Need to type faster? Spend some time practising every day and you will gain more speed within weeks than from just switching layouts. Most people don't as speed often isn't actually that important. I myself am bottlenecked by my brain, not my typing speed. Need less hand movement? Placing symbols, arrow keys etc as secondary function onto the central keys with a programmable keyboard helps with that, changing to dvorak doesn't as much because on a modern keyboard you can reach all letters without hand movement either way.
If you ever have a thought that you want to put into words but need to wait for your fingers, you are being bottlenecked by your typing. Most people think and speak faster than they can type, especially in short bursts; and I'm saying that, as someone who can comfortably type at ~160-180wpm and burst over 200 for a few seconds at a time, I still find myself waiting for my fingers. Holding a conversation over IM is one of the most common places where this bottleneck becomes very noticeable.
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...
To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.
On my keyboard I cover six keys with my two thumbs. It eliminates almost all hand movement and guess what, I feel a difference in my pinky fingers but not in the thumbs. I'm not saying every keyboard should be like this, but I think on a large scale you can probably improve wirst and hand health in the population by making a few small tweaks in how keys are arranged.
As previously stated, this is only an issue for non-practiced typers. With practice, it no longer feels like stretching. It just becomes muscle memory. It's like a novice golfer complaining that it hurts their hips when they rotate through the swing, or a tennis player complaining that trying to add spin with a wrist twist feels weird, or any millions of other example of "feels weird without practice". Hell, most people can't do the most basic of yoga poses without practice. Muscles need to be stretched and trained into doing what you want them to do. Once they are, all of the complaints go away and things feel normal.
Is QWERTY the most efficient, no. But as someone else commented, speed is not my issue. Thinking what needs to be typed is definitely my speed regulator. If I were to just do basic text dictation or re-typing while reading a direct source, my speeds increase dramatically.
I find that most typing complaints are from those that never had formal typing instruction and are self taught with games or similar. I was fortunate to have one full year of typing while in high school, and it is by far the most used class instruction I've ever had.
Most experimental layouts that add more features make the mistake to overload it, some of these things even look totally thumb-driven.... This make everything very confusing. Just Shift for a start, would be good. The pinky is too much overloaded. Offloading some of it to the thumb would actually be an improvement.
I don't agree with your statement about switching though. I was a very good Qwerty typist, but I'm much faster and more accurate on Dvorak. Switching was one of the most useful things I have ever done.
A big part of why I wanted to make the switch at all is because I was experiencing fatigue in my hands, and I felt that it could be due to my improper typing habits that I developed from mostly learning to type through playing videogames. I wanted to properly type from the home row, and the split columnar keyboard basically enforces that, and Dvorak makes it even easier.
I will say though, I type at about the same speed that I did before I made the switch. Switching layouts almost certainly will not enable you to type faster. Switching layouts encourages you to deliberately practice typing on that layout (I did lots of typing challenges while learning) which will make you faster. The biggest benefit for me has actually been in my back! The split keyboard allows me to rotate my shoulders back a lot more, which makes me feel way better at the end of the day. My hands are less fatigued too, but I don't feel like that was as big of a deal for me.
I have switched a few years ago to Dvorak. I do not think that this has changed much my typing speed, which has never been important for me. However, it has greatly increased my typing comfort.
Now I consider that switching to Dvorak was one of my best decisions and I only regret that I have spent decades using Qwerty without trying alternatives.
Of course, using an ergonomic keyboard is at least as important as the key layout.
I’m about the same speed as I was on qwerty, but my back and shoulders feel a lot better with the split keyboard. It feels really good to type with an alternative layout, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, the learning process was pretty arduous for me, and I’ve kind of lost my ability to use qwerty.
I would definitely recommend a split keyboard though. The ergonomics are much better.
Of course over long periods of time we're bottlenecked by our brains. But the things to write come in bursts, and typing speed blocks there. Also transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed.
My experience completely contradicts your assertions.
This is what puzzles me most of the mechanical keyboard market: you can have whatever shit cramped in on a 60%/75% keyboard but the spacebar is still the long slab.
Eg: Shurikey Hanzo 001 65% is especially... bold in this
The “missing” keys are on additional layers reached via a modifier key, or by overloading keys on tap/hold, or by increasingly esoteric methods the smaller the board gets: chording, tap dance, etc. They’re typically no less accessible than capital letters, while allowing you to keep your fingers on the home row.
For me, the additional keys on my larger keyboards rarely prove useful in practice. I end up mostly using the same subset available on the 60% I’m typing on now – it’s quicker and more comfortable than reaching over to the dedicated key.
