The real problem with current keyboards is the physical arrangement of the keys. Staggered rows instead of columns make them less ergonomic, the oversized spacebar wastes much of the most valuable space on the keyboard. The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text. While the weak pinky finger has to cover more keys than the others. These things are more significant than qwerty vs dvorak.
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.
"The thumb as one of the strongest fingers has almost nothing to do, with both thumbs mostly sharing a single key while typing text."
To be fair, that single key is used rather excessively compared to the rest.
That key makes up about 15% in English text, and it could be covered by 10% of fingers but instead it's 20%. Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys. Altough I haven't looked at actual keypress stats and how those are distributed across fingers. Might be interesting to look into.
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.
> Meanwhile every use of shift, return, backspace, ctrl etc is done with the weakest fingers and often include some hand stretching to reach those keys.
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.
I don't have a particular beef in the great Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate.
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.
> Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...
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'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...
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.
Same here. I adopted Dvorak as a youth, so when I got my first smartphone I put the keyboard in Dvorak.
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.
My first layout was AZERTY (french one), and I added Colemak 4 years ago. I am slightly faster in AZERTY compared to Colemak still (100wpm/90wpm), I never lost the AZERTY, the key is to just use both all the time. I have a shortcut and I alternate constantly, because I need to write french, or because I wanna code.
I was motivated to learn Dvorak in order to get rid of bad keyboard habits. And happily stuck to it. Not sure that I type any faster, but it feels somehow as a more rhytmical, much more pleasant experience.
This mirrors my experience. When I was a teenager I could type rather quickly using only two fingers on each hand. I figured I'd be typing a lot my whole life and it'd be easier to re-train proper typing habits on a whole new layout rather than trying to adapt my QWERTY habits I picked up while playing Runescape in elementary school.
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.
For everyone complaining about the issues with app shortcuts when using Dvorak, the solution is to use a keymap that switches to QWERTY when you hold down the CTRL or CMD key. It is a bit unfortunate that common CLI commands (`ls` is the worst offender) and semicolon usage in programming languages are designed around QWERTY, but I still prefer Dvorak.
According to this article, "a 1936 book called Typewriting Behavior" made "comparisons of the new keyboard to a jeep and the old one to an ox".
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.
I think they mixed up their sources. The jeep/ox comparison appears to be from the 1944 US Navy report: https://archive.org/details/APracticalExperimentInSimplified...
(Typewriting Behavior, for the curious: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74878/page/n11...)
Popeye introduced a character named "Eugene the Jeep" in 1936. Could have also been the origin of Jeep for the vehicle.
This is not the first historical inaccuracy I’ve noticed from this site.
I tried Dvorak for a while but gave up after I realized:
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.
It is one of the things I like about Colemak that it takes into account QWERTY's dominance in computers and intentionally doesn't move a lot a shortcut keys and punctuation. Semicolon is the most obvious punctuation mark that does move, most of the rest stay where they are. The big list of shortcut keys that stay the same place includes AZXCVBMWQ. XCV not moving is especially a big deal, as you also mention copy and paste as key shortcut examples.
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.
Not only are Ctl+C and Ctl+V not next to each other, but they move next to other shortcuts that are annoying to mis-hit, like the one to close a browser tab...
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.
Yeah but with QWERTY you can type out the word 'typewriter' using only the top row of the keyboard; so if you're a typewriter salesman QWERTY is the way to go.
(Been using Dvorak for 25 years now. Doesn't matter what the physical keyboard layout is - currently I'm using a Swiss layout)
There are no more typewriter salesmen.
I believe this was a reference to one of the origin myths discussed in the article.
I've tried to switch to Dvorak, but after a year I was just tired of the universally shitty default keybinding experience.
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.
In gaming, my solution to "I'm tired of always rebinding keys and/or finding games that don't support easy key rebinding" became "I'll just play with an Xbox controller by default". My home is full of Xbox controllers anyway and PC game support for them has been really good for a while (and even better now post-Steam Deck).
I know it is not everyone's favorite solution, but it is fun for me.
The only particularly bad case I've found is v/w/z being right next to one another, which can be annoying. Still, I think I've won out overall. I spend a lot more time typing text than I do invoking keyboard shortcuts.
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.)
