I use the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout (DSK) for most of my typing. This is the keyboard layout shown above. It was designed in the 1930s by August Dvorak, a professor at the University of Washington, by studying letter frequency, common letter combinations, and the mechanics of the hand. Since there are many websites with information about DSK and comparisons to the common QWERTY layout, this page will be my own story of my experiences with DSK. If you have never heard of DSK or are just learning about it, I recommend reading some information about DSK before reading about my experiences with it, so that you will understand some of my references. The following are the sites I've found most helpful.
Marcus Brooks' page about DSK is the first hit in a Google search, and is linked by most other sites as the "official" site. It has a fair amount of information, and lots of links to other sites.
The Wikipedia entry on DSK has, typical for Wikipedia, the most pertinent information per word of content, and is also the most unbiased body of information available on the internet about DSK.
Roedy Green's page about DSK is the largest and most comprehensive page about DSK (and various keyboards and typing methods) I've found on the internet. He proclaims "In this document I wish to convince you to try out Dvorak keyboard layout and help me convert the world away from the illogical QWERTY to the sublime DSK." Nearly 12,000 words later, he concludes "There really isn't anything more you have to know about DSK than what I have told you." There you have it - if you're not convinced by what he writes, you may be convinced by the sheer volume of what he types (in DSK, of course).
This keyboard compare applet is the best demonstration of the efficiency of DSK that I know of. It uses text that you type or paste into the window (try pasting in the text from this page for a test), and calculates data about that text based on the DSK and QWERTY layouts such as distance traveled by your fingers, percent of keys pressed on the top, middle (home), and bottom row, and percent of keys pressed by each finger. Marcus Brooks also has a comparative study of the efficiencies of the two layouts which is narrated for easier reading. These comparisons of the efficiencies of the layouts gave me the most convincing reason to switch from QWERTY to DSK.
The World of Stuff's page on DSK is long and thorough, and gives a good overall view of DSK. I got the above image of the layout from this page.
I learned to type in a typing class in high school when I was 14, and gradually became a better typist throughout high school. I first had my own computer when I went to college, and got a lot of practice typing as I chatted with friends online. The first time I took a typing test after college was for a job, and I tested at 88wpm with no errors, which was a testament to the long hours spent chatting, sometimes trying to keep up with 4 or 5 people at once. I later did typing tests at times when I felt especially fast, and usually scored around 100wpm. I enjoy writing as communication, and my typing reflected that.
I knew that the QWERTY layout of the keyboard was not a good design, but partly because it was all I had known for about 8 years of typing, and partly because I had become so good at it, I didn't think about what might be a better layout. I first learned about DSK in late 2002, and finding out about its existence was at first somewhat mind-opening, because I had never really given much thought to the placement of the keys on the keyboard. The idea that there was a keyboard layout that was designed for ease and speed of typing, instead of the inefficient layout I had been using, was fascinating. I found out about DSK in the same way I learn about most things: it caught my eye as I was reading something online, I did a search for it, and read about it for the next few hours. I decided I had to at least try it, so I popped the keys off my keyboard, re-arranged them in DSK, switched the keyboard layout (in software) and started typing. I quickly found that it was hard to type in a different layout, as expected, but I was surprised at how frustrating it was to type at only 5wpm or so after being used to typing at around 100wpm. I also found that typing while staring at the keyboard, after touch-typing for so long, was only making it worse. Many of the keys were at the wrong height or angle, since the keys on standard keyboards are at different levels and angles in order to make the keyboard feel better under your fingers. To help with this, I printed a picture with DSK on it and taped it to the bottom of my monitor, and put the keys back in the correct places. Now I was forced to touch-type, and although it seemed harder at first, I was able to type at 11wpm after an hour. I decided to stick with it and see how long it took me to reach my old typing speed and comfort in QWERTY.
