dvorak layout

[fossala]

I have been using it all morning. It is taking me ages to type anything.
Does anyone here use it?

[hoggy]

Have been for a while now. Love it, makes qwerty seem perverse. I'd say stick with it.

[fossala]

How long before full speed again? I'm at 12 wpm from ~80 wpm.

[webwit]

Switch to colemak, it's better.

[intealls]

I've been using it for about a year. I think it took me about three months to get back to ~80 wpm. I type faster now than I ever did with Qwerty (about 105 wpm if I try hard). I don't know how much of that improvement is attributed to Dvorak or just touch typing properly.

Like webwit said, Colemak is better (for Swedish as well as English, see the link webwit posted), but I went with Dvorak purely because of the readily available Swedish dialect, Svorak.

[cactux]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[webwit]

Colemak has been proven better in all aspects except hand alternation. Colemak balances the load between hands better because it does not optimize on hand alternation like dvorak. Dvorak has much used vowels on one hand, on the weaker fingers.

Colemak is better because it is a new fresh star, unlike dvorak, which is ancient. For colemak and other modern layouts millions of lines of text are analyzed using computers, to get the least hand travel and such, something which was not available to Dvorak. Dvorak didn't stand a stance. It is just outdated now. There is no reason to switch from qwerty to dvorak in modern times, it has been bettered. If you switch, switch to something else.

[pyro]

And yet it's only 2% "more efficient" than Dvorak, and Dvorak doesn't sacrifice on anything.

In my impression, Dvorak is more generally applicable to other languages, and it definitely is better for typing german than colemak. Just looking at s/c/h-key-positions turns me off.

Either way, it'll be 2 weeks to not hate typing and at least 2 months until you're a reasonably fast typist again. And don't overdo on the training, an hour per day should be the max.

[webwit]

2%? The difference in travel distance between dvorak and colemak with the text you just typed is 13%. If I translate your text to German with google translate, the difference is 12%. And dvorak sacrifices on a lot of things, which you simply dismiss.

[fossala]

Sorry I did not mean to start a flame war.
I have managed to learn the layout and type ~17wpm. The reason I picked it over Colemak is that Colemak is to close to qwerty and I didn't want to get mixed up when I do need to type qwerty.

[webwit]

17wpm! So now I know what you have been doing the past hour. Typing that response

I learned colemak using the "colemak by night" method and TypeFaster. Never had a problem mixing it up with qwerty, because I didn't properly touch type before, so typing qwerty is a different exercise. The keys that are the same make it easier, especially zxcv (copy & paste sucks on dvorak). I learned two keys at a time, starting with index fingers and working outwards and up, down, each round adding two keys. Didn't move on until I got 50wpm and good accuracy. I picked 50wpm as a barrier when you're no longer getting irritated by a slow down. Then after I learned all keys I made the full switch and I was immediately up to a fair speed.

[pyro]

Off Topic, just a last response

Spoiler:

I guess you're referring to http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

Right, I forgot to mention I flipped i und u. Improves Dvorak a little. And I'm very certain I'd find similar tweaks on Colemak, too.

My main problem with the stats is, that it doesn't really reflect the level of typing convenience, once you're at the level of modern keyboard layouts. If you were high on stats, why would you recommend Colemak over Capewell or Arensito? As I imagine it, if your whole keyboard were the home row, you'd have 0 finger travel, but you'd get RSI fast.

Maybe you should introduce a button to mark and autocollapse offtopic-discussions.

[webwit]

Meh, switching i and u won't win you 10%. Your main problem with the stats is that it provides a truth you do not want, namely that colemak is better than dvorak. You can't have that, because you're a dvorak user, so you try to rewrite truth. This is a silly discussion about your ego really. Now you're hitting a low point by attacking those evil stats. Perhaps you should persist in it alone without publicly humiliating yourself. First you use stats to falsely claim there is only 2% difference and dismiss colemak, then you get corrected because you made that up, then the corrector is high on stats and you dismiss the stats. Bah. If you find improvement suspicious, why not stick with qwerty?

