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I have given up on Dvorak once and for all. It does make for much more disciplined typing, but I found that just as I was getting up to speed on it, I was beginning to experience some discomfort in my right hand and arm. There are some nasty artefacts in Dvorak, perhaps the worst of which is the position of the L key, in the top right hand corner of the keyboard. Having to stretch your pinky as much as that gets really sore after a while. Since the main reason why I started looking into alternative keyboard layouts was that for the past two years I have been experiencing some general fatigue and mild discomfort on and off in my right arm in the first place, I thought that it would be prudent to take note. I was also finding it very uncomfortable to type URLs on my Kinesis keyboard, where said pinky has to do the Riverdance to handle the forward slash and the shift key for the colon, then move out of the way to let your right middle finger handle the “www”.

At the moment I am back on QWERTY at work and hating it. However, there is a very promising new kid on the block as far as keyboard layouts are concerned: Colemak. Unlike Dvorak, it takes QWERTY as its starting point and only shuffles some of the keys around, leaving almost all the punctuation and symbols and some of the less frequently used letters in pretty much the same place. This makes for a much more comfortable typing experience that is also much easier to learn, and it has none of the nasty artefacts of Dvorak either.

After only two or three evenings, I am already more comfortable with it than I was after three weeks of going completely cold turkey on Dvorak on my first attempt back in July 2000. It also seems that switching to and fro between QWERTY and Colemak will be much easier than switching back and fro between QWERTY and Dvorak. You can get full instructions on how to use it, and a Windows installer, from the Colemak website. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I am good enough at it to be able to use it at work too.

Update: I didn’t eventually switch to Colemak in the end. (See discussion.)

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Posted at 20:59 in Typing

Over the past week or so I’ve been having another go at typing Dvorak again. I’ve been getting rather frustrated recently at my long standing indiscipline and uncoordinated habits on a QWERTY layout, particularly in my right hand, and I’ve been anxious to ditch it in favour of something a bit more sane and logical for quite a while now, the problem being, of course, the amount of time and effort it takes to make the switch, and the dire impact that it has on your productivity during the first couple of weeks.

This time I think it is within my grasp, however. This is my third attempt to get Dvoraking, and I can now easily manage over 30 words per minute on my laptop, where I have rearranged the key caps. I am still a bit slower on my Kinesis keyboard which does not have the keys relabelled, so I am having to learn to touch type properly on it, and that makes it a bit more of an effort. Nevertheless, it is now at the stage at which the impact on my productivity is minor enough for it to be tolerated at work, and once you reach that stage, it is plain sailing all the way.

I am well impressed with just how much more comfortable it is than qwerty, and also that it seems to encourage and even enforce much more disciplined keyboard habits. I find that the fingers on my right hand tend to gravitate naturally to the home keys for their resting position now, for instance, whereas on qwerty they tended to gravitate to anything but the home keys. I am also finding it much easier to type without having my palms resting on the wrist rests at the front of the keyboard all the time.

One thing I have found however is that if you frequently have to remote desktop into other computers and servers, a reprogrammable keyboard is absolutely essential. Terminal Services uses the keyboard layout programmed into the server rather than your local machine, so unless you are prepared to switch back and forth all the time between qwerty and Dvorak (and everything that I have read on the subject is unanimous that you shouldn’t while you’re learning), relying on the ability to change the keyboard settings in Windows simply won’t cut the mustard. The keyboard switcher in Windows can be pretty temperamental at the best of times, and nice as it would be to switch all the servers I access to Dvorak, there are other people around who also have to log in as an administrator as well as me, and if they end up typing gibberish or are unable to even log in thanks to the Dvorak layout, they are likely to get rather annoyed.

It seems that there are quite a few alpha geeks and bloggers who type Dvorak. Well known Dvorakists include Bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen and WordPress head honcho Matt Mullenweg. For a light-hearted and entertaining look at the benefits of the Dvorak keyboard layout, check out DVZine.org, a Dvorak advocacy site in web comic format. It’s a seriously cool intro to it that is well worth a read, even if you don’t plan to switch.

