Dvorak For A New World

A friend introduced me to the world of keyboard layouts outside of QWERTY way back on December 16, 2001. She told me about the Dvorak layout and I instantly jumped on the opportunity to exercise my programming skills. We embarked on this “joint” programming venture to create a typing program to help people learn Dvorak. (I put “joint” in quotation marks, because I ended up doing all the programming, hahaha. However, she was the one who came up with the wonderfully appropriate title for this program, in honor of the composer of the New World Symphony.)

The Dvorak keyboard is supposed to allow users to type faster, more accurately, and more comfortably. The claim is that it reduces the average distance your fingers have to travel, so not only is it functionally better, but ergonomically better as well. While supporting evidence is controversial, in my own experience, I find the Dvorak keyboard layout much more intuitive and comfortable to use.

I am able to reach 90 WPM 110 WPM (with high accuracy) without much trouble. I do find that depending on the keyboard, the time of day, how rested my fingers are, and the barometric pressure (j/k), I sometimes have trouble typing accurately, and would have to constantly go back and correct the text. Most of the time though, this old noggin’ is the bottleneck in everything I do.

Here are a couple of links in case you would like to find out more about the Dvorak layout:

The Dvorak Keyboard
Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard