Dvorak Schmorak

I've had a passing interest in the Dvorak keyboard ever since I first heard of it. The notion of being able to type faster than I already do (~90 wpm) is extremely compelling. Mind you, I've used QWERTY since I was (literally) three years old, learning how to spell in front of a manual typewriter with my mother asking me to find letters and type words, so I would guess my QWERTY typing is so ingrained that it would be impossible to supplant with another system.

(Learning to spell on a keyboard is clearly why my handwriting is so horrible, but I'd pick fast typing over good handwriting any day.)

I stumbled over a Dvorak keyboard article, and went to our old friend, Wikipedia, to get a look at this superior layout. I have to say, I'm unimpressed.

Look at the placement of some pretty commonly-used characters, like "r", for example. Ring finger on right hand, not on the home row. Not exactly a power placement. Common punctuation like (" , .) on the left hand, and not on the home row. Bleh. "L" might not be the most-used consonent ever, but how does it rate being in the gulag up there? The "l" key is the top-row equivalent to the bottom-row key for the same finger, which is "z". Madness.

Writers of any discipline that includes dialog wouldn't benefit from the " moving, would they? To say nothing of ' being so far away from a power position, because I personally cannot say that I would enjoy avoiding contractions and sounding like Data from "Star Trek" all the time.

Vowels all jumbled together on the left hand. Ugh. Every word has a vowel in it. Most people's left hand is weaker than their right. So why overstress the left hand with all that typing? QWERTY puts two on the left and three (or four, if you count "y") on the right, which is a nice balance for most people.

I can't believe programmers of most of the modern programming languages would benefit from this setup. Lots of ":" and ";" used in coding, you know. There are some disciplines that probably use ";" more often than letters like "h" and "n".

And on a personal note, I think all of us would have to look at the keyboard layout above to see how inconvenient typing our names would be, as it's something you usually have occasion to type, especially if you regularly use it in your email address or business correspondence. I have to say, typing my full name would be a complete bummer on this keyboard.

I'm at a loss as to why this keyboard is supposed to be so efficient. Looks like a horrible design to me, but people swear by the Dvorak layout, I know. I guess it works for them, but I'll stick with what I know in this case.

I wanted to like you, Dvorak keyboard. I did. It'll just never work out between us.