On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 01:06:46PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:

It is *supposed* to, but no systematic test conducted by an unbiased experimenter has ever found more than a 5-10% improvement. (And you can get that sort of improvement with a Qwerty layout just by remapping the Return/Enter key to something you can hit without moving your hand off the home position.)

The most important thing that both of us lack here are references. I encourage people who are interested to go and do some research. :)

Beware of placebo effect. *Expecting* that typing on a Dvorak layout will feel better has a strong tendency to *make* it feel better.

There are strong arguments that a Dvorak layout should feel better than qwerty regardless of speed. The most commonly used keys are in the home row, the second most commonly on the top row, and least common on the bottom row. This does indeed reduce the number of times your fingers have to move away from the neutral position. That's gotta be a win, eh?

Nope, this is a myth. The early typewriters did have problems with jamming with fast typists, yes, but only if *adjacent keys* were hit in fast succession. The Qwerty layout was designed to put frequently-used keys far apart, to reduce jamming at high speed. It turns out that this actually *speeds up* typists, because it increases the probability that successive keys will alternate between hands.

I'm not convinced that that is the case. Provided that common digraphs in English occur on the same row, I would see it being easier to coordinate the correct order of keystriking. Yes, Dvorak keys were laied out like that. That would be the point. I do find it hard to believe that there is NO improvement whatsoever from using a keyboard layout designed for use with electronic interfaces with careful attention to useability versus one that was actually designed to reduce jamming on old mechanical typewriters. Yes, that is very soft logic. I'm not saying either is "better", just that I find it likely that they are each better at what they were designed to be. -- taa /*eof*/ -- 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