[cactux]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[webwit]

I was waiting for your cherry picking. That's still 7 and 5% difference, not 2. And because the average difference is larger, you're trying to manipulate the simple truth that colemak has significant travel distance improvement. Perhaps I should find the texts with the largest difference and put them into the argument? It's easy to find some with 20%. Also, I'm very curious why you think Dvorak has some kind of magical attributes. It's just old and outdated and outpassed. There is no magic. The guy analyzed some books by hand and more or less picked the arrangement he thought was best. Hey, that's an intelligent person thinking about an effective layout, and it was therefore easy to improve on qwerty. And it didn't stand a chance against mass text analysis by raw computer power many decades later. The only thing left is that's optimized for hand alternation where modern alternatives are not. And they are not by choice, because hand alternation isn't really good, and they optimized on hand travel and finger rolls instead. Hand alternation is as comfortable as your cursor keys spread out over two hands.

[woody]

What is this "distance" in the measurements?

[cactux]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[rouston]

Why not asking Ripster, the self proclaimed number one keyboard specialist on earth?

[cactux]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[webwit]

Ripster is ooooold. He can't learn new tricks like a new layout.

[woody]

Thanks, cactux, for the "distance" metric explanation.

It is, IMHO, pretty bad. It is just another home row exaggeration. From the definition, the least distance accumulation stems from same finger usage, which is quite painful - try typing (on QWERTY) sequence of WSWSWSWSWS or WXWXWXWXWX.

Anyway, don't include me in layout wars, was just trying to decipher the statistics. I don't use constant hand positions (homerow) and I even dream in QWERTY.

[itlnstln]

If I didn't use multiple PCs all the time, I would learn Colemak. I checked it out for a little while one day, and did seem pretty easy to pick up. Dvorak's all over the place. While it's better than QWERTY, like webwit said, it jacks up a lot of the commonly used shortcuts.

[webwit]

The next step of denial is to throw in that the whole distance thing is wrong While it is a valid measurement to show how much effort you have to put into typing texts with different layouts. It is valid because it quantifies, for example, that the position of E with qwerty is less comfortable and less optimal than the position of E with colemak. I don't see how that is wrong.

Same finger combos are wrong though and is something all modern layouts avoid by design. Finger rolls is where it is at. The layout freaks are as deep into these things and how everything balances out as we are deep into different Cherry switches and their characteristics. To suspect such a basic error is a gross underestimation of their knowledge. They mostly battle how different aspects and optimizations balance out. For example, you could improve a little bit on colemak travel distance, but at the expense of shortcut compatibility. Note how in the stats from the tool there is a Same Finger statistic (it is there to show you how good/bad it is), which shows that only qwerty has an issue with same finger combinations. In other words, the exact opposite of the point that this is an issue if you optimize for least distance.

I think if you already use dvorak, there's little reason to switch to colemak or one of the other modern layouts, because there's less win for your investment. However, if you switch from qwerty, the premise still stands: there is no reason any longer to switch to dvorak because there are better alternatives now, except if you're a strong believer in hand alternation (some like the rhythm, others find it confusing) or if you like a particular language variant, or if like the fact it's readily available in all operating systems. I never had a problem with this with colemak though, and I don't use a USB stick either. When I'm remote and need colemak, I go to the site and download the layout, it takes 1 minute.

[fossala]

Well I am up to 35 wpm with dvorak now (100% accuracy).

[Jim66]

Maltron layout for the win.

http://www.maltron.com/keyboard-info/ge ... ayout.html

[fossala]

A 2 handed 3d maltron was on ebay.co.uk the other day. Last I checked it was at £100.

[Jim66]

A 2 handed 3d maltron was on ebay.co.uk the other day. Last I checked it was at £100.

Indeed, I had my eye on that too.

How are you getting on with DVORAK now? Have persevered, or did you revert back to QWERTY?

[fossala]

The only thing I type in qwerty now is some passwords that are muscle memory rather than knowing the password. I have set up my scroll lock key to switch between the 2. But yeah even all my uni work is being done in dvorak.

[Jim66]

The only thing I type in qwerty now is some passwords that are muscle memory rather than knowing the password. I have set up my scroll lock key to switch between the 2. But yeah even all my uni work is being done in dvorak.

Nice, I haven't got the time/patience to learn DVORAK at the moment.

[fossala]

Just over a month later and I can type 70wpm. Nearly at my old speed.