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Using a Dvorak keyboard for a year, and pain avoidance

About a year and a half ago I switched to using a Dvorak keyboard layout everywhere rather than the more common Qwerty, as one of several measures to avoid keyboard-related wrist pain. After blogging about how I was going to switch I said no more about it, partly because ironically enough my typing speed temporarily decreased quite substantially. Marius asked me what happened.

I did stick with Dvorak and I'm glad I switched. I would recommend it to anyone who uses a computer for a substantial amount of time.

It really does seem to require less stretching and remarkably less hand movement. However it may be that part of this effect is just improving touch typing, being more aware of what finger is used for what key — in other words if one somehow forgot Qwerty and then sytematically re-learned it, it might give some of these benefits.

If you do want to switch, I'd recommend just jumping in: don't try to cut over gradually, don't put stickers on your keyboard, don't rearrange the keycaps. I put a printout of the layout near my screen and just kept looking when I got lost until I'd memorized it. At the peak of switching I would type sentences in my mind in idle moments.

Command keys, and vim in particular take a bit of adaption. I found it best to just use mouse actions instead for a while, and then slow down and think about the letter of the key before pressing it. Once I'd adapted it generally worked well. I used to use emacs a lot and rarely do so now, and going back to it is very difficult because what I do remember is in muscle memory.

Passwords can be very difficult, as people tend to remember commonly-used ones by muscle memory rather than as characters. It may be wise to write them down somewhere safe, at least for the transition period.

I can't really touch-type Qwerty now: I don't hunt-and-peck but I do need to look at the keyboard when I rarely have to use it — hotel computers, boot loaders, other people's computers and so on. On the other hand I have no trouble using a Qwerty layout on my phone, I suppose because it's a different mental context.

Some people like to pry off the keyboard caps and rearrange them to correspond to the Dvorak layout. I didn't do this, and I wouldn't recommend it, for a few reasons. I think that to learn Dvorak, you need to be able to touch-type it without looking at the keycaps, if only so that you can use it on machines where you can't (or may not) modify the hardware. Conversely, sometimes you may need to type Qwerty on your own machine, or you may want to lend it to someone who can't touch type Qwerty.

Perhaps most important, the little nubs on the (physical) F and J keys really matter to me now, and if I'd moved the keycaps they'd be in completely the wrong place. Dvorak makes the "home row" concept much more important, and my hands really feel at home with the nubs under my index fingers.

The transition is easiest on a Mac: you can easily put a little switcher on the menu bar, and even use it to display an Aussie flag rather than insisting on showing the stars and stripes. On Ubuntu it works pretty well, with a few nits: the text-mode recovery environments tend to "forget" that you wanted Dvorak during upgrades, the GNOME panel indicator likes to show the rather unhelpful labels of "USA" and "USA2" (with unpredictable meanings) and in some places like the screen-lock dialog there's no indication of which layout is active.

Vista I found generally pretty poor, as it wants to set the layout per-application not per-session. I very casually play WoW on Windows, which needs both typing of text and control through keys, and so far found it's best to leave my keyboard layout in Dvorak so I can type text in the way I'm used to, and then rebind all the keys so they have the same position: the WASD diamond comes out as <AOE.

I only later heard of the Colemak layout, which is supposed to be like Dvorak but better optimized for actual typing patterns, including those that occur in programming. It may well be; the hassle of the Dvorak transition is far enough in the past and the benefits are clear enought that I'm open to trying it. Dvorak does have the advantage that although it is used by a minority of people, it is widely available: if you borrow a random person's terminal the odds are low that it will already be in the Dvorak layout, but the odds are very good that you can easily and quickly change it. This is probably not true for Colemak (as of 2008).

More later on other RSI avoidance techniques...

posted Wed 23 Apr 2008 in /computers | link

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