Dvorak Keyboard Concerto

Some years ago, I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout.  For those of you who do not know, it is simply a different arrangement of the keys on my keyboard.  Go take a look at it.  The first thing you’ll notice is, “Wow, all the keys are in different places!”  But look a little longer.  Specifically at the placement of the vowels.  It really cuts down on the amount of work your fingers have to do to produce text. 

The reason for this is that the Qwerty layout was designed for typewriters.  The old typewriters had “typebars”, which could easily become entangled when you were typing too fast.  (Check out this picture.)  The Qwerty layout was designed to slow you down.  Now, in the computer age, no such obstacle exists. 

I made the switch when I was about 30.  (It’s supported by both Windows and Macs.)  In my case, this involved about a two-week period of time when I was incapable of typing anything in a reasonable amount of time.  This was because I had abandoned Qwerty (the layout most of you are using), and had not yet mastered Dvorak. 

The first thing I did was to rearrange the physical keys themselves, to match the Dvorak layout.  But modern keys have a slightly curved surface, and rearranging them resulted in an uncomfortable topography.  So I switched them back and learned to touch type. 

After about three weeks, I was fairly proficient at it, although not yet up to my previous Qwerty speed.  After a couple of months, however, I surpassed my previous speed. 

But fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.  For the last three years, I have been employed as a Data Conversion Operator for the US Post Office (more on that job in a future post).  This is a high-volume data entry job.  And they use custom keyboards, which would not make a smooth transition to Dvorak.  So now I use the standard Qwerty keyboard at work, and the Dvorak at home.

It may seem like a lot of work.  But I can type the word “the” without leaving the home row.  The the the the.  Now you try.