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bgraybr

Dvorak Keyboards

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I'm considering getting one. I'll have to learn how to type again, but it shouldn't take more than a week or two to learn it and maybe a year to get used to using one completely. I'll also have to remap controls in every game that I play, but that shouldn't take too long.

Overall, I think that the good should outweigh the bad. Dvorak keyboards are supposedly easier and faster than QWERTY keyboards, and reduce wrist strain.

Are there any Dvorak users here? If so, what are your thoughts on them?

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Looks like a lot of effort. I can't say I miss a lot of the keys that have been phased over the years, but I don't see these boards as being any kind of convenience.

I think we'll see Mac make the plunge and go Dvorak totally. The Airs and other products have them standard.

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I've used a Dvorak layout a lot in the past and found it easy to learn and nice to type on. The biggest problem was that a ton of software makes the assumption that you're using QWERTY, so the hotkeys will be in weird places. The Ctrl+Z/X/C/V row, a basic staple of the windows UI, is spread all around with Dvorak, among other things. Unless you can reconfigure all your programs to use different keys, you'll either have to get used to it, or switch back and forth between keyboard layouts a lot.

I got sick and tired of switching back and forth, so now I just put up with QWERTY most of the time. If I were a full-time writer or something, maybe I'd try sticking with Dvorak, but as it stands, it's rare that I'd be able to take advantage of the small gains in typing productivity anyway. For programming, my typing speed is rarely the bottleneck, so there's not much reason to go Dvorak there, and what little writing I do is usually just for leisure.

Either way, if possible, you might want to try out the Dvorak layout on a standard keyboard before you buy a dedicated one. I'm not sure, but I think all the major operating systems have software to let you use various configurations on a single board. I know I've done so on Win XP and Slackware, at least.

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User for 8.5 years now. I went from 100 WPM on traditional to 80 on Dvorak. Speed definitely never improved, though hand movement is reduced. If I try to type quickly, I frequently get ahead of myself and hit keys sooner than I should. I never experienced that on the old keyboard.

Also, it took about 4 months to get up to full speed.

Unless you're developing CTS, I wouldn't recommend a switch.

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AndrewB said:

If I try to type quickly, I frequently get ahead of myself and hit keys sooner than I should. I never experienced that on the old keyboard.


Oddly enough, that happens to me now. If I get a few letter off in one of my words I can type an entire gibberish sentence of mixed up lettering.

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My typing speed went up after getting a QWERTY Kinesis Classic. The first week was much slower than usual, because it has a weird layout (split in center, thumb keys...) but it wasn't hard to learn. I bought it for $200 about a decade ago, when I started having problems with normal keyboards while typing one-handed due to a broken bone (so 2x the normal stress on my free hand). Yeah, I should have just quit the job instead... it was a really stressful place to work anyway.

Anyway, nice thing about it (besides being comfortable to type on) is that not only did it eventually improve my regular typing speed on QWERTY, but it's completely remapable inside the firmware, and you can also create macros without any OS support. Not only that, but you can also physically detach all the keys and swap them around to create any layout. So I could turn this into a DVORAK with matching key labels, if I wanted to. But I don't really have any incentive to.

Another nice thing is that since it's a split layout with a bunch of space in between the "bowls", you can attach a touchpad there (using double-sided tape), and then there's no need to have a mouse.

The only customization I did (besides the touchpad thing) is to remap (swap) the Escape and CapsLock keys. I'm a vi user, so it's nice to have Escape right on the center row. I feel sorry for those unfortunte Emacs users who have to go through all kinds of contortions to get anything done. ;)

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Like MP3s or VHS or iPods it's really hard to get the public to switch from something they've adapted to even when superior alternatives exist.

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hex11 said:

I'm a vi user, so it's nice to have Escape right on the center row. I feel sorry for those unfortunte Emacs users who have to go through all kinds of contortions to get anything done. ;)


Heh, a bit off topic but how can you stand using vi? I used to use vim to program under Linux when I first started (I was obsessed with using the lightest weight programs possible), but after I discovered IDEs I pretty much gave up on it.

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QWERTY keyboards are "good enough" enough that I don't think it will ever be displaced in terms of traditional input interfaces. With all of the touch screens and shit people use now, who knows what the future holds. 3D gestures?

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VIM has a feature where you can open a source file like myfile.cpp at line 1240 by typing vim myfile.cpp +1240 and it will open at that line instead of scrolling down to that point. Emacs is a nightmare to configure, I much prefer Vim for writing long blog posts and editing programming code to get something working.

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Looks fucking shit to be honest. The xbox 360's default virtual keyboard (alphabetical ordering) looked less awkward than this. I'll stick with the standard, thank you.

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Bank said:

iPods


The iPods are a premium product, exactly how you get people to switch "from" it? I'd think the hardest part is to get people to switch to it rather than buying $20 Chinese MP3 player. Otherwise it's like saying "Yeah, it's hard to get people to switch from Porsche Cayennes to regular city cars for everyday use".

