneck. If we still had pools of typists clattering away to reproduce our words then - yes - a more efficient typing standard could be good. But what we have is good enough and the gains just aren't sufficient.

Having two concurrent standards is a nightmare from a usability point of view. I'm sure you've had the experience of using, say, a train ticket booking system which insists that you use a A-Z keyboard. You are slow and frustrated.

I live in a country which hasn't fully embraced the metric system - so people flit around between metric and imperial to all sorts of confusion.

Should we all learn Esperanto? Should we all switch to 220V electricity? Should we all use decimal time? All of those standards are better - but they're not good enough to warrant the upheaval of switching.

Please do not consider me as troll but I have really understandable analogy of my point - cancelling slavery in USA. Slavery makes suffering, and QWERTY layout also. Why we are using QWERTY instead of ABCDEF? Just because of a marketologist of Typewriter company which decided it is a good idea to foolish people about typing efficiency of QWERTY. He placed "random" word "typewriter" on the upper row of the QWERTY keyboard. And any manager while selling a typewriter demonstrates the "fast typing" of the "random" word on Typewriter's typewriter. From buyer's point of view QWERTY seems like more efficient layout then ABCDEF, and the new standard has been established. Sorry but your question about 10% is impossible to answer and I do not sure the "bad" standards you have chosen are any worse than the similar standards in other countries.

i would think that dvorak wins. I am getting better at it!

Nobody learns Dvorak because you'll never get a Dvorak keyboard at work. Not everyone is able to choose their hardware, nor wants to.

Let me disagree with you, because no Dvorak user is staring keyboard while typing. This layout is for comfortable touchtyping. And the difference is not about different hardware, it is about another paintings on buttons. And you did not answer my main question.

I answer what I know the answer for. No Dvorak user is staring at the keyboard while typing, but every QWERTY user would be staring at that keyboard, and many of them are staring at their QWERTY keyboards just as well, many programmers do too. Paintings on buttons are hardware; and I forgot to say that it's about software too - good luck getting Dvorak set up with typical user permissions. The main point is that people don't even want to, they don't care as much as you do. Not even I care and I agree with you that it's somewhat better.

Also not every language works like English does - is Dvorak better for French, Spanish, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, ...? Are the localized modifications (AZERTY) ready for Dvorak?

Windows 7 w/o Admin rights allows changing layout, I have checked a minute ago.

I do not know about AZERTY and about Chinese/Japanise keyboards, if somebody can answer this question I would appreciate any answers useful for my research in Dvorak. I can answer about Russian language - it has too many vowels for comfortable alterating hands, and it has 33 letters that makes aesthetics of typing this language very different from the one of English. For example, Russian layout has no {}[]<>$^&`~|@# special symbols which makes Russian layout incompatible for creating programming languages. That is why I do not bother learning touchtyping for my mother language, but I know there is some layouts about arranging Russian letters using August Dvorak's ideas. Maybe I should give them a try.

What about QWERTY users like you, I have some experience of teaching some ppl to Dvorak touchtyping, and I realized that the older you are the less profit you will gain from switching, and the younger you are the more profit you will gain from _not_ learning QWERTY. If you want to type like hunt-and-peck than there is no difference at all, but for learning to your first touch-typing experience, the difference between the layouts is crucial.

You have induced an interesting question for me - is paintings a hardware issue or something else like maybe a believe issue. I appreciate good questions, but firstly I need any hypothetical answers on the question in title.

It is diffulcult to type on for a begginer. typos are common.

lol i just had a typo. Silly me! ;D

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