I had read that the best way to learn the layout was to force yourself to type only on DSK and never on QWERTY, so that's what I did. I didn't do any typing exercises, I just typed as I would have otherwise (1-3 hours a day), albeit much slower. The hardest part was the frustration at what seemed like an incredibly slow typing speed, knowing that I could type 3-5 times faster in QWERTY. But when I switched back to QWERTY for a few minutes, I discovered that I couldn't type in QWERTY anymore, and after trying just for a few minutes and going to DSK again, I found that I made more errors than correct keystrokes. I was stuck in a typing no-man's land, unable to type in either layout faster than 30wpm, and knowing that if I switched, I'd be useless for the next half hour or so as my brain tried to sort out which pattern was correct.
It took several weeks of typing slowly on DSK while I was learning before I no longer felt bad about my relatively slow typing speed. Compared to when I had been learning to type in QWERTY, I learned fairly quickly, and was able to type at 40 wpm by the end of the first month. After about 2 months, I was typing at 50-60wpm and feeling very comfortable with DSK, and although I was still not typing as fast as I had in QWERTY, I was typing faster than the average typist, and it felt as fast as I wanted to type. I was planning to travel for a few weeks and realized that I would be using my friend's computers and would have to type in QWERTY, so although most of what I had read said that it's counter-productive to try to switch between layouts (and few people actually can), I switched back. The superiority of DSK was immediately and painfully obvious, as my fingers felt like they were jumping all over the keyboard and over each other as I typed. It took a week to regain speeds of around 40wpm, and it was harder to re-train for QWERTY than it had been to learn DSK, because not only was I faster and more comfortable in DSK, I had a hard time convincing myself to work to re-learn a less efficient layout. Once I was using QWERTY, though, I kept using it because I was feeling lazy and didn't want to make the effort of switching again, and after 6 months I was typing around 80wpm. I then switched back to DSK, and after just an hour or so, even though I was only typing around 20wpm (and feeling like it was much slower), it felt more natural and comfortable, and I was glad that my fingers weren't having to move all over the keyboard anymore. It took about a week to regain 40wpm, and 2 weeks to feel totally comfortable and at normal speed again.
While switching back and forth between layouts, I realized that although DSK is a superior layout and I preferred it, the disadvantage of being unable to type in QWERTY when at a public computer or at my friend's computers outweighed the advantages of typing in DSK at home. I decided to try to learn to switch between them, so that I could use DSK when possible, but still be able to type when at a different computer. I switched to QWERTY for a week, then DSK for a week, back to QWERTY for a week, and then back to DSK. During that time, I could never type more than 40wpm, switching between the layouts didn't get much easier or quicker, and by the 3rd week it seemed my fingers had a preference for one or the other that kept changing, sometimes mid-sentence. I decided to just stick with DSK and only go through the pain of switching if I knew I'd need QWERTY for a while.
A few months after that, I moved from Dallas to Southern Oregon, and sold my computer before I moved. I re-learned QWERTY, and because I was using my housemate's computer all the time, I didn't use DSK for about a year and a half. Then, in late 2004, I decided to try to re-learn DSK, with the hopes of trying to learn to switch between layouts anytime I needed to. I tried to touch-type without the printed guide in front of me, and found it was basically impossible, so I printed it and taped it to the monitor again, and was able to type at 30wpm in about a week. Since I was sharing the computer this time, though, and the default keyboard layout was still QWERTY, I sometimes used it for typing short bits, such as taking notes or typing URLs or searches. I found that using QWERTY sometimes while re-learning DSK made it take longer to learn, and the typing no-man's land plagued me for the first two weeks, but the whole process was smoother and less frustrating than it had been before, and after a month I could switch between the two layouts with only about 5 minutes of confused fingers. I typically used DSK while chatting and writing e-mail, and QWERTY for everything else, and after about two months, I got to a point where I sometimes switched between layouts without thinking as I switched between programs, since (in Windows) switching to DSK in one program left other programs in QWERTY. I could type 50-60wpm in either, but still preferred using DSK whenever I would be writing more than a paragraph.
