New Standard Keyboard 973
An anonymous reader writes "There are two keyboard standards today - QWERTY and DVORAK. QWERTY, the one we usually have, was used on the first commercially produced typewriter in 1873. Ironically, QWERTY was actually designed to slow down the typist to prevent jamming the keys, and we've been stuck with that layout since. New Standard Keyboards offers new "alphabetical" keyboard. This keyboard has just 53-keys (instead of 101) and offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry."
Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Informative)
Dvorak made up that story as marketing for the keyboard design he hoped to profit from. And, could they have made that new keyboard any uglier?
Product won't fly, details scarce (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a close-up picture [newstandardkeyboards.com].
The QWERTY Rumor (Score:5, Informative)
A long-lived rumor is that typewriter inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to slow down the typist.
If this were true, he would have located popular letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.
What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh", "ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.
This design change actually had the bonus effect of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.
A 1953 U.S. General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the two keyboards. Fingers travel less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".
More info (Score:5, Informative)
Original press release [yahoo.com]
Engadget reivew [engadget.com]
From the CES show [cesweb.org]
My problem with this so far is that the alphabetical layout is about as bad for your wrists as QWERTY. And I type too many numbers and symbols to seriously consider this type of keyboard.
Not to mention it has a Windows XP ^W^W Fisher Price theme.
And there's.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No thanks (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Informative)
I call bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
Short version. The two authors are economists who don't know crap about typing. Dvorak wrote a 500 page book about just typing of which only a small part was about his alternative keyboard. So, believe the suits or believe somebody who actually knows what he's talking about.
Re:wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of which, y'all should check out my new IOCATB keyboard layout. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, it feels faster than anything else.
Re:The Dvorak Layout (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Horrible, just horrible (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, damn near every other keypad in existance begins with 1 at the top left and works its way down to 9 at the bottom right (think telephone, ATM, eftpos terminal, security keypad).
What it comes down to is that there are two original progenitors of keypad layouts. The ones you list all go back to Bell Labs design for the Touch-Tone(tm) phone keypad. They even spent a fairly good chunk of change testing for which was more efficient. The results were that for dialing phone numbers, the "123" pad was faster, even for people who were experienced 10-key ("789" keypad) users. The reason is actually quite simple. 10-key is generally used for financial data entry, so the most commonly entered digits (0 and 1) are placed close together where they are easier to hit without looking (some proprioception issue there-- the exact explaination why eludes me). As the 0 is under the thumb, that means the 1 has to be in the bottom row to be close to it. Thus the bottom-up layout.
Dialing telephone numbers, however, isn't something that's done repeatedly. Almost nobody dials a phone by touch*; rather, they look at the dial pad to guide their fingers. The "123" layout is better suited to visual navigation because we're already trained to read from left to right, top to bottom.
Computer keyboards still use the 10-key style layout because the primary use for the keypad is still the same as its ancestors, the calculator and adding machine. Changing it to the telephone-style layout makes no sense as there's already an even easier to use "visual navigation" set of number keys above the letters.
* after 10 years of programming names and numbers into phone systems via the keypad, I actually no longer look at the phone keypad as I use it; but I've only ever noticed that skill in phone techs who install systems.
Re:wrong (Score:2, Informative)
You've never used Emacs have you?
Alt-W, Ctrl-Y
yes, that's easy to reach. Undo? Why that's simply Ctrl-Shift-minus. Oddly however, once you get used to using the modifier keys these shortcuts seem natural rather than hard to reach. Any keyboard layout is good if you get used to it.
Jedidiah.
120wpm QWERTY & Dvorak Experience (Score:3, Informative)
I've slowed down since and now average about 80wpm and have learned not to strike the keys quite so hard. My hands don't ache as much and I've considered going with one of those whiz-bang carpal-friendly keyboards before I come down with CTS. Coding can be tough on the hands.
Anyway, one semester my room-mate and I believed the Dvorak myth and decided to try out switching. We bought new keyboards that supported both standards and came with two sets of keycaps, then made the switch.
It took us about a month to re-learn touch typing and it was a bitch. Neither one of us caught up to our previous speeds - we even played typing games to help - we got to maybe 2/3-3/4 of our previous typing speeds.
While we were okay on our computers we both found it very frustrating to use others. Being geeks, we frequently needed to work on other machines and lugging a keyboard around wasn't really a solution. We decided to abandon Dvorak and went back to QWERTY. In a week or two we were back to ballpark of our old typing speeds, though it was a frustrating transition.
The moral of the story is an old one: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Down with keyboards! (Score:4, Informative)
What we really need are alternatives to traditional typing -- ways to communicate with the computer in a more efficent manner.
I'm personally waiting for the wireless implant in my head so I can just "think" the words onto the screen
In the meantime, I've tried out the Twiddler2 chorded keyboard [handykey.com], which is a combination key entry and mouse device. Although a bit slower, it is FAR more comfortable surfing and chording with it than using the traditional keyboard and mouse (though you can forget programming). And it plays nice with OS X and Windows.
