Goodbye Dvorak, it was great knowing you.

Before I started writing my master thesis back in 2010 I decided to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. Now, seven years later, I’m switching back to Qwerty. Here’s why.

The premise of Dvorak is that it is an efficient keyboard layout. Keys are positioned in such a way that when you rest your fingers on the keyboard (the home bar), the letters you use most are right under your finger tips.

Left hand: A, O, E, U, I
Right hand: D, H, T, N, S

This makes typing more comfortable because your fingers move around the keyboard ('finger travel') as little as possible. As an engineer with RSI issues, I found this a compelling argument (although it's debatable).

Qwerty vs Dvorak heat map. The home bar is the row of keys between CAPS LOCK key and the Enter/return key. As you can see, on Dvorak the most common vowels are under your left hand and the most common consonants under your right hand (image courtesy of xahlee.info).

Another upside is that because popular vowels and consonants are on separate sides of the keyboard, you end up typing alternating between your left and right hand, which is more comfortable and faster than typing entire words with a single hand. This benefit is less pronounced in the Dutch language (which I mastered at some point in life) because words often contain longer vowel and consonant combinations, e.g.

‘schreeuw’ (cccc vvv c) vs ‘scream’ (ccc vv c)

After about one year of typing Dvorak I was faster than I was earlier on Qwerty. Plus, I was now a Cool Person™. Feeling cool however, has not made up for downsides of typing Dvorak. Here’s why I switched back to Qwerty.

Keyboard shortcuts are detours

Keyboard shortcuts are important to me. Whenever I have to use the mouse a lot, my hand, arm and shoulder tire quickly and start hurting eventually. Shortcuts (e.g. cmd + S to save a document) allow me to keep my hands on the keyboard, which makes me more productive and reduces my RSI issues. Win, win.

Keyboard shortcuts are often bound to a letter that makes sense semantically: S for save, C for copy, Q for quit. There's also a logic to the location of shortcuts. Right under your left hand are the most common shortcuts: undo/redo (Z), cut (X), copy (C) and paste (V). This leaves your right hand free to use the arrow keys or mouse. Very handy when you do a lot of coding.

The Dvorak was invented before shortcuts and is downright unhandy when it comes to common shortcuts. Not only are Z, X, C and V all over the place, they are also on the right (wrong) side of the keyboard. This makes it impossible to use these shortcuts with your left whilst at the same time using the mouse or arrow keys with your right hand.

The opposite is also true: uncommon shortcuts are easily accessible. Both W and Q are located immediately above the left and right cmd keys. If I accidentally strike the W or Q key a bit too low, I also accidentally strike the cmd key, resulting either in a closed window (cmd + W) or worse, a closed application (cmd + Q).

And yes, drunk coding is nearly impossible on a Dvorak keyboard.

Dvorak is useless on smartphones

The big benefit of Dvorak — less finger travel because all the common letters are closer to each other — is truly a non-issue when typing on a phone as my fingers will not travel more than an inch anyway. More importantly, compared to Qwerty, writing with Dvorak is significantly harder on a phone — exactly for the same reasons as why it is more efficient on a physical keyboard. Here’s why.

When you type on your smart phone, it tries to make sense of what your typing. Because your fingers are bigger than the keys on your phone’s keyboard, the area your finger touches on the screen often covers multiple keys. It’s your phone’s job to figure out which key you actually intended to type.

All keyboards have to address this problem but it’s much harder with Dvorak. Because all the common letters are right next to each other, the number of possible words for a certain typing pattern can get huge.

For example, the following words are entirely possible alternatives when trying to type ‘hot’ in Dvorak on my smartphone (for simplification I only wrote down words with letters that are right next to h, o and t):

English interpretations for h, o and t in Qwerty:
git, hit, hot, jot, joy

English interpretations for h, o and t in Dvorak:
dat, dan, doh, dot, don, den, hah, hat, hon, heh, hen, tat, tan, ton, ten

For added complexity, I regularly write in three different languages: English, Dutch and Swedish, often in the same single sentence. A simple typing pattern of three key strokes could be interpreted as many different words in each language.