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Blah blah blah, most of the world has owned an iPod at some point Maes

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Xeros612 said:

Looks fucking shit to be honest. The xbox 360's default virtual keyboard (alphabetical ordering) looked less awkward than this. I'll stick with the standard, thank you.


QWERTY keyboards were actually designed to hinder your ability to type. Typing too fast on a typewrite would cause it to jam, especially if the keys being frequently pressed were close to each other.

But as has already been mentioned in this thread, it's hard to get people to switch off any sort of standard.

As for the iPod thing, they're so popular now that iPod is accepted as a synonym for any media player. Apple is good at selling a brand. The high price probably works with the sleek design to make them appear better quality than they actually are. Personally, I pick up a Sansa when I'm in need of an .mp3 player. I just have to drag and drop my files onto it, and it can play everything from .mp3 to .flac (something that the iPod won't do). I've beat my current one completely to shit for more than two years, and it still works fine. Better than any iPod that I've ever owned.

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bgraybr said:

QWERTY keyboards were actually designed to hinder your ability to type. Typing too fast on a typewrite would cause it to jam, especially if the keys being frequently pressed were close to each other.


you're right on the second sentence, wrong on the first. The real reason for the qwerty layout is Bigram Frequency, which is an analysis of the most common two-letter combinations in English, so the keys are spaced out in a way that the hands type left-right-left-right on most of these. look at the word "the" which requires left-right-left, for example. having that on one hand would be tedious.

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bgraybr said:

I'm considering getting one.

Why would you do that instead of just rearranging the keys on your existing keyboard?

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Mr. T said:

Blah blah blah, most of the world has owned an iPod at some point Maes

Technician said:

Back in 2004 everyone had a budget mp3 player. Everyone now has an iPod. Even if they are junk.


Heh, different economic realities really do affect world views. The only person I know that has an iPod is my sister, and then she can only afford it because she's working in the UK and gets a practically space-age salary compared to Greece.

And an iPod from 2004 won't even be usable after all those years: either the HD will have failed or the battery will be bust. Good enough perhaps for sheeple consumers with a disposable consumerist mentality, but not for cost-conscious Euro pinkos like myself ;-)

In fact, me b so ghetto I be takin' a promotional shoe stand from da streetz, dawg, so I can put my shoes on it.

fraggle said:

Why would you do that instead of just rearranging the keys on your existing keyboard?


Maybe his model of keyboard can't be rearranged without breaking it or putting stickers on the keys :-p

Csonicgo said:

you're right on the second sentence, wrong on the first.


TBQH I've heard conflicting POVs on that whole QWERTY thing. Some say that it was invented to deliberately slow down typists, others to optimize typing speed. Since those two goals are conflicting, they can't be both true, but I've long given up on finding a single source that can definitively clear this up. Even wikipedia's article on the matter was quite ambiguous and cryptic, and left me with no clear answer.

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Reminds me of this and this.

Anyway, looks like it would take me forever to get used to anything other than QWERTY. I can't help but feel unorthodox keyboard layouts are fixing problems that don't exist. But then I don't do much heavy typing these days, so who am I to judge.

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I guess the problem I would have if I switched would be that every keyboard I use except my own one would still be QWERTY.


As for ipods, I wouldn't thank you for one. Not so much for the machine itself but the fact you have to use itunes to put stuff on there and have it play. A drag, drop and play MP3 player is what I want.

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Technician said:

Back in 2004 everyone had a budget mp3 player. Everyone now has an iPod. Even if they are junk.

Noone I know has one, and I've never seen one up close. Most people I see on the bus or in the street use their cellphones MP3 capabilities. As do I.

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I have an iPod I bought in 2008. It cost as much as a nice monitor, but I had $300 in gift cards for Best Buy, so I got it for the price of a cheap case. It's by far the most capable and reliable MP3 player I've ever had. Sadly, it comes from the one generation where they managed to encrypt the bootloader so I can't install Linux. Bastards!

I do miss those little MP3 players that didn't have screens. If you put all the functions in a rocker switch you don't even have to look at the thing to fiddle with your music. Those were great. Sadly, that kind of UI gets pretty annoying if you several gigabytes of storage.

As for keyboards, I'm solidly convinced the primary motivation with qwerty was to keep the letters in typewriters from striking each other. You can see on a Dvorak keyboard the T and H on the right hand could potentially have issues if you hit them at the same time. This always has me wondering if Dvorak typewriters had a different mechanical design, or if the problem was mostly gone by the 30s.

I wouldn't want to relearn touch typing after spending as many years as I did learning it in the first place. Then of course everyone else has qwerty and sometimes they need to use my machine...

