james mckay dot net

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 on 5 August 2006.
Tagged: dvorak, 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 on 21 June 2006.
Tagged: ergonomic keyboards, Kinesis, 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 on 10 March 2006.
Tagged: dvorak, typing