On Aug 17, 2013, at 2:24 AM, Gary Gregory wrote: > On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 3:07 AM, Nick Williams > <nicho...@nicholaswilliams.net> wrote: > > On Aug 17, 2013, at 2:01 AM, Ralph Goers wrote: > >> >> On Aug 16, 2013, at 11:58 PM, Nick Williams wrote: >> >>> >>> On Aug 17, 2013, at 1:54 AM, Ralph Goers wrote: >>> >>>> That doesn't really help much. I find the syntax below oddly annoying. >>>> What is strange is that I don't really mind it when there is only a single >>>> '-' character but when there is more than one I find it irritating - >>>> especially with size-based-triggering-policy. I can't tell you how many >>>> times I hit '=' instead of '-' when typing it. >>> >>> Well there's an easy and obvious solution to THAT. Switch to Dvorak. You >>> won't accidentally hit = instead of - then. QWERTY sucks. ;-) >>> >> >> Right. Instead I will mistype everything. :-) > > Hah! > > Off topic, I switched about two years ago. Before I was touch typing 70-80 > WPM and my wrists hurt. All. The. Time. > > Now I touch type 100-110 WPM and my wrists rarely hurt anymore. QWERTY was > invented for the typewriter, and it was intended to prevent jams by slowing > typists down by moving all of the most commonly-used keys as far away from > each other as possible. This causes you to constantly stretch and stress your > fingers and wrists to type common words. Dvorak [1] was designed to bring the > 11 most common keys to the home row, the 12 most common keys to the top row > (second-easiest to reach), and the 10 least common keys to the bottom row > (hardest to reach). It's possible to type dozens of entire words without your > fingers leaving the home row. Only possible to type 1-2 that way with QWERTY. > > [1] > http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/KB_United_States_Dvorak.svg/400px-KB_United_States_Dvorak.svg.png > > Which Dvorak keyboard would you get/recommend today?
Well you can't actually buy them. Nobody really makes them. You might be able to find one or two somewhere out there, but they're the really old keyboards that take a lot of pressure to press, unlike today's modern ergonomic keyboards that are easier to press the keys on. For my MacBook Pro, I simply got a keyboard cover [1]. For my Dell laptop at $work I popped off the keys and rearranged them. For my Apple Bluetooth Keyboard (older edition), I just popped off the keys and rearranged them. For my Microsoft keyboard at $work, I also popped off the keys and rearranged them. It's a much better (and cheaper) solution than trying to actually buy a Dvorak keyboard. The only reason you would ever need to buy a Dvorak keyboard is if you needed to type Dvorak on an old system (like DOS) that didn't support Dvorak in software, or BIOS. In these cases, the few Dvorak keyboards out there actually have hardware switches on them to turn on a mode that makes it look like a QWERTY keyboard to the operating system. However, there's rarely a need for this anymore (all modern operating systems support Dvorak in software), and for the few cases I need it (BIOS), I keep a spare Microsoft keyboard with the keys still arranged in QWERTY. Sometimes I don't even need to use it. I never forgot how to type QWERTY. Takes me only about two sentences to switch modes without looking at the keys. [1] http://www.kbcovers.com/servlet/Detail?no=284