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Posted at 20:35 in Typing

I recently got a comment wishing me luck with my switch to Dvorak, so I thought I’d better post an update.

Unfortunately, it never got off the ground. The problem with the Dvorak layout is that it is so totally different to qwerty that it takes several weeks to get used to — time during which your productivity takes a pretty big hit. If you don’t want to annoy your boss, don’t do it.

Dvorak is not the only alternative: there are other layouts that are closer to qwerty, such as the Colemak layout. Colemak is based on qwerty — only about half the keys have been shuffled around — and claims to be more tightly optimised than even Dvorak in terms of things like the distance that your fingers move, alternation between your hands, and so on.

However, I don’t think you need to do all that much in terms of optimisation to notice a big difference. Remember the Pareto Principle — that 80% of the wealth is in the hands of 20% of the people? The same thing probably happens with tweaks to your keyboard layout. The figures may not be exact, but most of the improvement will come from a relatively small number of changes. These layouts may be able to outdo each other in terms of the exact figures, but there comes a point beyond which it gets a bit pedantic.

One simple tweak that I’ve experimented with a little has been to swap the E, R, T, U, I, O and P keys with the ones directly beneath them. I haven’t spent a great deal of time with this, but it seems apparent to me that it gives a fairly impressive improvement over qwerty while being very easy to get used to. It moves all the vowels and the most frequently used consonants onto the home keys, and since no keys change fingers, you can adapt quite quickly. Once you’re used to that, you could possibly go on to swap some of the other keys around a bit, and adopt an “evolutionary” rather than “revolutionary” approach.

If you can’t afford to shell out for a programmable keyboard such as the Kinesis, Microsoft has a nifty little program available as a free download that lets you create and edit your own keyboard layouts for Windows.

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Posted at 22:09 in Typing

For the next few days at least, I am back on my Microsoft Natural Keyboard.

The reason for this is that my Kinesis Advantage keyboard went belly-up last night. At around the time that Sweden scored their last minute equaliser against England, it suddenly decided to stop responding to some of the keys. Fortunately it is still under warranty so I will be sending it back to get fixed in the next day or two, but having said that, it is still a little bit annoying.

On the other hand, I’m not missing it too badly as of yet. While the Kinesis is more comfortable in some respects — it seems to have knocked a couple of my bad typing habits on the head and the mild discomfort in my right arm has more or less gone now — it does have a few niggles. The curly brackets and the +/= key are in totally the wrong places if you are trying to code in a C-style language such as C++, Java, Perl, PHP or C#, for starters. You have to curl your fingers on your right hand underneath your palms to get to the curly brackets, which tend to get used pretty heavily in the aforementioned languages, and the +/= key is placed counterintuitively in the top left hand corner of the keyboard. The position of the arrow keys is just horrendous — directly below the C, V, M and comma keys, where I am constantly pressing them by mistake, sometimes with fairly annoying consequences. To be sure, you can reprogram the keys if you like, but I haven’t done so as of yet, mainly because I haven’t been able to decide where to move them to or what to put in their place.

I will probably keep it once it’s fixed, but all in all I’m not sure that I would go out of my way to recommend the Kinesis keyboard. At £225 including VAT and delivery it is probably overkill, given that the Microsoft Natural Keyboard is a fraction of the price and you are likely to find it perfectly adequate as it is. On the other hand, if you are concerned about RSI and have to type a lot of ordinary text rather than C# code, it may be worth considering getting a second hand one. One thing is clear, however: both are a vast improvement over the horrible traditional flat keyboard layout.

Update: It was fixed under warranty.

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Posted at 23:20 in Typing

Well I’ve finally done it. I took delivery of my brand new Kinesis keyboard today. It’s fully ergonomic — the keys are in curved bowls that are contoured to the shape of your hands — but man, it has prompted a few interesting comments to say the least.

