Sunday, April 23, 2006

Dvorak? Dvorak Who?

In more random web-surfing (what do you know, procrastinating can bring up good things sometimes!), I came across a typing layout known as "Dvorak." Me, in my infinite weirdness, became very interested.

Here's the basic idea. The Qwerty style (the one on your keyboard now) was set up to be as inefficient as possible because back in the day, when typewriters could jam up, some guy named Charles Sholes figured out the WORST way to layout a keyboard. This little anachronism has stayed with us until today. A good case of argumentum ad antiqitum.

So, these two other guys (Dr. August Dvorak and William Dealey) came along and came up with a better layout based on, what, science? Go figure. It's named Dvorak after the one creator.

Basically, it should make typing more efficient, less painful, and generally better.

And I, come this summer, will try it out. Just another 'different' thing to seperate me from the crowd. Oh well.

Namaste.

1 comment:

Barx Atthemoon, Warden of Tunare said...

I've never really tried Dvorak, but I don't really see myself bothering...

The problem is that most folks are simply so used to Dvorak that its not going to change. Also, with shared computers you can't really change the keyboard layout to DVORAK and then you're stuck doing QWERTY again. And the fact I type relatively fast with QWERTY makes me less willing to change.

Theoretically DVORAK is much better. It would also be better if Devs started unversially supporting it, and that if the OS was set to DVORAK all the shortcuts moved to the proper keys.
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