Suvir's Blog

I have been toying recently with the idea of switching my keyboard layout.

It all started with my some abnormal pain in my hand one evening. So, I googled for something like “keyboard hands stress”.

tangent : I dont think I am the only one who considers google to be some sort of oracle or something. I sometimes feel pretty silly googling for trivial things for no good reason.

Anyways, so I hit “search” and got back loads of pages of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury). And quite frankly, I was pretty freaked out. Not being able to use a keyboard or mouse for a long time is something that I find extremely disconcerting and disturbing.

(another) tangent:  It feels like having your arm bent by some bully in the playground and not being able to get back at the prick ( well, thts why he is the BULLY).

Getting back to the point, one of the tips for beating RSI was switching from qwerty to another keyboard layout called dvorak.Firstly, a little background on dvorak and why it was developed.

Well, long long ago, there were typewriters. Whenever typists used to type fast, the typewriter used to get jammed. So these clever guys scrambled the typewriter keys to basically limit your speed. If you go faster than a certain level, you will feel strained and well therefore you will type slower than your brain is actually processing stuff. So,  an “educational psychologist and a professor of education”[sic] by the name of August Dvorak and another fellow called William Dealey analysed the most common typing patterns for the english language and designed a new and easier to use keyboard layout called the “Simplified Dvorak Layout”. Its pretty different from the qwerty layout but its much easier to use. For example, all the vowels are in one place, common punctuations are grouped together etc. Small things which basically make typing less strenuos.

The current world speed typing record is 210 words per min. No surprise that its held by a dvorak user. This by no means implies that a normal dvorak user will type at at 210 wpm. A normal user would still max out around 100-120 depending on what they are doing. But the point is that you would actually move your hands much lesser and hence strain yourself lesser.

Over time, many variants of dvorak have been developed. Most of these keep the letters same as “ANSI dvorak” but modify position of other things to make it easier for a particular task. For example, there is a programmer’s dvorak which makes symbols like ‘;’, ‘{‘, ‘}’ ‘.’ etc easier to reach. This is obviously based on the analysis of classical statically typed programming language like C, pascal and basic. There is no proof that you will program faster if you use the keyboard ( ofcourse not).

Notable users of dvorak – steve wozniak , bram cohen, matt mullenweg .

BUT ALL THIS ONLY APPLIES IF YOU TOUCH-TYPE. Do you still HUNT-N-PECK ??? THEE is ILLTYPERATE!!!! more on that in the next post  ;D

Tags: dvorak, qwerty, rsi