Type everyday? use Dvorak!

If you are someone who uses the keyboard for more than an hour a day, then this post is especially for you.

Did you know that the inventor of the keyboard (Christopher Sholes) designed the current layout of the english keyboard (also called the QWERTY layout) to slow down the typist? Surprising but true. The idea was to prevent the type-heads (the part that imprints the character on the paper) from jamming when successive characters were typed too fast. This approach worked with the typewriter. The layout was inherited by the keyboard of today which is electronic i.e. no type-heads. Most of us still continue to use the old speed-reducing QWERTY layout. I certainly did - until i came across the story of Dr. August Dvorak (1894-1975).

Dr. Dvorak was a educational psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington. He came up with a simplified layout of characters that was designed not only to increase speed (by 20%) but also typing accuracy by a good 50%. The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout is a ANSI standard and comes avialable with most modern operating systems. It does not require any additional hardware or software to be installed. All it needs is a change in configuration.

Read more about this simplified layout and how it can help improve your every work in the form of a comic strip at - the DVORAK Zine.

I have started using the Dvorak layout, it make sense. The question is - will you?

Image courtesy: Wikipedia.org