Created: 2024.11.27
Probably not. If you aren't willing to read the rest of this article - you won't want to use a DVORAK layout, you don't have enough patience and you won't get any of the benefits. And bonus: You won't get saddled with the many downsides.
If you don't read this section, you won't understand why I'm still using DVORAK, why I don't take 2 weeks and switch back to QWERTY.
When I was in Grade 6 (age 11) back in 1972 I got my first 'scientific' article published (I failed to mention to the magazine that I was only 11 years old… they ended up printing over a year a 6 part article on Corydoras fish, when they found out I was only 11 years old, they were even more excited - the first installment had been published in several magazines around the world.)
Just before doing that 1st article, I had taken a course in touch typing at the local college. My father was an instructor there and I got special permission to take the course - with a warning from the course instructor that if I goofed off even once I would be kicked out of the course. As it turned out, I became the teacher's pet … as well as sort of the mascot or darling of all the other - adult - students. By the time I was done the course I was typing a respectable 80 something words a minute which didn't hurt the attitude of the instructor and other students.
In those days I was getting about one or two articles published a month in various magazines, and I used my old (well my parent's old) mechanical typewriter.
They eventually bought a better one, but not the IBM Selectric ball based I really wanted. In the course I took they had IBM Selectric typewriters that never jammed. The original mechanical one my parents had was always fouling up, especially when I typed the word 'the' (the h and e I think it was, I typed too quick and the h would jam on the way back down as the e was coming up.)
I switched to computers in 1979 using the university computers. My dad got an Apple II I could use at home, and then later upgraded to an Apple Iie that had the most wonderful feature: Capital letters were in reverse video so you could tell them apart from the lower case video (which on the screen were capital letters but not reverse video, and when you printed them on the dot matrix printer, were printed in lower case letters.
While I was in school, I was running my first computer software company.
In 1984 I bought and switched to an IBM PC Clone. It showed Capital letters as capitals and lower case letters as lower case letters on the screen. Oh it was so much nicer than the Apple II E.
By 1988 I had written a technical book with several more coming after I switched to DVORAK, published by various publishing houses including McGraw-Hill. They probably averaged 800 or so pages.
I had also written dozens, maybe 100's by then, of articles published in paper (remember those?) magazines on topics including computers, management, horticulture and ichthyology (study of fish and related).
And every time I went home at night, while driving, I would massage the back of my hands, especially my left hand, because my hands were in constant pain from all the typing I did at work. I owned the company and I wrote a lot of the documentation for our software.
I read that DVORAK would do two things:
I wasn't really concerned about my typing speed. I would often pause to think while creating content while my fingers typed the stuff I had been thinking - jumping ahead in time, I really freaked out some audience members when I was doing a "Java is ready for prime time" with Sun - I would be talking about one thing looking at the audience while typing in a computer program loosely related to what I was talking about, but not the same words, in Java, showing that not only could we talk about Java, but we really could create working content in minutes, not months.
But when I read about the pain going away in the hands and wrists, I was all up for it.
It took me about 2 months to make the switch, the 1st two weeks were horrible trying to switch to DVORAK - after all, I could touch type QWERTY at a decent speed and had been doing so for about 15 or 16 years.
After a month, I was still far slower than when I used to type QWERTY and I thought about giving up. When I 'suddenly' remembered - I had only massaged my hands one time on the way home since switching to DVORAK. I had forgotten my reason for switching.
I've been touch typing DVORAK now for more than twice as long as I touch typed QWERTY (36 and 16 years respectively) and by some people's definition, I'm 'old'.
I still type pages of content per day.
I get frustrated now, about 36 years later, that keyboard combinations are often optimized for QWERTY, I get especially frustrated when I hit CTRL+W when trying to hit CTRL+V (W is just beside V in DVORAK, and if your hands are off by 1 character …)
It is especially frustrating because it usually happens when I'm entering the 39th field in a form, and I go to 'paste' some code from somewhere, and instead Boom, the window, the form and all my data is thrown away by the browser. Sure I can get the page back with CTRL+SHIFT+T, but all the data is lost and has to be reentered. Noting that the most common time for my hands to be in the wrong place is when I just copied some text from another app, using the mouse, and then my hands come back.