In a lot of software those extra function keys are well used, easily go into muscle memory and help to safe a lot of time.
For usability alone those small sizes don't make much sense in an office or on a desk.
(Been using Dvorak for 25 years now. Doesn't matter what the physical keyboard layout is - currently I'm using a Swiss layout)
It took about a month to learn, but on the side it largely fixed my QWERTY habits too, and I can freely switch between them pretty easily.
But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another.
Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's optimal for a swiping keyboard is probably quite different from what's optimal for a typing keyboard.
Perhaps, but as someone who has been proficient in QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, and who now uses Colemak-DH I can say that I leave my phone and small tablet keyboards on QWERTY.
The separation of common letters in QWERTY forces your finger to move farther when swiping, but that provides a bit more distinguishing information for identifying words. When I tried swiping with Colemak and Dvorak my finger basically scrubbed back and forth across the home row and words were often mis-identified.
There are slightly improved swiping input methods like 8pen, Typewise, Hero, etc but if you are entering enough text to be able to amortize their learning costs you might be better off getting a portable Bluetooth keyboard or just using voice dictation.
That only lasted a few days for two reasons:
1) What you said about the mistakes. It is so much easier to fat finger in a way that makes autocorrect clueless.
2) The muscle memory doesn't translate at all anyway. Obvious in retrospect, but typing with your thumbs is a completely unrelated skill to touch typing. Turns out both live separately and equally in my brain.
I also recommend dactly (see also https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/ for a more generic keyboard generation)
My biggest issue is how often I hit '.' instead of 'p' for some reason.
This seems to be an interesting place where the type bar optimization problem of the earliest typewriters came back in a new weirder form. For swiping keyboards to work the words need recognizably different shapes and for irregular pairs to be closer together (just as with the type bar problem) and so QWERTY is very strongly and weirdly optimized for swiping even though it seems very unlikely its inventors could have ever imagined swipe typing.
I can anecdotally admit that touch typing and swipe typing are extremely different muscle memory. I touch type Colemak and swipe type QWERTY. (One of the things that prompted the move to Colemak for touch typing was that I needed to unlearn a ton of bad muscle memory from self-taught/self-"optimized" QWERTY, as it was inflaming RSI/RSI-like symptoms, so the loss of "fluency" there was a requirement/feature for me.)
I also do still use QWERTY for touchscreen devices, because you can't keep your hands on the home row on touch screens, so you lose the benefits of Dvorak (and I actually found the common letter combos being near each other to be way more cumbersome on a touch screen).
The article mentions in passing how Dvorak may help people with physical hand issues - well it certainly helps for me. YMMV
I touch-type both Colemak and Qwerty fine, but I still sigh a little internally any time I have to use the inferior layout for more than a few minutes.
Does anyone know why this issue seems to have been overlooked by August Dvorak & William Dealey, or was it by design? Perhaps it's to make typing the relatively common English digraph 'ou' a comfortable inward roll, but for me, that doesn't outweigh stretching my left index finger all the time reaching for the I.
Consider also that it was developed in the 20s and 30s. Nowadays you could throw some moderately hefty compute at almost everything of note written in the English language and come back to an error-free analysis after lunch, but who knows how representative was the corpus they analysed, painstakingly and manually. It might have made perfect sense with their data set.
Ultimately, the English language didn’t evolve to be easy to type, there will always be compromises somewhere, and the English of today isn’t the English of a century ago anyway. I imagine you’d get quite a different layout if you based it on Gen Z text messages or something.
Personally, I can’t help but note that Dvorak’s first name was August.
Jeeps were invented in 1941. Some origin theories of the name date back as far as WW I (but for recruits, not vehicles). If the author truly used this comparison in 1936 it would be a tremendous citation for the word's origin.
Or perhaps the comparison was made in a later edition of the book. Don't know.
(Typewriting Behavior, for the curious: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74878/page/n11...)
I personally prefer reuse of the existing word "jeep" meaning "new recruit" to mean "new vehicle". But that's just an opinion.
Either customize every app to better match the layout, or live with the afterthought UX.
Oh, and gaming. Better get used to switching to qwerty.
As for games, I always rebind everything, or play with controller. It's a one-time thing per-game and then you're comfortable and can also use an in-game chat without trouble. Plus you can use this chance to switch to ESDF-style (the equivalent in your layout, so RSHT for me) controls from WASD controls so your fingers can be in the normal homerow position.
Regarding games, switching keyboard layouts in Windows 10/11 is thankfully super easy. (And some games do get it right, and the bindings go by physical position, so they just fall into place - though personally I've never liked this, because I don't really know where any of the Dvorak keys are individually, for non-text purposes. I'd rather switch to QWERTY and then I can look at the labels on the keys to figure out where to put my fingers.)
I know it is not everyone's favorite solution, but it is fun for me.
1. Not only are the key positions for typing different, but all the keyboard shortcuts I know needed to be re-learned too, and were often in much worse locations (as just one of many problems, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are no longer next to each other)
2. I still need to be good with QWERTY because basically everything uses it.
It's a shame, because it does seem more efficient (you can type a lot of words without having to move your fingers from the home row), but I just felt like it was too much work for too little gain.
In general Colemak doesn't move keys to radically far from their QWERTY positions (many stay on the same finger, even), so I've heard using it and QWERTY together isn't too bad. In my personal case, I had a terrible QWERTY form and realized I don't have to do anything but "hunt-and-peck" in QWERTY when using other people's machines. I may feel a bit like an idiot doing it, but it turns out, most people don't even notice if you touch type or hunt and peck (partly because so many more people hunt and peck than you tend to realize; even in a world where QWERTY touch typing has to be taught in schools, I think it is still a skill like Cursive that you think everyone else uses once you learn it, but you forget how hard it was to learn in the first place). It's more "my guilt" that I "use QWERTY poorly" than anything anyone else actually cares about.
Remapping the shortcuts is possible but too much effort; I just live with it.
Fortunately, modern video games seem to understand different layouts and automatically change their input to match the actual finger placement rather than what they QWERTY letters would be.
Re point 2, I have not found this to be true (when do I ever need to use someone else's keyboard?), but also I haven't lost my qwerty skill anyway.
https://andre-wagner.medium.com/colemak-dh-my-journey-to-cha...
The only problem I can find is that the only Mac mod I can find with this layout that is not completely custom has an annoying and minor difference with the Windows and Linux versions of the same type of mod.
I switched to Colemak pro'lly 15 years ago, and while my fingers certainly move around a lot less, I don't think my top speed on typeracer.com has improved over what I was able to do on QWERTY before switching, nor do I seem to make fewer errors.
On the whole 1) I do like Colemak a bit better, but 2) I don't think it was worth the switch, although 3) it's certainly not worth a switch back. I think 4) if everyone started with Colemak things would be better, but 5) given that they don't, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone else choose Colemak over QWERTY if they're learning, based on my own experience.
What's kind of weird is that with all the ink / bits spilt over this issue, all we have are two 50+-year-old studies whose raw data are unavailable. How hard would it really be to re-run an RCT?
I did a monkeytype benchmark before switching, and I still barely hit the same numbers, so it's certainly not a magic fix for more typing speed. What is left then is the argument concerning ergonomics: which I am not sure is worth the trade-offs.
Every time I now sit at another's computer I am unable to type without glancing at the keyboard. Moreover, I am trying to switch to (n)vim, and am completely at a loss navigating, as the hjkl keys are now scattered across the keyboard -- beating their purpose.
In general, I do type faster than before, and faster than many people around me. That's likely only because I actually had to practice.
That made me think, maybe if I switched to Colemak and got a better keyboard, I could go even faster. I did both; and though my forearms certainly feel less tired on the odd occasion that I have long bouts of continuous typing to do, I'm neither noticeably faster nor more accurate.
So, both our anecdata seem to match the conclusion of the 1956 study mentioned in this article: That it was the intentional practice that primarily resulted in the improvements, not the keyboard layout; intentional practice on QWERTY would probably yield similar speed improvements to practice on Colemak or Dvorak.
I can still use qwerty due to muscle memory when I need to, I just find myself making dumb mistakes initially. As others have said, typing speed is not a focus due to my ability to only think at a specific pace.
It reminds me also of people who swear by using default settings in their editor or other programs so they can feel at home anywhere. Yeah, that's sort of a benefit, but I don't think it outweighs optimizing your workflow at your own machine.
I had a friend who used a split keyboard, blank keycaps, and a very odd layout (QGMLWB or BEAKL2 I think) at work. IIRC he said he kept a second normal keyboard at his desk for when someone would come by to pair program. This is sorta the inverse of your scenario. I guess he'd need to carry his keyboard to someone else's desk, or just type slower.
Back in the in-person days when sharing a keyboard with a coworker was more common, you have the very handy switcher icon in the taskbar.
So what you say counts for any non-standard keyboard. There's always a learning curve. I tried going to 60%, now I settled for 80%/TKL and there are situations where I miss the other 20%, but my (vertical) mouse is in a more natural position. At least with Dvorak, all the physical keys are the same size as a standard Qwerty, so you could just set to Qwerty English-American and be done with it.