QWERTY-Flip: The better keyboard layout your fingers already know
nick-gravgaard.com
nick-gravgaard.com
Nowadays I use Workman [1] and put the arrow keys on the home row on a different layer (same locations as Vim).
For quick things (<5 min) I can still type decently on QWERTY.
For longer I just set the OS to Colemak and then back again when I’m done. Win/Mac has Colemak and Dvorak built in. I hope most linux distros do as well.
Assuming you don’t need to look at the keys.
And if I need to use someone else’s computer I just type in QWERTY. It’s not like I forgot how.
>"What am I suppose to do, carry a Dvorak keyboard around with me (with the right adapters as well)?"
point of the original post. Which is genuinely the only real answer if you have to interact with machines you can't customize to your liking, and is a bad answer.
I think that's the sticking point; not everyone can/does keep 2 layouts in their head. My QWERTY is certainly weaker than my preferred layout.
When you were considering learning in the 90s, this would’ve been harder to do, but that changed. It’s too bad you didn’t reconsider learning every decade or so!
Anyway. I generally agree. Switching it extremely difficult. And logging in to a Dvorak Remote Desktop is insanely annoying.
Mixing keyboard layouts works well on Windows 10+ or macOS. Remote Desktop problems were a thing with WIndows XP, but I can't remember having problems more recently.
I looked at Colemak (and the Tarmak training layouts) which seemed unnecessarily complicated, so I made my own transitional layout. First keeping most of the keys on the 'same fingers' but not necessarily same column as Qwerty (the P and R swap hands and O changes finger):
Q W D F {P} Y U K L ;
A S E T G H N I {R}[O]
Z X C V B J M , .
The final layout I'm using is:
Q W U D P Z H Y L ,
A S E T G F N I R O
K X C V J B M ; .
[0] https://github.com/qwickly-org/Qwickly [1] https://github.com/qwickly-org/QwickSteps
Glad I tried it, now I know I could do it all over with only a little bit of discomfort, but I never saw any of the oft lauded benefits of switching keyboard layouts. Maybe at 60-70WPM I am just not fast enough to notice improved efficiency, or my youthful joints have yet to decay enough to have pain from typing. Who knows.
The studies showing Dvorak superiority apparently were never compared with qwerty users going through similar training, and when they did, the advantage disappeared.
Apparently, we do better if we train.
I'm self taught through online games like StarCraft and don't use the home row - my hands settle in a different location, I use the edges of the keyboard for positioning (mostly through peripheral vision rather than touch), and I use my elbows and shoulders in addition to my wrists to move across the keyboard. Don't have to stretch or twist my fingers and wrists into awkward positions that cause strain, never had the issues others describe, and so far no hint I'll develop them.
They hate it for the same reason they hate recycling and climate change. It's a very visible and popular example of markets not being perfect and needing regulation to perform better.
It's highly likely that your source was in economics rather than ergonomics.
Is the original paper that kicked it off, I think there was a few follow ups.
This wiki page has a snippet from a site talking about it that is no longer online:
https://wiki.c2.com/?TheFableOfTheKeys
http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/dissent.html
edit to add:
https://reason.com/1996/06/01/typing-errors/
Vs
It's a big decision
Dvorak has the advantage of being supported on most operating systems, now, and possibly some decades into the future.
Note also that if you grew comfortable with asdf, hjkl, or Emacs key bindings (C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b), you'd have to unlearn some muscle memory there as well.
Source: am very happy Dvorak typist for more than 20 years. The initial two weeks, starting from the Beavis-and-Butthead lessons, gave me terrible headaches.
I've never felt any discomfort from qwerty, so, no, this business about increased ergonomics and comfort is a false promise to me.
I have, however, helped multiple people who thought they had problems in their hands and wrists who actually had problems in their necks and shoulders, and showing them diagrams of the brachial plexus nerves helped them eliminate their pain through posture changes.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find that I will frequently mistype switching between different warty keyboards (eg, standalone mechanical vs laptop)
I can mentally switch over to dvorak and program for a while, mentally swap back, and type normally for other things. I mainly switched the default layout back to qwerty because I was tired of remapping all the keys in every game I play. Sometimes when I come into work on a Monday morning I'll type gibberish for a couple of sentences then mentally flip back to qwerty and be fine.
I get your point in principle. I actually switched to Colemak in college, and it worked really well. Then I got a job doing IT support and it was a pain in the butt to keep switching every time I interacted with a customer laptop.
But now I remote work from home. I can’t remember the last time I touched a keyboard that wasn’t mine.
(Apologies for not referencing Dvorak or Colemak in this comment)
Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G / H J K L
Z X C V B N M , .
Decades ago I learned dvorak and used it exclusively for about a year. I honestly felt no benefits. If anything it made things more of a pain in the ass because many common commands (e.g. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V) are where they are because of their locations on a qwerty keyboard. You can re-map shortcuts but I still find myself using devices that aren't my own often enough that I find it annoying.
I remember one funny instance where I had to remote desktop into a shared server, and I remapped to dvorak and forgot to change it back, and then when someone else remoted in they thought their keyboard was possessed.
I will never return to QWERTY.
I think it'd be more likely to be the switching effect if you were going between two similar-effort layouts (e.g. Dvorak and Colemak).
No. It's because you don't have to do hand contortions with Dvorak the way you do with qwerty. If you want a demonstration, try typing "minimal" on both, and watch your hands carefully. On qwerty, it's almost all on one hand, and alternating between top and bottom rows. On Dvorak, it's alternating between hands (which is always better). You can see similar things with any English text of decent length: Dvorak makes you alternate between hands far better, and far more of your typing is on the home row (esp. since the vowels are all on the home row).
I don't know if the same applies to typing, but I can see a mechanism where it is.
When I switch to Qwerty once a month, my fingers are jumping all over the place, and my hands take weird positions to reach those random keys due to them being scattered for every word.
It’s like Qwerty was created to be the most inefficient layout for the users with keys being all over the place for every word (not the fake news about slowing people who use typewriters, it’s really inefficient).
https://github.com/kentonv/dvorak-qwerty
Maintaining this has been a big PITA though, and gets harder as operating systems increasingly don't want to support software intercepting keystrokes for security reasons.
I would not recommend learning dvorak, for this reason.
Colemak avoids this problem by leaving the most-important hotkeys where they are, so might be OK? But I haven't tried it, and I am not really sure how much benefit these alternative layouts really bring, TBH.
Creating that firmware was one of the most fun and satisfying projects I've worked on in a long time.
Is that a fact? I thought they were chosen because it's C for copy, X looks like a pair of scissors, and V looks like a downward arrow (for pressing what you're pasting down). Downward finger traversal (for X, C, and V) is worse than upward, which is worse than no traversal. If they were chosen for their location I'd expect S, D, and F to be used. Or perhaps J, K, and L. The only traversal that's necessary is to hit Ctrl with the opposite hand.
I like Workman. With that and a keyboard that has many thumb buttons (Moonlander and Ergodox clone) my wrists are much happier.
I wouldn't recommend Dvorak - it was designed a very long time ago without computers in mind or the in-depth efficiency calculations we can do today.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/george-i-made-a-keyboard/first-...
I’ve considered moving to an ortholinear split keyboard [1] for this reason, but it seems like I’m so used to the “broken” way that it would take too long to retrain muscle memory at this point. The other downside is readjusting when needing to use a laptop keyboard.
I’m just ranting that they didn’t do standardize on something that made more sense a long time ago, instead of everyone being so locked into the broken way that there’s no going back at this point.
[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/40390/why-are-keyboar...
While I was at it I also tried learning Colmak but didn't stick with it. This flip layout seems worth a try for the low learning overhead.
This from my experience with a typematrix keyboard together with the daily use of a normal laptop keyboard.
Touch typing is stupid and pointless on qwerty keyboards. On a proper layout like Dvorak, touch typing makes sense because most of the keys you type are on the home row, but on qwerty, it's the opposite: you rarely use the home row keys, so resting your fingers there makes no sense.
My laptops are still QWERTY though, and it's not too hard to code switch. It didn't take me too long to learn the new layout, though there was a short awkward period where I was bad at typing regardless of layout.
Using ZSA Moonlander with Colemak-DH
- My programming layout: https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/Mvngb/eOWyK/1
- The basic Colmak-DH layout on a split keyboard: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/XWBeyRd
---------------------------------
Switching from QWERTY to Colemak-DH only took a week (it's really easy to leave a diagram of the layout on the screen to learn faster). Then my WPM increased by about 10 each week until it hit equilibrium.
I can still easily type on qwerty too, no speed reduction.
How?
When I put my hands on my split keyboard (which moves my hands apart from each other) at work, my muscle memory just types in colmak-dh without me needing to think about it at all.
Then when I get back home and use my 10ish year old traditional mechanical keyboard, my muscle memory just types in qwerty without me needing to think either.
It's all about my arms being in a different position.
With no keyboard and just my hands on an empty table, when I put my hands together I can touch type the table in qwerty, then when I move my hands apart they touch type in colemak-dh.
I'm utterly convinced this is the reason why people can't type in more than one layout without affecting their wpm of their original layout: it's because their two muscle memories are fighting each other.
Getting a keyboard of a separate shape will instantly change things for people.
I'm still typing in Dvorak, but I'm almost sure that it's primarily the change of cursor keys that made my typing much more relaxed. It saves a lot on wrist travel.
However, I did send a lot of unintended print jobs to our office printer when Notepad didn't ask for confirmation after pressing C-p.
FYI I once came across a very old “how to type manual” which said your fingers should rest on the top row. That explains a lot. And suggests why something like this makes a lot of sense — unfortunately manual memory is a PIA to change.
Also, use a programmable keyboard, so you can use it wherever without having to jump through OS hoops.