If you're interested, there are many other chorded "keyboards" [google.com] as well as many more ergonomic variations to the standard keyboard [google.com]. A useful resource is the exhaustive Alternative Keyboard FAQ [tifaq.com] and this alternative keyboard gallery [griffins.ca].
Re:wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Daniel
Re:wrong (Score:2, Informative)
By the way, I'm typing in Dvorak. I don't find the odd shortcuts to be a problem. I just got use to their position and I can hit those shortcut keys just as fast. I think the benifits of not having to reach for keys outweighs the shock of having to relearn where all the shortcuts are. In fact, I find it easier to reach my middle right finger up for CTRL+C and my ring right finger for CTRL+V. Try it!
I can also type in qwerty. I have to at work. I don't get confused when I switch back and forth. It just takes practice. Kinda like when we all switched over from Windows to Linux. It wasn't as easy at first, but the benefits motivated us.
False (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, everyone knows that all real [datahand.com] geeks [handykey.com] chord. [wirejunkie.com]
Re:wrong (Score:1, Informative)
You've never used vim, have you?
y, p
yes that's easy to reach. Undo? Why, that's simply u. Oddly however, once you get used not using the modifier keys these shortcuts seem natural rather than hard to reach.
Re:wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Re:wrong (Score:5, Informative)
I would tend to be suspicious of studies comparing qwerty to dvorak, since most people who learn dvorak learned qwerty first, whereas most qwerty users know only qwerty. Because of qwerty's ubiquity, it's very difficult to make an objective comparison.
I use qwerty and dvorak interchangeably, and am probably slower in both than if I had stuck with qwerty alone, but I find dvorak much more comfortable (and that's something that's much harder to quantify).
According to a quick google search, Barbara Blackburn [syr.edu] is the fastest typist in the world and she uses dvorak. That carries more weight than questionable studies in my book, though I would prefer a better reference than a random web link.
Does anyone have data comparing the fastest known dvorak typists to the fastest known qwerty typists?
Re:wrong (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/foot.htm [kinesis-ergo.com]
Remove the foot.htm bit for the whole site, it uses frames.
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true (Score:5, Informative)
The study by Liebowitz and Margolis depend heavily on two assumptions:
1) Dvorak's studies were self-serving and therefore suspicious.
2) Strong's studies were well controlled.
The first is kind of hard to argue, as the studies were self-serving. However, Strong's studies were NOT well controlled.
Don't believe me? Try getting the original material of Strong's research to verify his claims. You can't. Know why? Strong destroyed the material. If Strong's studies were well controlled, why did he shred his research when people started asking about it?
So in "researching the entire Dvorak saga", the two economists failed to even mention that Strong's research, which they use as the fundamental support of their argument, may be seriously flawed. At the very least we cannot take it at face value since we cannot analyze the data ourselves. In fact, Strong was not objective at all, from the very beginning he intended to show that any speed up with Dvorak is sufficiently small that retraining the Navy's typists would be impractical. So why did these economists overlook this fact? Well, they were themselves trying to argue that the market always picks the best solution.
Keep this in mind when you think about window's dominance in the market, or any other product that rose to the top through whatever questionable means. The paper in which these two economists wrote about Dvorak not being better than Qwerty was actually a paper in which they were saying "The market always chooses the best option." The keyboards were just the whipping boy they chose to use.
So which serious objective tests between the two keyboards have there been?
Re: Two Guys Say It.. So What IS the Truth? (Score:3, Informative)
The only support that Liebowitz and Margolis provide as evidence that there is no speed difference between the two layouts is the research of Dr. Earl Strong in the 1950's.
So the Debunking actually boils down to the research of one person. Done in 1956. And he didn't want Dvorak to win. Oh, and he destroyed his data before anyone else could look at it, so all we know is what he said it said.
The truth isn't out there. Nobody has done a good study.
Re:wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I've had worse than just quitting emacs... the shortcut for auto-indenting a block of code is CTRL-ALT-\ (backslash). The backslash on my keyboard is right under backspace; CTRL-ALT-backspace kills the X server.
Been there. Done that. More than once. :-(
Back to the original story: see that line about there being two keyboard standards today (QWERTY and Dvorak)? That's bollocks! Germans, for example, have a QWERTZ keyboard which includes the umlaut characters. Other countries have other weird and wonderful layouts, some of which look nothing like the QWERTY layout.
-- Steve
Re:Who needs 53 keys? (Score:3, Informative)
I use vim almost exclusively. Most people use either vim [wikipedia.org] or elvis symlinked from vi and don't know it, although vi [wikipedia.org] is its own program. I can come up with 26 letters [a-z], 10 numbers [0-9], shift (gotta hit that "!" you know), escape and colon. Then we can't forget / for the searches and replaces, \ to be able to match special characters, and newbies will want the arrow keys instead of h, j, k and i.