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Maes said:

And an iPod from 2004 won't even be usable after all those years: either the HD will have failed or the battery will be bust. Good enough perhaps for sheeple consumers with a disposable consumerist mentality, but not for cost-conscious Euro pinkos like myself ;-)

i bought ipod nano sometimes back then. it was smaller in size and bigger in capacity than its contemporary flash memory competitors and with hacks like rockbox you could even avoid the itunes hell. i broke it some 5 years later when a heavy rain caught me running somewhere in fields and i didn't bother using my lifetime warranty for it, because cellphones were already available with 1GB+ memory cards and they're definitely becoming the standard for mp3 players. :P

my friend however kept claiming the warranty for various (even ridiculous) reasons and they always gave him a new one for free, so throughout the years he even upgraded several times when they ran out of the older types. so umm, it's not all like you think. :P

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Even if it is a "faster" layout, I think having to spend time unlearning the 18 or so years I've been using a standard QWERTY keyboard would completely remove any benefit it might provide.

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dew said:

my friend however kept claiming the warranty for various (even ridiculous) reasons and they always gave him a new one for free, so throughout the years he even upgraded several times when they ran out of the older types. so umm, it's not all like you think. :P


What you are describing can only work in a highly competitive economy where customers are quick to sue or "bring their business elsewhere" for little or no reason, and where the whole business world's mentality is centered around a philosophy of "the customer is always right" and a disposable/upgrade/aftersales support/gift card etc. philosophy.

But if you want a reliable device that won't ever require weird DRM, custom charges, special service etc. and that can -literally- function in a tent in the back of the woods without you worrying of not being able to fit a standard battery in it (been there, done that), and all of that without having to rely AT ALL on any sort of service or after-sales network, then anything by Apple is really rock bottom.

This is, like, the total opposite of what customers expect here: once you have bought something, you're pretty much on your own. Unconditional money-back guarantees are unheard of here, service is a luxury that you better avoid, so buying something that will last you and that will allow you to have as little contact as possible with the sales network is of paramount importance.

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bgraybr said:

Heh, a bit off topic but how can you stand using vi? I used to use vim to program under Linux when I first started (I was obsessed with using the lightest weight programs possible), but after I discovered IDEs I pretty much gave up on it.


In the beginning, I used plain old vi (not vim) on a 4 MB 486 with just some rxvt's running inside TinyX (the only reasonable way to use X11 on a machine like that...) One terminal for the editor, one for man pages, one for compiling and testing.

Later on, I discovered vim and its features, like syntax highlighting, multiple windows, scripts, plugins, embedded perl interpreter, the works... Some of those features were incredibly useful at times.

But over the years vim has become bloated, which caused me to return back to the original vi. I learned it better, and how to cutomize it (via ~/.exrc) to create macros and custom keybindings. Instead of multiple windows implemented in the editor, I use tmux. And there's no embedded perl interpreter, but vi can shell out and use any program to filter portions of text (fmt, sort, perl, whatever...) Another nice thing is that all these tools are in OpenBSD's base system, so I don't even have to manage packages at all. It's Unix, so it's already there.

Btw, some say Emacs is a great IDE but a lousy text editor. :D (well in its defense it has a "vile" mode for vi fans)

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Technician said:

Back in 2004 everyone had a budget mp3 player. Everyone now has an iPod. Even if they are junk.


Not me man. Never had any MP3 player, iPod or otherwise. The closest is my Nintendo DS, which can play various media formats via Moonshell. And I suspect a lot of people use their smartphones in this manner now.

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hex11 said:

And I suspect a lot of people use their smartphones in this manner now.


What fucks up cell phones in general in that role (even many "non-smart" phones can act as MP3 players) is:

  • Battery life, which has to co-exist with other functions too, and in general is uncomparable with that of a dedicated player under similar conditions.
  • Awkwardness of getting files on the phone. Low-end phones tend to have no direct-to-PC cable interface, or a nasty custom affair sold separately. If you are really unlucky you might be stuck with just infrared/bluetooth, or even having to download stuff via WAP ($$$). In some models you can take the SD card off and write to it in a more convenient card reader, but very few support removing it without disassembling the phone itself. At least Android smartphones all use a standard connector cable and all can work in plain USB drive mode. My Sony Ericsson K750i was somewhat in the middle: it did come with a custom cable, it could work in pure flash drive mode to just copy MP3s on it or you could use a brain-dead software by Sony which forced you to encode shit in ATRAC3 (!) in order to use your phone as an "MP3" player.
  • Phone jacks. Many phones have custom affairs, even though the trend it to use standard 3.5 mm jacks more and more.

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Ah, yeah the crappy battery life... I miss my old Nokia 1100 for that reason alone. But on top of that, it also had a nice, easy to navigate menu/interface and actually useful features like caller ID and integrated flashlight LED. But I had to give it up because Tracfone "lost" my SIM serial number after not using the phone for over a year. According to their customer service, there was no way to get that number back in service, so I had to go buy a new phone altogether. Of course, by then they had switched to other phone models. I ended up going with Net10 and their basic LG model, but it sucks battery power (probably the color screen, not something I needed...) and the interface is a clusterfuck of unusability.

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