To give a contrasting viewpoint, I don't think you need to change your per-program keybinds. I've used vim with qwerty, dvorak, and Workman. I never rebound hjkl or anything else. The letters are in another spot, which you have to get used to... just like you're already doing to type words at all. Plus, in the case of vim you'll probably use stuff like e and w and search to get around faster a lot of the time anyway.
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.
I have a new keyboard with a physical switch on it to switch keyboard layouts / settings, wonder if I should give it a try sometime. But, same issue, I switch between typing, gaming and programming. Switching to dvorak would mean I would also need to remap all my applications.
Decided to try Colemak-DH after reading this article and googling:
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.
So did you actually get any faster?
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?
As a Colemak (DH) user for ~5 years, I share these experiences.
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.
I type Dvorak around my old qwerty speed. It’s probably not possible to be faster. For really fast qwerty typists, the brain has multiple fingers with the right hand contortions in motion, hitting keys in order, just in time. Dvorak eliminated hand pain by reducing motion, but it didn’t give my brain the ability to orchestrate my fingers with tighter timing.
The less-movement thing is also why I switched. Wrist pain instantly gone and never returned. Qwerty is torturous.
I'm happy I switched to Colemak around 13 years ago. Mostly due to elbow pain. I do find it made a difference there.
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.
Right -- see, I basically maxed out "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" in high school. (That is, I practiced with it regularly until it couldn't find any particular problem with my typing, and resorted to giving me practice typing symbols, at which point I got bored and quit.) What prompted me to look at Colemak (and mechanical keyboards) was when some friend/colleagues at work were playing with typeracer.com, and I clocked in at 120WPM on one of the first races. One of my friends didn't really believe it and asked me to repeat the performance in front of him, which I did.
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.
Also a Colemak (DH) user. I agree completely with everything you've written but I'll add that I'm happy I switched even though it was definitely not "worth" it by any quantitative measure.
This seems to be a more in-depth treatment of the advantages of QWERTY in the typewriter mechanics contemporary to its introduction.
I tried to convert to Dvorak. I even switched my keycaps, but when I started learning with linux application, I finished at level 3. It required me to write three different letters. When there was 1 - it was okay. When 2 - quite nice. But 3 - it made me feel pain in the back and in the brain. It felt like something was going very wrong with my nervous system. I had to quit.
I feel the Dvorak layout has a bug. In both English and my native language, the letter 'I' occurs much more frequently than 'U', so I've switched the 'U' and 'I' keys.
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.
It’s common niggle but, as far as I know, nobody is sure of the precise rationale for placing every key, only the broad explanations of the layout that Dvorak published and promoted. The layout wasn’t based only on letter frequency but they attempted to account also for bigram frequency, frequency of repetition within words, frequency with which words are used, and with an objective of rhythmic alternation between hands.
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.
The Workman layout (much newer, to be fair) "solves" this. Right hand homerow is NEOI, with U on the top row and pressed by the middle finger. I've been using Workman for a few years and would recommend it. I used Dvorak for maybe 1.5-2 years before it.
In a tech support scenario, Dvorak is always troublesome. You sit down to type at someone's computer, and random characters start popping out.
In general, even if it may not be "optimal," significantly non-standard keyboards (yes, Mac isn't quite like Windows) is IMO more trouble than it's worth.
Back to the author's point: "good enough" is the bar, when we are talking about a choice that impacts millions of users. Changing "good enough" to "optimal" requires gigantic costs in retraining and redesign, and simply isn't worth it.
It is a problem for any well-designed application with shortcuts. For they'd make the shortcuts often used to be according to the OS HIG, and a priority to easy to reach keys being also shortcuts often used (in that order). The latter is just part of learning curve (we all grew up with Qwerty, right? right?!) but the latter is an issue for any non-standard Qwerty (depending on how much they differ from Qwerty; which Dvorak does a lot but Colemak and Workman and Azerty and Qwertz already less so).
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.
People make this argument a lot, but you should optimize for the most common situation before an edge case. I am usually at my own PC/keyboard and I greatly enjoy my weird keyboard and layout. I can't type qwerty as well as I used to, but I rarely have to. (If I had to do it more I'd probably retrain it to make switching back and forth less troublesome).
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.
The only time I have to use QWERTY is the occasional touch screen kiosk or something. And you're not exactly touch typing an essay in that scenario.
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.
This is called 'security thorough obscurity' - no one can mess with your computer in case that you forget to lock it (e.g. when you go make yourself coffee at work).