Arguably, the longer the word is, the less alternative interpretations there are. However, typing Dvorak on my phone with auto-correction turned on was so annoying as it kept guessing wrong, I quickly switched back to Qwerty (yes, for seven years I have been typing with two different layouts).

You need custom keyboards

It’s pretty easy to map your physical Qwerty keyboard to Dvorak in your Operation System’s settings. It works well when you can type without looking down at your keyboard. When that’s not an option (for example because you only have one hand free to type), it gets pretty annoying. Looking at a Qwerty keyboard while typing Dvorak is a challenge. I type ‘Ddpvd’ to type my own name, ‘Eelke’. ‘bodavya;k’ for ‘breakfast’. And ‘Kjd Ldkjdopalh;’ becomes ‘The Netherlands’.

So, I decided to I switch the physical keys around on both my MacBook and my extra keyboard. Wiggling off keys from your keyboard not only feels scary and risky, it actually is! I have so far destroyed two keyboards, even though I was really trying to be careful.

On the upside, when finished with your keyboard make over, all the keys make sense again! For you, that is, as nobody else but you will attempt to use it (there are those who try, get burned and exclaim, ‘wtf is this?!’ as if their Right To Type had just been revoked). If my MacBook were ever to get stolen, it would have probably been tossed away because switching those darned keys back is too much of a hassle — even for a petty thief.

A downside however, is that you no longer have the small bearing lines of the F and J keys on the right place. This sounds like a minor thing but without it really requires you to sit exactly in front of your keyboard. I don't know how many times I've had to retype a password before realising I had panned my entire left hand one key to the right.

Plus, all the minor other issues

And then there’s a bunch of other issues that I ran into.

• You suck at Qwerty. Although you do most typing on your own devices, you sometimes have to use Qwerty on other devices — say your colleague’s laptop.
• Whenever you really need to use somebody else’s computer, you either struggle along with Qwerty or just quickly setup the Dvorak layout on their computer. Sometimes you would forget to switch it back to Qwerty when you’re done, locking out the owner. One time, the login screen on my friend’s computer was stuck in Dvorak (without any option to switch it back to Qwerty). To solve it, I had to figure out how to type his password in Dvorak layout on a Qwerty keyboard — a sad day for password security.
• For some reason, Apple decided to pivot 90º the orientation of the keyboard butterfly mechanism (which pushes back the key upward after being pressed) for the F and J keys . After I swapped my Qwerty keyboard to Dvorak, I ended up with four keys rotated 90º clockwise - making the appearance of it look even more funky.
• In my editor of choice (Atom), I couldn’t use cmd + shift + Z as a redo shortcut because of the way keys are bound in Atom/Electron. Instead I had to use cmd + Y, which annoyed me plenty because it is at the right side of the keyboard, requiring me to use both hands to undo the undone.
• I want to learn vim and that doesn’t make sense if all the keys are in a different location. Sure, it’s possible to get a keyboard mapping so that everything is in the same place as on a Qwerty layout, but then whenever you read any kind of instruction, it’s going to be based on Qwerty — the thought of having to mentally map Qwerty vim to Dvorak vim already made me give up vim altogether (now I actually plan to learn it, I already started on Vim Adventures and this vim-inspired editor got me really enthusiastic).

In conclusion

I have switched back. I wrote this article in Qwerty and these last paragraphs went pretty smooth, I’m happy to say. Dvorak has benefits. I’ve already noticed that normal writing (not coding) is more natural on Dvorak. But I do much more than that with my keyboard — it’s an input device through which I perform all kinds of activities, not just writing emails and blog posts. Being a coder, my productivity depends on my tooling and Dvorak was just holding me back.

Goodbye Dvorak, it was great knowing you.