Dvorak status
January 30, 2008
One month has gone by since I switched to the dvorak layout, or to be exact to the swedish variant called svorak a1.
Time to take some distance and look at how the ride has been going!
Well, I am still using svorak. The first 2 weeks were tuff and I seriously pondered giving up. Now the worst is over. I type at a reasonable speed of about 22 words/minutes. Still sluggish but 1) I am truly touch typing 2) my performance are improving daily with a rate of about half a word per minute and per day.
I had to overcome a number of obstacles and am still struggling with a few of them...
I am quite disappointed at the typematrix keyboard that I am using. Since I am mostly programming and using emacs heavily I find myself hitting altgr all the time. On the typematrix, altgr is placed at an impossible angle for the right pinky. I reconfigured the keyboard mapping using the program KeyTweak provided by Typematrix and moved altgr to be just on the right of the space bar, where pgup was, so as to reach it with my right thumb. It feels better but it's still uncomfortable.
I used Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator to define an own variant of svorak with the symbol keys at more comfortable positions. That was a clear improvement and my fingers now seldom leave the 3 central keyboard rows.
I also wrote a couple of layouts for x-win...
So I have been learning a lot, both in how to improve the keyboard layout to reduce finger movement and in keyboard design. And since it's a lot of fun, I will keep on with it!
Now I am limited in my experimenting by the position of the typematrix's keys. And I am irritated at the little use I have for my thumbs. Ultimately, I would like a keyboard with keys placed like that http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/classic.htm or that http://www.newstandardkeyboards.com/Products_S.html
But in a perfect world I would also like the keyboard layout to be programmed in the keyboard encoder, at the hardware level, in order to avoid all the messy business of software layout remapping. So that's what I am looking at now: building my own ergonomic keyboard!
Time to take some distance and look at how the ride has been going!
Well, I am still using svorak. The first 2 weeks were tuff and I seriously pondered giving up. Now the worst is over. I type at a reasonable speed of about 22 words/minutes. Still sluggish but 1) I am truly touch typing 2) my performance are improving daily with a rate of about half a word per minute and per day.
I had to overcome a number of obstacles and am still struggling with a few of them...
I am quite disappointed at the typematrix keyboard that I am using. Since I am mostly programming and using emacs heavily I find myself hitting altgr all the time. On the typematrix, altgr is placed at an impossible angle for the right pinky. I reconfigured the keyboard mapping using the program KeyTweak provided by Typematrix and moved altgr to be just on the right of the space bar, where pgup was, so as to reach it with my right thumb. It feels better but it's still uncomfortable.
I used Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator to define an own variant of svorak with the symbol keys at more comfortable positions. That was a clear improvement and my fingers now seldom leave the 3 central keyboard rows.
I also wrote a couple of layouts for x-win...
So I have been learning a lot, both in how to improve the keyboard layout to reduce finger movement and in keyboard design. And since it's a lot of fun, I will keep on with it!
Now I am limited in my experimenting by the position of the typematrix's keys. And I am irritated at the little use I have for my thumbs. Ultimately, I would like a keyboard with keys placed like that http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/classic.htm or that http://www.newstandardkeyboards.com/Products_S.html
But in a perfect world I would also like the keyboard layout to be programmed in the keyboard encoder, at the hardware level, in order to avoid all the messy business of software layout remapping. So that's what I am looking at now: building my own ergonomic keyboard!
