My new favorite thing. Not that I’ve tried it yet or anything, but my husband (of all people) read an article about it in his Wall Street Journal (of all places) and reminded me about it. I’d heard of the Dvorak keyboard in college, and then promptly forgot about it because, of course, no one uses it. Or no one did back then. It’s far better than QWERTY on your wrists, far faster and was designed specifically for touch-typing. How can it be wrong? Apparently, there’s all this drama about Dvorak being blacklisted for some reason and the change-over being so difficult because there were hundreds of thousands of typewriters in existence by the time he had invented his system. Exciting stuff. Intrigue, drama, maybe even a little Communism. His name is Eastern European…
After reading myriad websites (and rejecting outright the space-alien-module looking keyboards that take up half of your desk and claim to be ergonomic) I have decided to simply convert my current keyboard and see how it goes. The general consensus seems to be that one can learn the Dvorak keyboard within a week or two, and have the QWERTY system out of your blood within a month. We’ll see. And I’m not certain how beneficial it will be for me, since I’ll still have to know QWERTY for work. Although I can most likely switch my computer there as well since my boss never uses it anymore.
These two sites are the most useful that I found:
The first is extremely informative as far as the actual conversion is concerned. Computers make it super easy to switch these days. (Although surprisingly, the ever-intuitive Mac doesn’t allow you to enable it through the Keyboard settings in your System Preferences, but in the International settings. Who knew? Made sense once I actually learned how to do it, but I’m so used to figuring out things for myself on my Mac… Just a side note. Not really important, but I found it interesting.) This site even has a free download so that you can convert to just a one-handed version (left OR right) as well. This is good if you’re working with your mouse a lot. (Dvorak apparently invented those systems for amputees from the war and one-handed typists can type up to 50-60 WPM. That’s only 20 words less than I can do now. The man was clearly brilliant. Why don’t more people know about this? Or am I just out of the loop?)
The first site even provides a sheet of labels you can download and recommendations on how to convert your keyboard. And then, as I mentioned, links to crazy keyboard land. I’m sure they’re very good for you, but I’m just not ready to go there yet. I’m still old-school (ish). It took me forever to stop writing long hand and to teach myself to compose at the computer, and I still miss typing at a typewriter. I used to have an old Smith-Corona and an even older Underwood and when I was feeling low on inspiration I would make myself a gimlet and type on one of those for a while and suddenly feel like Raymond Chandler. So baby steps. I will learn the Dvorak Keyboard first, and then see where I’m at.
The second website is free lessons for learning the keyboard. I’ll report back on that one. Who knows? Next time I could be writing my next post all Dvorak-style.