Evolving a better keyboard layout | Hacker News Reader

Evolving a better keyboard layout

klausler.com

58 pointsbdfh4224 comments

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..."

It seems to have helped my typing speed too. On a typing program, I timed my top QWERTY speed at 78. This is after learning to touch type when I was about 10, and now I'm in my 20s. Then I switched, and after a year or so, my top Dvorak speed passed 100. That being said, I practiced my typing a lot more with Dvorak.

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.

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!

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

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?

So I don't repeat myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424891

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

this is quite similar.

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.

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.

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."

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

Once you switch, your fingers should still retain some of the muscle memory. Mine have, though I can't type as quickly.

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...

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

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

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

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.)

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