The next keyboard wont feature the QWERTY layout
In my surfing I’ve come across a cool idea about how to improve typing efficiency- change the keyboard.
Apparently a professor with the last name Dvorak (nothing to do with the Tech TV guy) came up with a better keyboard layout.
This site shows the benefits of the dvorak keyboard and how to switch to it. I’m tempted…
Remember when you took those typing classes, probably in high school? You got to do drills with such words as “fff”, “jjj”, “jkl;”. Added to the awkward physical motions Qwerty requires, these “nonsense words” are counter-intuitive, making Qwerty very hard to learn. On Dvorak, the keys on the home row make up literally thousands of words (we have a list of nearly 5000 from one electronic dictionary alone!), meaning you could have typed real words on your first day of typing class… if you had learned on a Dvorak keyboard.
[tags]Dvorak keyboard, keyboard, typing[/tags]
March 17th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
There is a reason that QWERTY is the standard in keyboards, maybe not as prevailant today, but back in the day, it was a necessity.
When typewriters were used with the ol’ hammering of the letters, keyboards were often in the abcde format, however, because of the time it took to hit a key and have the hammer move down, some of the typing was too fast for the machine, and multilpe hammers would converge on the same location, thus locking things up. Typerwriter makers needed a way to slow people’s typing down, and thus, qwerty was inveted to force the odd movements of fingers to make normal words.
Interesting eh?
March 17th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
A way to slow them down?!? I’m not saying your wrong, but I’d have to see a few sources to believe that. Dvorak is a big self promoter. Some say the efficiency increase is not so grand.
I changed to DVORAK for a week and only a week. Learning the new layout is not the problem, it’s being able to use QWERTY! One trip to the lab and I found I could barely type up an email. Unless the entire world desides to switch at one, I’m staying with QWERTY.
March 17th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Dvorak is a self promoter? He was a professor, not the columnist.
June 3rd, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Great idea
August 28th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
I currently use dvorak on my laptop and it didn’t take too long to learn(acceptable typing speed after several days, same speed as qwerty after about a month). I think that as long as you keep using qwerty on other computers, you wont forget it and now I can completely touch type because my keys are still in qwerty.