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The Dvorak Zine - fun comic telling story of the Dvorak keyboard
f0dder:
I've been thinking about learning DVORAK as well - not to increase typing speed (it's quite sufficient 8) ), but to have less strain... but programming is one of my concerns too, I recall looking at the dvorak keymap and thinking the programming chars weren't laid out nicely.
Lashiec:
Deozaan's question reminded me of this blog post by a Microsoft employee (the manager of the team behind the Ribbon in Office 2007)
Oh, I wanted to read the comic :(, even if I know the story behind QWERTY's rise to power ;D, a teacher told us about it a few weeks ago.
f0dder:
The story of QWERTY is so damn sad :(
Deozaan:
Maybe this will help.
tomos:
here's another one I came across in the comments (Lashiec's link)
Colemak
Colemak is a modern alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts.
It is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English.
... Colemak is now the 3rd most popular keyboard layout for touch typing in English, after QWERTY and Dvorak.
What's wrong with the Dvorak layout?
* The main problem with Dvorak is that it's too difficult and frustrating to learn for existing QWERTY typists because it's so different from QWERTY. Colemak has been designed to be easy to learn.
* Placing 'L' on the QWERTY 'P' position causes excessive strain on the right pinky. Colemak doesn't place frequent letters where the pinkies stretch.
* 'F' is on the QWERTY 'Y' position which is a difficult stretch on normal keyboards.
* 'I' is very frequent but isn't on the home position.
* 'R' is very frequent but isn't on the home row.
* It is significantly lopsided so that the right hand does too much work.
* It's not comfortable to use Ctrl-Z/X/C/V shortcuts with the left hand while holding the mouse with the right hand. Colemak conserves those shortcuts in their QWERTY positions.
* Even though the design principles are sound, the implementation isn't optimal because it was designed without the aid of computers.
* 'L' and 'S' form a frequent same-finger digraph on the right pinky. Same-finger for the pinky is very rare in Colemak. In particular, Unix commands such as 'ls -l' are very uncomfortable to type.
* Some punctuation (in particular the curly/square brackets) is less comfortable to type on Dvorak. This affects mainly programmers and advanced Unix users. -
notice anything odd?
No CAPS LOCK 8) not sure why.. but they talk about it here:
http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=34
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