Your humor isn't lost on me, but a seasoned vi user will use at least 41 keys, 45 for the inexperienced. The other 8 must be for Emacs.
Re:wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, while my criticism of vim in this respect is valid, let's not blow it out of proportion -- it's a pretty specific complaint, and it doesn't detract from the utility of vi as an editor. It's just one place where the modal paradigm can be something of a pain. But to quote a documentary on male models I saw recently, "Come on! The guy had to magically pull his underwear out of his butt just to beat you!"
Emacs would work better in this particular instance, but the emacs guys fail it, because they can't get unicode to work properly. So vi still gets a point. I wouldn't sweat it too much
I'll just use vim until emacs 22 comes out.
Actually, it's very clear (Score:4, Informative)
But there were real mechanical considerations there too.
Typewriters used to be purely mechanical things. Hitting a key physically pressed a lever, which swung a small hammer at the paper. Actually, at the ink ribbon. And on the hammer a letter or digit was embossed. (Actually, two. SHIFT would physically raise the carriage, so the second letter on the hammer hit.)
Because it was purely mechanical and involved densely packed thin levers, it was jam-prone. If you hit two keys at the same time, two hammers would try to occupy the same space at the same time. If they were coming from opposite ends, not much would happen: 99% of the time one would just hit on top of the other. But if they were adjacent (or almost adjacent) levers, the machine would jam.
That was the problem they tried to solve: keeping the machine from jamming. Which involved moving the hammers for most common letter combinations further apart from each other. Which, since it was a purely mechanical contraption, involved moving the keys too. (It wasn't as simple as defining a new mapping table, like on computers.)
And whatever effect it had on typists and typing speed, was side-effect rather than considered in the design. Whether it sped them up or slowed them down, it still ended up faster if it didn't require unjamming twice a minute.
However, here's another fun fact: the typewriter for which that layout was designed was very different even from typewriters manufactured after 1900. After 1900 the hammers were arranged in an arc in front of the paper. Before that, they were arranged in a circle or bucket shape.
That bucket shape is what the QWERTY layout was designed for. Which meant that moving the hammers had some weirder effects on where the keys moved. E.g., near the middle of rows, two adjacent keys would swing hammers from opposite sides of the bucket. Hence the "TY" in "TYPEWRITER" would not jam that machine, which is why they're still near each other.
It would, however jam a post-1900 typewriter.
So basically the short story is: QWERTY was never supposed to be ergonomic, it was supposed to just prevent jams. And even that was a quick mechanical hack, which missed a lot of fairly commong combinations. _And_ even for the purpose of preventing jams it wasn't that useful any more, for any post-1900 typewriter.
Yet, more than 100 years even after the new typewriter design, and half a century after keyboards being used in computers (which don't jam) we're still stuck with the QWERTY idiocy.
Its saving grace, though, is that basically on a computer keyboard _any_ layout works just as well. Neither jams nor alternating hands (which made sense back when you had to hit the keys HARD on a typewriter) are relevant any more. You just type faster on whatever layout you're the most used to. For most people that means QWERTY.
Which means there's little real incentive to switch to a new layout.
Re:wrong (Score:3, Informative)
The tables for mapping CJK onto Unicode are not present in 21.3, but they were posted to gnu.emacs.sources by Dave Love around April 2002, and are available somewhere on his FTP site [dl.ac.uk]. 21.4 will have the tables, and dynamically load them as needed, and that can be got from CVS now (and is reasonably stable, certainly more stable than the unicode branch).
Re:wrong (Score:3, Informative)
If you wanted, you could just remap "i" to always enter XIM also, or alternatively remap "I" to do the same. (Do you really use the default binding of I: "Insert text before the first non-blank in the line [count] times."
I don't know anything about XIM mode, but I would be surprised if you couldn't map a key to press CTRL-SPACE and Esc in sequence.
Re:wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Re: The QWERTY Rumor (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed.
After seeing all the rumors, counter-rumors etc. about Dvorak being faster, I tried it for myself. After about 5 months of not-really-intensive training (an hour a day or less), I'm at about 90% of my original QWERTY top speed, with very small improvements suggesting I might top out at 100% or maybe a little faster. Switching back and forth at will is not a problem.
But the real benefit is less wasted movement. That part has never been disputed, and it translates directly to greater comfort.
To the grandparent post, having letter combinations like "sh", "th", "wh", "ou", etc on alternating hands (as they are in QWERTY) is fast, but I would argue that having them on the same hand as in a 'strumming' pattern (as they are in Dvorak) is possibly even faster, and can be done with about the least hand movement you can imagine.
The only real complaint I have with Dvorak is how much it is NOT suited to coding. Most of the symbols, e.g. []{}=\/+<> have all been rearranged and some have been placed even farther out of the way. And of course the standard keyboard shortcuts, but that has been addressed in other posts.