Today a rather strange thing happened to me, I typed one another dev’s DAS Keyboard so my mind switched into full on touch typing mode, this lasted about 20 seconds before I started typing DVORAK instead of QWERTY (I can touch type both layouts – ironically I’m typing this on QWERTY). I’ve also been trying since around 1999 or 2000 to switch to the DVORAK layout but I almost without fail revert to QWERTY after a few weeks. I don’t revert because DVORAK is simply too hard or too slow because I’ve actually managed to build up my DVORAK touch typing speed to something that is almost useable. 

There are certain trends in the IT industry that just bugs me (and believe me that’s an understatement, ask anybody who’s had a similar conversation with me!) for instance the worst possible technology will be the industry standard! There are many examples of this, I’ll leave this as an “exercise” for you “the reader” to research. Back to the topic at hand, QWERT vs DVORAK is an excellent example – now I realise that some of you will claim that my statement is false and there is no scientific proof blah blah blah, I’m drawing on personal experience and in MY OPINION QWERTY sucks! Personally I like the way DVORAK feels while typing and that is why I believe that the worst layout is the standard. If you’ve read this far you might think that this is going to be another lecture on why you have to switch to DVORAK, let me assure you it is not!

So why am I mad as hell? There is a force that keeps me from my favorite keyboard layout and I wish I could eliminate it, unfortunately I do not think I’ll be able to. What’s my current options to get onto the DVORAK layout? I can use a soft switch by changing my keyboard layout on the OS layer, this might be fine for your average user that lives on a single machine or at worst case have a machine at home and a machine at work. In my case my home machine is also my work machine so theoretically I should have my cake and eat it? Another alternative is to buy a hardwired DVORAK keyboard, not only are these hard to find, some of them are just plain silly looking, tacky or very expensive . If there’s another one I’ve missed let me know in the comments I’d like to investigate it!

Interestingly neither of these actually solve my problem. I’m a laptop user, I’ve got a MacBook Pro to be exact, I’m also a Microsoft developer which means I spend a lot of my time using VMWare to run windows, not only that I work on many server environments via remote desktop and I even remote to some of my other Mac’s. The servers I use are shared machines which other developers use too and they are not DVORAK users either. So the first problem is that when I switch my Mac to the DVORAK layout it’s all fun and games until I move to windows VMWare will treat my keyoard as QWERTY regardless of what the Mac thinks it’s using, and right fully so the hardware is wired for QWERTY so it makes perfect sense, it’s virtualised and not dependent on any Mac settings. My real issue starts with the remote desktop connections, if Windows is set to use DVORAK remote desktop will blatantly ignore this and treat my keyboard as QWERTY – this does not make sense since it’s NOT virtualised and I’m merely sending the remote machine keystrokes! Suddenly I have to switch every machine I connect to to DVORAK when I only want my own machine to be switched and send the keystrokes as DVORAK instead of QWERTY to the machines I connect to. This works well when I’m using a terminal and ssh into a remote machine, why does this not work for other remote connections?

Another problem with the DVORAK layout is that short cut keys are usually chosen for their location on they keyboard or due to their relation to each other, undo, cut, copy and paste for example. DVORAK scatters these keys all over the keyboard so it makes no sense using them anymore and you loose all the benefits of using DVORAK instantly. There’s a partial solution to this with DVORAK layouts that switch to QWERTY when you hit the command key on the apple (I’ve not been able to find the windows equivalent yet, but it does not matter since windows produces too many other headaches besides this one). Don’t even get me started on trying to use EMACS or Vim (I use both I’m not religious!) on DVORAK keyboard, things go bad VERY quickly!

So my solution to this, and this is a theoretical solution I highly doubt I’d be able to find a practical implementation of it anywhere:

Change my laptop keyboard layout on a firmware (possibly even hardware, but I don’t believe it’s required) level, but I don’t want a standard DVORAK layout because of the short cut keys issue. Come to think of it if windows copied more of Mac OS X you might actually be able to globally remap all short cut keys to DVORAK equivalents. This might only get you part way there since there’s other issues on Mac OS X that will prevent you from doing this since Cocoa provides this magic and Carbon apps will give you the proverbial finger! The only way this solution will actually function properly will be when implemented on a lower level than the OS and even then it will be far from perfect.

So in conclusion DVORAK will ultimately be an EPIC fail, this sucks and gets my blood boiling, I really do like the DVORAK layout and in a perfect world there would be no QWERTY short cut keys would have been designed around DVORAK so all the counter arguments would also go away. Personally I feel DVORAK is better because on a subconscious level I automatically switch to it even though I spend 99.9% of my time typing on QWERTY. So if you’re thinking about switching to DVORAK I can honestly not recommend it unless you’re living on an isolated computer (which might be fine for most people).

DVORAK FAIL </ Rant>

P.S. Please prove me wrong! I’d like nothing more!

P.P.S. You might have noticed that I did not mention Linux in this post, I’ve given up on Linux many years ago due to the amount of pain associated with it (I did try DVORAK on it though and it sucked back then), my linux pain argument could fill a book so I refuse to go into it!