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I’ve heard this is basically the same reason why autocad will never move away from their fucking terrible UI. Too many people have spent too many hours getting really good at using it, and the investment cliff is too big now.
Even if the mechanical linkage was the initial reason for the design, the design still holds value in basically spreading out the letters in such a way that it minimizes the need for fingers to be constantly used for the typical words that we use in the English language. You don’t want all the vowels to be on the left hand, for example, you want these letters spread out so that you get roughly even utilization of the fingers when typing.
, the design still holds value in basically spreading out the letters
The Qwerty legend is that it intentionally doesn’t spread out some letters to force typing to be slower so it wouldn’t jam.
Dvorak was created so that letters were actually distributed between hands based on letter frequency in English.
Yeah, QWERTY was absolutely used to slow down typing as well, but it had a secondary function of spreading out the letters.
DVORAK just has the one function. It didn’t have to contend with other baggage. But it doesn’t mean QWERTY didn’t also have that goal. But since QWERTY handles the same goal that DVORAK does, reasonably well, it doesn’t hit the threshold needed for us to swap over.
Additionally, DVORAK is kind of nasty because it has all of the vowels on the left hand. I just picked a random word “Control” and most of the work is being done by the right hand; most of the time on the same finger row, which is horribly inefficient. Control on QWERTY is roughly equally left and right handed; not clusters of similarly used letters.
A common estimate of the ratio of vowels to consanants in the english language is 3:1 – So you’ll be doing 3x as much work on your right hand than with your left. Which makes DVORAK kind of garbage tbh.
So you’ll be doing 3x as much work on your right hand than with your left.
But vowels are extremely rarely repeated in English so splitting so it’s right hand vowel, left hand consonant, right hand vowel, etc keeps typing even.
I’ve used Dvorak for years now (15 or so?). I find it far more comfortable for typing in English than qwerty. You don’t have to reach as much to type common words because all the common letters are on home row. The less common a character, the farther it is from comfortable use. And it has a nice bouncy feeling because you often switch hands after one or two key strokes. When I have to use qwerty, I find it very uncomfortable to have to “spider” around with one hand for clusters of letters as I type.
Now, the REAL downside of Dvorak in my opinion is that every shortcut, hotkey, and keybinding in the universe is designed for QWERTY layout. Playing a new game? Don’t forget to re-map every key except M and A! Careful not to miss any! Game doesn’t let you map a key to “comma”? Looks like you have to switch to QWERTY to play this game (and type in chat with it blegh)! Re-mapping is a huge pain and all the convenience of learning something like Vim is overshadowed by the keys getting scattered all over the place. I’m fine living with an awkward CTRL-C and CTRL-V, but for most people I can see why they wouldn’t bother.
tl;dr: DVORAK > QWERTY for typing in English, but it comes with annoying drawbacks
What are you smoking? Vowels clustering on one hand is a hallmark telltale sign of a decent layout because of hand alternation, a doubtlessly desired property because, you know, vowels and consonants alternate!
