On Sep 10, 10:11 am, Marc Weber <[email protected]> wrote:
> Was making the switch worth it? Yes, because of the ergonomic benefits.
>
This is the exact same reason I switched. My father had RSI so bad he
required surgery. Typing was always a big problem for him, and being
an electrical engineer he did a lot of it.
When I started studying computer engineering I decided I didn't want
to have the same problem. Someone told me of the ergonomic benefits of
Dvorak, so I tried it out with great results, as I mentioned.
> For a period of four or five years, I used the qwerty layout at work (on
> a shared DOS computer), and the Dvorak layout at home, spending about
> half of my typing time on each. During that time, my Dvorak speed
> increased to 90 wpm, and my qwerty speed reached 80 wpm. My accuracy
> improved slightly on both layouts. On the Dvorak layout, my most common
> typos are reversing two letters, whereas on the qwerty layout, it's more
> common for me to hit the wrong key altogether.
>
I have about the same experience I think, with the exception of the
"reach" keys for my right pinky finger, L, /, =, and \. Other than
that, my main problems on Dvorak are swapping letters, whereas with
QWERTY I would often hit the wrong key entirely.
> I think I read that dvorak can make you about 15% faster. This is
> similar to the results above. So I guess that Ben would have gotten
> faster using qwerty as well :-)
> Ben: Have you already been a good typist when switching to dvorak?
>
I may have been able to get faster with QWERTY, don't know. I was
already a fairly decent touch-typist in QWERTY when I switched, but
with widely varying speed and not very great accuracy, which probably
affected my measured speed significantly. Speed tests I took online
varied from 25 to 40 WPM. This was just over 4 years ago, sometime
during college. Using Dvorak these days, I consistently type at 75 WPM
or higher according to the same speed tests. My actual day-to-day
typing speed may be very different of course.
But as I said, my reason for the switch was not typing speed. That was
just a pleasant side effect. 15% sounds about right on average, and in
my opinion a speed enhancement is not a good reason to switch by
itself. Combined with ergonomics and accuracy improvements though, it
was enough for me.
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