My first impression is that it is going to take a little bit of getting used to. The general consensus of the blogosphere seems to be that you spend the first three days swearing at it then the rest of your life swearing by it. Quite what I end up thinking of it after thirty days remains to be seen, but I rather suspect that it will on the whole be pretty positive. I have it on a 30 day sale or return basis, so if I decide it’s not worth the money, I can send it back.

I’ll write a fuller review in a couple of weeks’ time once I have some idea of where it’s going. In the meantime, I’ve put my plans to switch to Dvorak on ice for the time being. However, you can switch the keyboard layout on the fly between QWERTY and Dvorak, or even re-map it to something totally esoteric if you like. So watch this space…

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Posted at 18:45 in Typing

I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and move over to using a Dvorak keyboard layout.

Everyone thinks I’m crazy doing this but there are some good sound reasons for it, notably that apparently it’s more comfortable. The traditional qwerty layout is actually far from optimal — it was not designed for either comfort or speed and it involves a good deal more finger travel than the DSK. People who successfully make the switch generally report that even if they don’t notice an increase in overall speed, they do find Dvorak to be both more comfortable and more accurate.

As you would expect, it feels quite awkward at present, since I’m fairly new to the game. Going from about 60-70 words per minute to about ten is a bit of a pain, but I’m slowly but surely picking up a bit of momentum as I persevere. It seems that a lot of people give up in frustration rather than sticking it out to the point at which they are good at it. Apparently if you keep going back to the qwerty layout while you are re-training, though, it really slows you down a lot, and this seems to be where most people fall over.

Switching is technically fairly easy as every operating system includes it as an option, and you can stick some labels on your keys with the new layout, as I have done. Unfortunately, Windows only provides you with Dvorak layouts for US English, which means no pound or euro symbols. For some strange reason, it seems to have escaped the attention of some Americans that 95% of the world’s population do not live in the U S of A. Evidently, some such Americans work at Microsoft. However, a UK layout is available for download here.

I’ll be blogging my progress and thoughts on the transition over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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Posted at 22:32 in Typing

From time to time my Microsoft Natural Keyboard raises a few eyebrows around the place, and people wonder how on earth I can use something like it. The answer is, without too much difficulty. You do need to be able to touch type (or a reasonable approximation at any rate) and it does take a bit of getting used to, but once you’re used to it, you’ll never want to go back to a conventional one.

I was always a tad sceptical about these things but a few years back I got hold of one that a local company was throwing out and decided to give it a try. The idea behind it is to prevent or reduce RSI (repetitive strain injury) and it does seem to make it quite a bit easier, that’s for sure. A year or so ago I bashed my wrists and they were pretty sore for a few days, during which I noticed a big difference between the natural keyboard (which was still quite comfortable) and my laptop keyboard (which was actually rather painful).

Having said that, it’s still not perfect. I find it particularly tiring on my right arm reaching for the mouse all the time, and I suspect that a trackball in the middle of the keyboard would be a far better idea. It really sucks that a lot of programs still seem to rely pretty heavily on the mouse to the extent that usability with a keyboard is difficult if not downright impossible. It’s lazy programming, and it has important implications for accessibility. There is also quite a bit of stretching involved when you are programming: reaching for keys like the curly brackets and so on can put quite a lot of strain on your pinky.

I am rather interested in the more heavily adapted keyboards such as the Kinesis contoured keyboards, or the Maltron keyboard. Yes, they look weird, but they are heavily researched and contoured to fit the hands and minimise strain. They also have clusters of keys for your thumbs including things like the cursor keys, control, alt, page up and page down, to ease the strain on your little fingers and minimise arm and wrist movement. The Maltron keyboard even claims to have achieved recovery from RSI in some users.

Unfortunately they are very expensive (the Maltron costs £375 for the basic model, or £435 for the version with a trackball; the Kinesis is somewhat cheaper) but if you spend a lot of time on the computer as I do, they could be well worth it. I’m admittedly a little bit concerned about the whole RSI thing, so I may invest in one at some stage, or at the very least ask for a trial. So, if you see me with an even weirder looking keyboard than ever some day, you’ll know why.

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Posted at 13:32 in Typing