The other day I committed to moving from QWERTY to a DVORAK style keyboard.

Earlier this week … I printed out a Dvorak style keyboard layout and placed it on my desk, changed my Window’s settings and  forged ahead.

I failed fantastically. It was much harder to change than I thought.

It all hit when I had to whip up a document in an incredibly hurry. Typing like a two year old on ritalin just wouldn’t cut it. I sad a sad goodbye to Dvorak and went running back QWERTY.

I’ll try again next week when things hopefully calm down a little.

For a very long time now, I’ve been thinking of moving to a ‘Dvorak‘ style keyboard. I spend so much of my life infront of a screen that my eyesight has already suffered from it. Over the last few years, my arms, wrists and hands have also begun to suffer.

You see, the QWERTY keyboard was developed to actually slow down typing speeds. Back when typewriters were being developed, if typists hit the keys in too quick a succession, the typebars and hammers would jam. To solve this problem, the QWERTY layour was developed which kept the most frequently used letters away from each other. Christopher Sholes is to blame for this monumental contribution to carpel tunnel syndrome.

In the 1930s, a chap called August Dvorak started his campaign to rid the world of this now unecessary layout. The layout he developed placed the vowels and commonly used consonates in the middle row of the keyboard, with less frequently used keys near the outer edge.

By rejiggering the keyboard, Dvorak also solved the Qwerty board’s most irritating feature: having the letter J stuck smack-dab in the middle, in perhaps the primest real estate around—where one’s right index finger hits the board. How often do we use that wretched letter? Almost never. For example, George Orwell uses it a mere 29 times in his “Politics and the English Language.” He uses the letter K, given maybe Qwerty’s second-best piece of real estate (right hand, middle finger) a mere 170 times. By contrast, Orwell uses H and T, given the same prime spots on the Dvorak board, 1,180 and 2,258 times, respectively.

Make Mine Dvorak, Slate, Feb. 5 2002

So, I am now actually going to do this. I will sacrifice my current fludity and speed for a short slow period of learning to type again. Where to begin … I have a number of options here:

• Grafitti an existing keyboard
• Botch up an existing keyboard
• Purchase a Dvorak keyboard

I’ll give this a little thought over the weekend and then on Monday I’ll begin on my new typing adventures.

NB. The image is of the “Hansen writing ball“. Nothing to do with Dvorak or QWERTY, but cool non-the-less.