Poll of the Day > I don't know why they were like "QWERTY layout is outdated"...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Back when Dvorak was first proposed.

I can type faster than I can speak so I would say QWERTY layout hasn't held me back in any way. Changing it seems arbitrary.

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One branch of nerds are hyper fixated on making everything as optimized as possible, to the expense of just keeping it simple or keeping things the same.

It's maybe 30% faster, which is all that matters to them, as opposed to the fact that their hands can work faster than their brain most of the time.

Granted learning how to navigate QWERTY probably accounts for that, meaning the differences are ultimately down to experience and practice (there's no reason you couldn't get good at Dvorak other than to ruin your ability to use any other keyboard you could lay your hands on besides the one you use at home), but the layout of the keyboard doesn't seem like a big deal.

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Yeah, the fact that the world is QWERTY means that you need to flip things around super fast when you're just, like, using a keyboard from someone else.
It seems wildly annoying.

Wasn't QWERTY made the standard because it was so inefficient it prevented typewriters from jamming?

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I'm more concerned with which is easier to learn for new typists. Yes, QWERTY is fine for those of us who have been using it for decades, but if a different keyboard layout has the same or faster typing speed and is easier to pick up then it's worth adopting for the future. If there's no difference, then it doesn't seem worth the cost.

kosherliberian posted...

I'm more concerned with which is easier to learn for new typists. Yes, QWERTY is fine for those of us who have been using it for decades, but if a different keyboard layout has the same or faster typing speed and is easier to pick up then it's worth adopting for the future. If there's no difference, then it doesn't seem worth the cost.

How do you change it?
What rollout is a good way of handling it?

The idea is that you would be faster once you learned the new one. But you might be slower at first.

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"Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[4] but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands."
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shadowsword87 posted...

How do you change it?
What rollout is a good way of handling it?

Don't know
Don't know

Countries have switched to the metric system before which also required massive cultural changes and rollouts, so it's definitely possible. I'm not about to try to figure it out here though.

papercup posted...

Wasn't QWERTY made the standard because it was so inefficient it prevented typewriters from jamming?

Yup. It's layout was made with the intent of slowing down typists so that they didn't end up with jams. Course that's no longer an issue but by the time that computers became avalible to the public at large basically everyone was used to typewriter layouts so they just kept going with them.

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kosherliberian posted...

Countries have switched to the metric system before which also required massive cultural changes and rollouts, so it's definitely possible. I'm not about to try to figure it out here though.

They switched before they were was an industrial base, when everything was just mostly scientific measurements.

shadowsword87 posted...

They switched before they were was an industrial base, when everything was just mostly scientific measurements.

That's not true for all of them. There were major countries that metricated in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Hell the US even tried it in the 70s, but stopped (imo wrongly) due to the cost and time required to do it.

Unbridled9 posted...

Yup. It's layout was made with the intent of slowing down typists so that they didn't end up with jams. Course that's no longer an issue but by the time that computers became avalible to the public at large basically everyone was used to typewriter layouts so they just kept going with them.

No. Stop saying wrong things.
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