Comments on: Fast Typing Without RSI

By: Gaz

Gaz — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:25:31 +0000

Hi Mike, Thanks for your comments. I decided to write this up when I landed on a page about RSI from my feed reader, and realised that Dvorak still hasn’t achieved the recognition it deserves. Hopefully, by remembering to evangalise it more often, I’ll be able to help more people reach that aha! moment

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 21 May 2007 14:58:57 +0000

Thanks for writing this up. I can report a success story almost identical to yours (here's my short writeup on Dvorak from 2002). I'm still amazed at the long-term, solved-problem stability of this solution (switching to Dvorak) -- for these five years since that initial, short-lived transition hurdle, Dvorak has been like riding a bicycle: requires no conscious thought and lets me go fast. Better than I ever was at QWERTY. More important, same as you report, my early onset of RSI has never returned.

By: Zath

Zath — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:52:30 +0000

Of course yeah, I had the thought in my head that the keys would look wrong, but then that doesn’t matter because you’re touchtyping!

Our computers at work are pretty tightly locked down and can’t normally make changes, but I did check and I could change the keymap settings, handy to know if I get chance to try this out.

…or it would an interesting office prank!

By: Gaz

Gaz — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 22:51:57 +0000

Hi Zath. Don't forget that it's only a keymap. The letters physically printed on my keys are still QWERTY, but when I press the the ASDF keys with the fingers of my left hand, my computer prints AOEU -- because I've gone into my keyboard settings and told the computer to use the Dvorak layout rather than the US keyboard layout.

When I still had a day job that forced me to use Outlook to connect to the corporate Exchange server, I just had to set my XP user keyboard configuration to Dvorak. Occasionally, if I typed at someone elses computer I would do the same thing while I was there, and then change it back to UK QWERTY just before I left. Cheers, -Gaz

By: Zath

Zath — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 11:45:55 +0000

I remember hearing about a “better”, more natural keyboard typing system, but never actually had seen it before – interesting to see you talk about it, you never hear about it normally.

It really makes more sense to have that layout of keys, I’m just not sure if only using that keyboard at home and working with qwerty keyboards in the workplace would work – I suppose you could always take one in to use, assuming you don’t hotdesk everyday.

By: santaram

santaram — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 04:53:49 +0000

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