Dvorak – Week 1
It has been quieter than usual around here lately. The reason for that is due to my typing skills being drastically crippled for the past week. Last Thursday I was preparing for a flight from New Hampshire to Boise (that involves about six hours in the air) and decided it’d be a good idea to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I don’t have any good reasoning for this, but it’s too late for reasoning.
I spent the flight teaching myself where things were. I then continued through the weekend. That weekend was painful. I think I was at about fifteen words per minute at the end of the day Saturday (I try not to take Sundays off – not being able to type made that pretty easy).
On Monday I got an email I wanted to reply to quickly. I tried to cheat and went back to qwerty for a second. Turns out the plane ride, plus the casual “training” I did over the weekend had made my qwerty skills useless. I was beyond the point of no return (yes, it would still be faster to go back to qwerty than forward with dvorak, but that’s no fun). This was scary. I trudged forward.
Some notes:
* My qwerty skills degraded a lot faster than I thought.
* Keyboard shortcuts are hard to relearn and sometimes painful when you use the wrong one (“what the heck was that!? I just wanted to copy that text”)
* OS X’s “show keyboard viewer” is essential those first few days
* The conversion is painful. I wanted to give up about three different times. No idea why I didn’t, guess I’m stubborn.
* gtypist is pretty good (especially for the price)
One concern I have with this switch is how I’ll be able to type on other people’s keyboards. That situation hasn’t come up yet, and since I work in solitude in my home, it’ll probably be a while before this situation presents itself. Only time will tell. I plan to have to look at the keys and hunt and peck.
I might check back in a week with more comments on the switch if I have anything I deem somewhat interesting.
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Goal Tender
October 19th, 2006 at 6:44 am
First of all, congratulations. Switching to Dvorak is indeed difficult, but I found that it also teaches quite a bit on how the brain works: at the beginning, one knows where the keys are but it takes a conscious decision to hit them. You’ll find that things will become easier and easier, until you don’t have to think about it.
About typing speed, I don’t know if mine has improved much compared to when I was using azerty (I’m French). The nice thing is that switching to Dvorak taught me to touch type, which is amazingly useful (and I discovered why the keys labeled ‘f’ and ‘j’ have little things on them
).
About switching to other keyboards: I found that I still remember them, but I don’t have the muscle memory so it requires conscious thought to type things. It’s not a lot of fun, but it’s doable for short periods of time. I have a friend who kept using qwerty and dvorak at the same time and he was able to retain both, but I guess it’s even harder to get there.
Good luck,
Alan
October 19th, 2006 at 9:16 am
You’re a braver man than me, I can barely type on qwerty.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:37 am
I was a Dvorak typist from around age 13-16. It was great for me because I had learned Qwerty as a sort of hunt & pecker, but when I taught myself Dvorak I was careful to do it all correctly. This layout worked great for me in 9th grade because the computers at school were Apple IIc, which had the little switch for going between Dvorak and Qwerty. Shocking really, in retrospect, that such a popular computer had such a switch. Wonder what the story is on that.
I finally switched back to Qwerty when I was 16 and looking for temp jobs as a typist. It turns out that most of the offices I ended up in did not have accommodations for Dvorak typists
So I retrained myself in Qwerty and have never gone back. The good news is by the time I went back to Qwerty, my old habits had died. So I was able to relearn with (mostly) standard home-row based touch typing.
I occassionally think of switching back to Dvorak, now that I have a great deal more freedom over my computing environment. But the few times I’ve toyed with the idea, I got hung up on things ilke keyboard shortcuts and special characters. The first time I tried was back when I spent a lot of time in MacsBug, and it was impossible to remember all the alt-key combinations for characters like ¬ and …
There are some different layouts for Mac OS X that try to compromise between Dvorak for typing, while retaining Qwerty for shortcuts. I have tried occasionally to get into these but never stuck to it. One thing I find interesting is that all these years later, if I “air type” something, it’s liable to come out in Dvorak (with errors, I’m sure). But the muscle memory for words in strongly in Dvorak.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
Dvorak – yea I’ve tried this before, from a good friend I worked with for a few years. In the places where I’ve worked, I usually had to help out fellow programmers either as a team member or as a team lead. So that ruled it out pretty quick – you can switch to Dvorak manually but its a pain.
Plus, I still have fond memories of blasting aliens in Typing Tutor using Qwerty. I’ve also gotten really fast on Qwerty. But when I get deeper into the Mac Indie lifestyle and work independently, I’ll have to reconsider.
December 26th, 2007 at 1:11 am
I switched to Dvorak about 14 months ago.
On my personal Macs (G4 / iBook / 17″ PB / 15″ MBP) I physically rearranged the keys on the keyboard. On my work laptop (Dell) I left the keys in the qwerty layout but set Win XP to Dvorak. This has worked out well for me — it REALLY forced me to learn Dvorak by touch type since looking down at a qwerty layout did me no good.
For a while (six weeks) I would type both layouts but this is what I found: My qwerty skills dropped off significantly My Dvorak skills stagnated
Obviously I’m not one of those typist that can be great at both. So I dropped qwerty altogether. I’m very happy with Dvorak; plus it was a nice challenge. My Dvorak typing speed is up to what my qwerty was for sure — probably better (though I haven’t officially checked).