As I write this at the end of 2004, I have reached a point where I can type in both layouts, and even switch between them with only a minute or so of errors before typing comfortably and fast. A fact that I've known as I've been learning DSK which only now seems important is that until this point, my efforts to learn DSK and my skill at it could be viewed as rather useless, the type of thing that eccentric geniuses are known for. Especially for someone like me who doesn't have his own computer and needs to be able to type on other people's computers, it's necessary to be able to type in QWERTY, so whatever the reasons for learning DSK and whatever the benefits of it, it's actually a disadvantage if it means I can't type in QWERTY. Also, I'm pretty sure that the only way I'll be able to type 100wpm in either layout is if I do a lot of typing in the same one exclusively for a year or so, since switching between layouts requires too much mental effort to allow much speed increase in either. It can be argued that I would have been better served by not learning DSK, since I don't expect to ever be able to type as fast as I could before I started learning. For me, however, the value of DSK is more than just the speed possibilities or the comfort; there is value in the mental exercise which expands my brain and its capabilities, similar to the value of being able to speak two or more languages, even if they are rarely used.
I've noticed a few things about using DSK which I didn't expect before I switched. Some of the websites I've linked to above have more comprehensive lists of these kinds of differences, but these are the things which have affected me most:
It's usually easier to use QWERTY when writing HTML, because of the various characters that are used in HTML which are rarely used when typing words (
< >, /, { }, =, etc ). For these characters, many people look at the keyboard to find the character, so if you're using a standard QWERTY keyboard to type with DSK in the software (as I always do) then it can be confusing to try to learn where the various characters are on DSK.
Common keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+N, Ctrl+F, etc get misplaced when using DSK. This is especially frustrating for the clipboard commands (Ctrl+X, C, V) which are all in a row and accessible with the left hand, since in QWERTY, the right hand can operate the mouse and the left hand can control the clipboard shortcuts; this makes it very easy to move files among folders or move text within a document. With DSK, these 3 keys are under the right hand, making it harder to use them with the mouse in the right hand. Also, several applications have their own keyboard shortcuts which get misplaced when using DSK. For example, Winamp's play control buttons are mapped to the bottom left row in QWERTY (Z X C V B), and these get scattered over the keyboard in DSK. The only common shortcut not affected by this is Ctrl+A, since the A key is in the same place in both layouts.
The placement of the dash and underscore key in DSK (on the home row, right next to the Enter key) is so much more natural than its placement in QWERTY (in between the 0 key and the =/+ key) that even when I type in QWERTY for hours, I still reach for the dash key as if I were using DSK.
If you're interested in learning DSK, you may want to visit a few of the following websites to help you learn and to help gauge your progress.
Dan Wood's "A Basic Course in Dvorak" is a course with 29 lessons, and introduces the keys 2 at a time, starting with the home row and working out to the less-used keys. After each pair is introduced, there is a comprehensive section to practice all the keys you've learned so far. It's very similar to a typical typing course, with the exception that you can type things like "Todd hesitated in his Datsun then hit the Honda in the side in an instantaneous THUD" using only the home row.
Typing Master has a free online typing test which I used a lot when I was learning Dvorak. It allows you to set the duration of the test and to choose from among 4 texts to copy. The advantage of this one is that once you become familiar with a certain text, it becomes easier to type it. It also keeps a list of the top 100 scores each week.
Learn 2 Type also has a free online typing test which gives you a random text of its choosing, and you must type the entire text before being scored. This is harder, but very similar to the typing tests typically given by employment agencies or other firms.
A Google search yields a large variety of free online typing tests, so you may want to look through them if you don't like the two I linked above.
If you use DSK, or would like to learn, please e-mail me and let me know! I'd love to hear from others who use DSK or who would like to learn. If you're interested, but not sure you want to go through the hassle of learning, I'd like to encourage you to find a week or two when you can afford to type slowly, and try it out. I've read stories of people who tried it for a few days and hated it because they were frustrated by not being able to type as fast as they were used to, and others who were satisfied with their typing speed after only two or three weeks of learning DSK. I've also heard stories of people who became proficient in DSK and then later decided to abandon it entirely in favor of QWERTY, and those were all because they decided they needed to be able to type in QWERTY. That's the same reason why I went back and forth for a few years, but now that I've learned to switch between the two, I'm glad I learned DSK. Especially when I'm tired and don't want to think much or move my hands much when I type, DSK is very valuable. I encourage anyone who is learning DSK or thinking about learning it to stick with it and try to learn to type in both layouts. For me, it's worth the effort, and very satisfying.