caughey@active.UVic.CA (Dave Caughey) (06/15/91)
Does anyone out there use the Dvorak keyboard? I decided to switch to it last year partly because I wanted to see if it was any good, and partly because it was... well... different. I used to type about 35-45 words per minute on the QWERTY keyboard, and can do approximately the same on the Dvora (maybe a few more wpm, but not many). What I have found, however is that typing is just easier. Less mental effort is required and my hands absolutely never get tired. In fact, I can't stand using a QWERTY keyboard anymore -- It's just too much work! The toughest part was re-training my hands for all the editor (in my case, vi) commands again ("hjkl" just aren't as intuitive when they are located under "jcvp") Has anyone else had good/bad experiences? How long did it take to be a "fluent" touch-typist? Are you "bilingual"? And has anyone ever heard of alternate *mechanical* designs and layouts for a keyboard? Regards ___________________________________________________________________________ Dave Caughey Dept. of Elec. & Comp. Engineering caughey@sirius.uvic.ca P.O. Box 3055 University of Victoria "My karma ran over my dogma!" Victoria, B.C., CANADA V8W 3P6
neitzel@infbs.uucp (Martin Neitzel) (06/27/91)
>>> Dave Caughey writes:
DC>
DC> The toughest part was re-training my hands for all the editor
DC> commands.
Yes. And you definitely don't want the C-x prefix in emacs at the
dvorak position (C-b on qwerty). There exists an xmodmap that maps
keys to dvorak layout, but leaves all control combinations where the
are... Sorry, i haven't any experiences if this is a viable approach.
DC> Are you "bilingual"?
This triggers another point: Dvorak is fine for English text, but bad
for some frequent letter-sequences found in German (my native language).
Martin