About once a year I think for various reasons "I should spend a week and retrain myself to QWERTY" … but then I remember the pain in my hands. Maybe when I'm 95 and I stop typing so much every day I'll take a week and switch back to QWERTY.
I also 2 finger type QWERTY on my cell phone, iPad and Android tablets. I don't have a problem with that and there is no benefit to DVQRAK on a cell phone.
I really hate the parking systems close to my house. They lay the keyboard out A .. Z; making it incredibly slow to type. I'm sure it is that way for some Liberal party woke reason - something about being nice to all those non-English ESL people coming to Canada and never having seen a QWERTY keyboard. Now, don't write to tell me that every keyboard except a pure Chinese one, is mostly laid out in QWERTY I'm talking about how Liberals under Justin Trudeau think, I'm not suggesting there is anything even remotely close to logical in their thinking process - it's like their science, if you don't accept the Liberal Party's interpretation of Science as 'Truth' then you are a traitor.
One big benefit I hear for a lot of people, since it is inconvenient, and usually unreasonable, to get keys with the DVORAK layout on them, people never switch to touch typing. If you don't understand 'touch typing'. While I'm typing this, I'm looking at the screen where the letters are showing up (way to the right of the keyboard, and I'm reading skype and email messages as they pop up, and, oh yeah, I'm typing this article at the same time.
When you learn to touch type, you will be much faster than when you don't. Because your keyboard will be littered with QWERTY key symbols - you cannot type DVORAK without touch typing.
I can still touch type in QWERTY, but it's a little weird, I look at the keyboard, not to hunt and peck, but to make my brain switch to qwerty. I type QWERTY at about half the speed I type DVORAK - but that's because I usually type DVORAK now, if I still typed QWERTY all the time, I'd probably be about the same speed as DVORAK.
No one will steal or break into your computer - even if you tell them your password. Here is the password 'password' when I'm looking at the keys: "laoo,rpe"
Side note: That reminds me of when a company rejected my 52 character password because it was all lower case, and forced me to use a Capital, a lower case, a number and a symbol or number. I was on the phone with their tech support, and I was muttering about not being allowed my standard 50+ character passwords, they said "You don't need a password that long, because we force your password to be more complex." So I typed in "Password1" and read it to the tech support saying - "Capital P, assword one … Hey you're correct, your computer says that is super complex, but it rejected my 52 character password as low security, I'll use that. She said "No, that isn't a good password" I said "Yes it is, your computer says it is. Now I don't have to use 52 character passwords anymore." Of course I didn't REALLY leave it as "Password1" I changed it as soon as we got onto the real topic of my call to support. PC Financial shortly afterwords made "Password1" a not-allowed password, but they still accepted any 7 characters with 1 at the end as 'high security". All of that to say that you probably can't get into my computer even if you know it's actual password. And if you DO get in … good luck doing anything nefarious!
No.
Well, at least that's my opinion. I think the claims of faster came from the days that we were using mechanical typewriters. We spent so much time 'unsticking' the keys that jammed together, or typing purposely slowly to avoid jamming the keys, that yes, DVORAK might have been faster - I type more in a cadence with DVORAK than I did with QWERTY, with QWERTY there were combinations like 'the' that I would type at twice the speed of my normal cadence, and that is what caused the jams.
I hear there is a way to touch type to replace a mouse with greater speed and precision.
I don't care - I like the idea that this will allow me to work when travelling without having a place to put my mouse.
Check back in 16 years to see what I think of that idea.
(Oh and I currently use glidepoint for precision work, but a traditional mouse for day to day work, and pens or finger when on touch screens.)