Dvorak Keyboard on the MacBook

Please ignore the caveat "supposedly" better or "supposed" faster attached to the Dvorak keyboard layout. It is faster and better.

Dvorak since 1982

I've been typing dvorak for ten years now and I generally love it. However, I find that using shortcuts are totally a hassle with Dvorak. Especially as a designer whose left hand constantly cradles the left side the keyboard, Dvorak makes the keyboard shortcut process a little more difficult. Another interesting thing is that some programs like FCP re-map the shortcuts to be the original key spaces, but not the orignal keys (I suppose they do this to facilitate the fancy editing keyboards). So, all of a sudden, command+s = command+o even though my mind thinks that the latter should open and not save. I often take the extra time to switch into qwerty when moving from the productivity apps to the design apps. Anyway, uh. . .

I didn't dare mess with my macbook pro, but my iBook G3 has been like this for years. Caused some consternation at the apple store when I took it in for the motherboard replacement issue.

/dvorak only since 2001

Good-looking MacBook. It's a great feeling seeing a Mac with a proper keyboard. I use only Dvorak, and even though I never look at the keyboard, it's good to see the layout in all its glory.

Holy crap! There are people here defending QWERTY! Unbelievable. No no no. If you haven't learned Dvorak, and are even the slightest bit interested, do it now. It was a revelation when I found it a decade ago. Took me less than an hour to learn to touch-type with it, and I have never looked back.

Here is the best article I have ever seen on the issue. Free online:

http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-97/features/thecurseofqwerty1099/

"The Curse of Qwerty" by Jared Diamond. Discover Magazine, April 1997.

Maybe it should be noted (because it never is) that this is mostly an english centric option? I write regularly in Swedish (my mother tounge - although I found "Svorak" to solve that problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svorak), English and Japanese and I can imagine that a Dvorak-setup would make things more difficult and actually slow me down rather than the opposite.

:) don't we all...(scott). well it is an interesting concept (dvorak), one that i have honestly never even heard of before. might be worth a look. although i think gamers would be screwed :p, 'awsd' is forever moot haha. cya guys, happy new years!

aaron-
sorry, you learn something every day.

(and what about " keyboard tapping" in GarageBand?)

scott: Are you insane? Why on earth would you change the electrical components? All you do is tell OS X you want to use the Dvorak layout. Windows and MacOS and Linux and everything around has supported this for years. It's no different than telling it to treat a pc104 keyboard as some other localized type.

> It's not supposedly faster, it's just plain faster. QWERTY was made slow so the hammers on typewriters wouldn't jam. It's supposed to slow you down.

Actually, no, it's not that clear cut. QWERTY was designed to cross mingle the key hammers so they wouldn't jam, not to slow them (or the typist) down. Subtle distinction, but one which is perpetuated almost as much as the "Bill Gates said 640K ought to be enough for anyone" myth.

The typist wasn't actually a consideration, as most people at that time typed with hunt-and-peck two fingered typing.

Although the superiority of more efficient key layouts makes intuitive sense, there is no hard evidence supporting anything more than a modest improvement in efficiency. Careful reading of the Wikipedia article linked to above illustrates this debate and this study sums up the controversy:
http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

Key quotes:

"...the evidence in the standard history of Qwerty versus Dvorak is flawed and incomplete. First, the claims for the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard are suspect. The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself, and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard."

"studies in the ergonomics literature find no significant advantage for Dvorak that can be deemed scientifically reliable. "

"the competition among producers of typewriters, out of which the standard emerged, was far more vigorous than is commonly reported"

"by ignoring the vitality and variety of the rivals to the Remington machine with its Qwerty keyboard, the received history implies that Sholes's and McGurrin's choices, made largely as matters of immediate expediency, established the standard without ever being tested. More careful reading of historical accounts and checks of original sources reveal a different picture: there were touch-typists other than McGurrin: there were competing claims of speed records: and Remington was not so well established that a keyboard offering significant advantages could not have gained a foothold"