On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Taavi Burns wrote:

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...Almost all the "we should switch" arguments also support "switch to Maltron, not Dvorak".

Indeed, I see that point. Given that Maltron uses the basic qwerty letter layout...

Uh, come again? It most certainly doesn't. The home row, for example, is ANISF DTHOR, with E on the left thumb and space on the right thumb. Some Maltron keyboards do come with a Qwerty mode as well, but that's explicitly a compatibility kludge. (Note, keyboards shaped vaguely like the Maltron keyboard are not necessarily Maltron keyboards.)

Question: who made the Maltron such that it's that much superior to a Dvorak layout? Has anyone tried using the physical Maltron keyboard with a Dvorak letter mapping?

Why would you bother? Use the Maltron shape with the Maltron layout.

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the Dvorak layout; if you could shoehorn some approximation of it into a Qwerty-based physical layout (which I'm unsure of), the result is quite likely to be better than Dvorak.

I'm saying that after looking at a picture of the Maltron keyboard, I don't think there's any way to convert a standard keyboard short of a hacksaw and soldering iron. The physical metaphor is wrong.

Correct, but that's backwards from what I was suggesting, which is adapting the Maltron layout to the standard physical shape. I'm not sure it is reasonably possible, mind you, because of the thumb problem.

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Preferably a factor of ten. It has to be at least a factor of two to get people excited. 10% just isn't enough when there are major compatibility issues.

Noting that the compatibility issue is a human one. The machine can trivially remap the keyboard's logical layout.

True, but so what? The human issue is a large one, actually a bigger barrier than a hardware issue would be.

On a slightly divergent note, I'm still quite perplexed as to why having the most commonly typed letter _not_ on the home row is not such a performance hit as one would expect.

Note that the most commonly typed *key* is space, which has a whole thumb dedicated to it in either Qwerty or Dvorak, and is in the home position for that thumb in Maltron. That said, yes, E is the commonest letter and it's not in the home row, but only about one character in every ten is an E, so by itself it does not make a huge difference. And Qwerty does put it on a strong finger, and in a location where it's not a long reach. (Maltron's E on the left thumb is clearly better, mind you...)

Neverminding that the studies you cite say that there's negligible improvement, I'm quite curious as to why that is.

Basically, because the Qwerty layout is not a bad one (for an electronic keyboard -- some of its problems, like the assignment of A and the shifts to the little fingers, loom larger on manual typewriters), and the improvements to be had by rearranging it simply aren't huge. Henry Spencer henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml