Ben Gamblin Online - Blog: Dvorak

Dvorak

25 Apr '07, 23:02

No it's not some sort of medicinal drug. It's much more geeky than that. It's an alternative keyboard layout that is supposed to be much more efficient than QWERTY.

I was inspired to try the new layout after reading a thread about it in the Ubuntu Community Cafe forum, where various people are giving it a go and posting their experiences of it. Well, I say new, but it actually dates back to the early 1900's.

Yesterday I installed the new layout onto my Ubuntu machine, onto my logon on Kate's laptop, and onto my iPaq, and have slowly been learning where the keys are ever since. I've even altered the physical layout of my keyboard so I can see where the correct keys are if I need to double check, although people say not changing the keyboard layout is a good excuse to learn how to touch-type if you don't already know.

So I'm trying to learn this new layout correctly, using the right fingers for the right keys rather than how I type with QWERTY which is simply a knowledge of where each key is and only using two or three fingers to press them, although I can type reasonably fast like this.

But other than the slightly geeky obsession I have with trying something out of the ordinary, I do have a valid reason for attempting to use this new layout.

I occasionally find after doing a lot of typing at the office, that I have a dull ache in my left wrist. Since it's reckoned that the Dvorak keyboard minimises the risk of damage occuring through RSI, I thought that it may alleviate this pain.

The only problem is I cannot currently use Dvorak at work for two reasons. First of all, I am way to slow at typing at the moment. The first paragraph of this entry took about 5 minutes to write before I changed to QWERTY. I did notice a marked improvement today though over yesterday so hopefully my typing speed will increase quite quickly (it's reckoned around 4 weeks to return to normal typing speed). The second reason is that I can't install alternative keyboard layouts on my laptop. I'll have to ask our IT contractors to install it for me.

The good thing as far as work is concerned, is that assuming I can master touch typing, I won't need a special keyboard since I won't need to look at the keys anyway. Take the typing of this post as a reversed example, I am typing using the QWERTY layout, but looking at my keyboard I see Dvorak. Because I know where the QWERTY keys are, I don't need to look at the keyboard itself. Hopefully I'll be able to achieve the same with Dvorak.

Of course there is the possibility that by this time next week, I will have given up on the whole idea and just reverted back to the mainstream. I do like to be a bit different though even if it is just to baffle people at work who might need to type something on my computer.

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