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Viewing entries tagged with 'dvorak'
The Dvorak Experiment
Game to try something new, I thought why not give that crazy keyboard layout known as Dvorak a shot. To give you a little history behind it, "Good old QWERTY" originated from the days of mechanical typewriters and was designed to prevent jamming of the hammer (Hehe "Stop - Hammer Jam."). Wikipedia says;
Although the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard ("DSK") has so far failed to displace the QWERTY de facto standard, it has seen an increase in popularity in recent years especially among computer programmers and others whose jobs require them to do extensive amounts of typing.[citation needed] It has become easier to access in the computer age, being included with all major operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD) in addition to the standard QWERTY layout. It is also supported at the hardware level by some high-end ergonomic keyboards.
I also have a secret desire to justify the purchase of a Kinesis Advantage but in the meantime I'm simply using a printout of the key layout above my keyboard.
The awesome news is that with every stroke I am seeing an improvement and since it has only been a few hours of typing I remain optimistic that this exercise, while alienating me a bit from QWERTY, will step up my WPM count. So far the only toggle back to my earlier ways has been for instant messaging as you very quickly miss the 'instant' part (as do your recipients). I mean, if your father types slower than you, something has gotta give.
The next exercise after some improvement in fluency is enabling myself to switch between the two without conscious thought so I can still remain agile whether it be a server room, a colleague's machine or behind a client's keyboard.