Okay, well maybe not everyone, but most of us. For something a lot of us spend so much time doing these days, we don’t really seem to question how we do it. There are the standard myths like that the standard QWERTY layout was to slow us down. In truth, however, it was adopted from one particular brand of typewriter, the Remington No. 2, in 1878. The original design evolved largely because of jams of the internal typing arms in early models. I’ll save you the rest of the snooze inducing details of the history lesson. You can check it out here, if you’re that interested.
Since then, that old, bad, layout has just sort of settled in, like a cantankerous mother-in-law that’s come to live with you. Then in 1936, along came Dr. Dvorak, with a new layout to make us all type at warp speed, reduce errors and protect kittens from climbing trees. Check it out:
Dr. Dvorak studied how people type to optimize the behavior. Notice all the popular kids are located on the home row: A, E, T, S, etc. This lets users spend around 70% of the time on the home row. Also, all the vowels are on the left side and the popular consonants are on the right, so the user is usually alternating right and left. You can read the rest of the details here.
So what, you say? Every keyboard and operating system is designed to use QWERTY and we are all taught to type that way, unless you weren’t taught at all and home grew hunt and peck style (I’m looking at you, Andre). Some people claim to be pretty fast at hunt and peck, but they still need to look at the keyboard and are slower than they could be. For comparison, here is the finals at the 2010 Typing Championship. The winner won with 163 wpm. Not too shabby by any means. However, compare that to the Guinness World Record Holder, Barbara Blackburn, with a top speed of 212 wpm. She also maintained 150 wpm for over 50 minutes straight!!!! That’s right, granny could kick the pants off of the current fastest competitive typists, due in large part to the Dvorak keyboard. The 2010 champion, Sean Wrona, even admits that Dvorak and another layout known as Colemak are better, but he seems afraid to take the plunge and switch:
“I am frequently asked which keyboard layout I use. I have only ever used the traditional QWERTY layout. I recognize that Dvorak and Colemak may be better on the hands, but it would be too much of a loss of speed in my case to justify switching.” - http://seanwrona.com/typing.html
The reason I am rambling about all of this is because I have decided to take the plunge and switch to Dvorak. I learned typing in a high school class and have been typing okayish with QWERTY ever since. However, I find QWERTY kind of annoying and for something I spend about 8-9 hours a day doing, I’d like to do it in the best possible way. I’ve got my Dvorak stickers, and I will be switching all of my keyboards at once, and spending 15-30 minutes a night doing typing lessons at keybr.com. Windows, mac (not that I have one), and even android and jailbroken iphones all have Dvorak keyboard layouts available. For a comparison, I have tested my current speed with QWERTY. After 7:44 on keybr.com, I got an average speed of 50 words per minute, and a top speed of 62. After I feel comfotable with Dvorak, I will be posting my new speeds, which will hopefully be a bit better.
Need any more convincing? Here are 7 reasons to make the switch.