This means you place your fingers along the so-called “home row” on your keyboard, and train each finger to reach the keys it needs to in relation to its resting position.
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Unlike QWERTY, which I learned through years of hunting and pecking during frantic instant messaging conversations, Dvorak only really works if you learn to touch type. I probably wouldn’t have bothered at basically any other point in my life, but at the time the opportunity cost was minimal. Helpfully, I also had the kinds of time on my hands that only teenagers have access to.
![bad typing microsoft ergonomic keyboard reddit bad typing microsoft ergonomic keyboard reddit](https://d1rytvr7gmk1sx.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/sculpt.jpg)
At the time I was still in high school, so I rarely had to type anything too lengthy in a short space of time. Longer words require more movement, but these short words that tie everything together can be typed with minimal effort.ĭvorak only really works if you learn to touch typeīy 2009, I’d read enough articles about Dvorak to convince myself to give it a serious shot. Of the top 10 words, seven of them consist of letters found entirely on the home row, and of these, four of them can be written without moving any of your fingers away from the keys that they rest on. You can look at the most common words in the English language to see how this works in practice. The aim is to maximize speed by sharing the workload equally between your fingers on both hands. Then, the remaining letters are arranged so that you type words with alternating strokes of your left and right hand. All of the vowels are here, mostly directly beneath the fingers of your left hand. In contrast, Dvorak tries to place the most common letters directly on this home row.
![bad typing microsoft ergonomic keyboard reddit bad typing microsoft ergonomic keyboard reddit](https://www.windowscentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/styles/large_wm_brw/public/field/image/2020/08/razer-protype-4.jpg)
The others are on the row above, where your fingers have to reach to get to them. Of the five vowels, for example, QWERTY only places one of them on the middle home row where a touch typist’s fingers are supposed to rest. You can dispute whether it’s due to design or sheer historical accident, but it’s hard to deny that QWERTY places all the most commonly used letters of the alphabet at opposite ends of the keyboard. Now, 10 years after making the switch, I’m fairly confident it made me a faster typist, but not for the reasons you might expect.ĭvorak is the QWERTY alternative with the design argument that made the most sense to me.
![bad typing microsoft ergonomic keyboard reddit bad typing microsoft ergonomic keyboard reddit](https://ergonomictrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/microsoft-sculpt-keyboard-negative-tilt3.jpg)
The stories might not have been true, but that didn’t stop my curiosity about the alternatives, which is how I became a Dvorak user in 2009. But the common thread throughout each of these origin stories is the idea that the QWERTY layout was designed for reasons other than pure typing speed. In fact, the real reason likely has to do with the formation of a typewriter cartel in 1893, which caused its members to standardize the QWERTY layout for their models. There’s not enough evidence to conclusively prove any of these stories. Another popular myth claims that the layout was designed to allow someone to type the word “typewriter” on its upper row, although it stops short of explaining why. You might hear stories that the QWERTY layout was intended specifically to slow down typists working on traditional typewriters, because their machines would jam if two adjacent letters were pressed in quick succession. Spend enough time on the internet and you’re bound to hear Dvorak discussed, normally in response to the supposed shortcomings of QWERTY. There’s a popular idea that QWERTY was designed for reasons other than typing speed