March 2023: Dvorak
Most of my podcast listening falls into either of two categories: Informative breakdowns of topics already within my field of interest, or audio dramas. However, in between those two, I do occasionally enjoy listening to an hour or so of a couple people just talking about themselves. One such podcast is Cortex hosted by CGP Grey and Myke Hurley. One could argue they talk about productivity and such, but both of them are somewhat exceptions to what one would call the normal working world, so I would argue it's not of a lot of interest to me in that regard. However, in one of their episodes, they discussed keyboard layouts and which one they used. The standard QWERTY layout came about because of typewriter mechanics. If two keys that were close to one another were pressed simultaneously, or even in quick enough succession, they would get caught on one another and jam the machine. To avoid that, they came up with a layout that would position the letters that often appear next to one another in words so that they were sufficiently far away on the keyboard, so to minimize the occurrences of jams. Considering most of us, me included, are not in the habit of using traditional typewriters anymore, I think it's pretty funny that we still use this no-doubt useful, but ever so slightly archaic keyboard layout for everything. I also think I've read somewhere that the Dvorak layout, which was designed to minimize finger-motion while typing, is somewhat faster than QWERTY, so maybe I could benefit from learning that, at least nominally. Of course I have at least ten years of touch-typing experience on QWERTY so I wouldn't expect myself to be faster with Dvorak once the month is done, but knowing where what is might be able to give me an avenue for practicing by way of writing non-important text work that gets produced anyway.
Like for almost everything, the internet provides a neat solution for my practicing problem. There's of course always the option of just switching layouts and suffering for a month, but I'd rather not do that, considering I still have a few passwords I tend to type manually. There's a neat Dvorak-trainer on the internet here that does everything for you, including mapping QWERTY-input to Dvorak and breaking the experience into sensible chunks to tackle one at a time. What strikes me first and almost immediately is the fact that typing on a foreign layout makes you feel incredibly dumb, if you're already able to touch-type on any other. I occasionally get looks when I work in the train or similar public places, when looking out a window or watching people while typing, so getting my vowels wrong on a regular basis is incredibly annoying. Still, efficiency skyrockets upon the first few hundred words typed, then plateaus at about 10 Words a minute, so about one letter a second. It's of course still a far cry off a normal typing speed, but at least I don't feel like dyslexic.
New additional keys tend to throw off stuff a lot, naturally, but not as much as I thought it would.
I think this is also mostly due to the way Dvorak is laid out.
When comparing the middle row with the list of most common letters used in the English language, found here, one finds that they are mapped in a way so that a lot of the most common consonants are in the right middle row. That means that any new addition of letters will introduce only small changes to the way you're using it. In a way though, I see this layout being a nuisance to use in other languages - specifically the Romanic ones that often use "Q" for question words (Spanish, Italian, Latin, etc.), because that placement is just terrible. I already noticed that the unfamiliar placement of the "V" was enough to throw me off most times it came up. I'm willing to bet that at least half of the mistakes I made in that last screenshot was due to stray "V"s.
The fourth lesson is somewhat complementary to the third one, so I skipped it and went straight to the full roman alphabet. Twice 100 words landed me at 100 words per 12 minutes, which is still pretty slow, but considering the accuracy was alright, I can't complain too hard. It's still a far cry off from what I'm used to, and more importantly, when touch-typing QWERTY, one should notice a level of flexibility in the finger positioning that just isn't there yet, during the learning phase. I'm still very much fixed on the F and J (or U and H on Dvorak) keys. Part of that is due to the fingers I'm used to typing with. I don't usually use the right little fingers much, because that's all of the symbols, which I feel relatively secure in tapping with my ring- or middle finger, and are really more important when writing code. Other Dvorak moves letters onto the "," and ".", which makes me use the little finger a lot more (at least for now). As previously, improvements plateau pretty quickly but regaining the flexibility should be the next step. The month however is almost over. I doubt I'll be using the keyboard for any of my writing soon, but I feel confident enough to add it my layouts.