Re: [TCLUG:2516] posters and questions

[barnabas@pobox.com]

John R Sheets wrote:
-> Eric Hillman wrote:
-> > > -Does Redhat support Dvorak keyboards?
-> > 
-> >         Yes. (You didn't ask, but, I, for one, think that the Dvorak hype is
-> > overblown.  I recall one study which showed that Dvorak may accelerate
-> > carpal tunnel damage because it concentrates too much on the right hand,
-> > whereas QWERTY favors the left and requires more alternation between hands.
-> > My opinion is that Dvorak may be more damaging, but the probable cause is
-> > Dvorak zealots pounding the hell out of their fingers trying to prove
-> > they've gained 5 words a minute since switching...)

-> Interesting (and colorful) perspective.  That's an angle I hadn't
-> thought about.  I've putzed around with Dvorak a little, and
-> wouldn't mind learning it as a change of pace (but I'll never
-> give up good ol' QWERTY).  Dvorak does seem to make a little more
-> physical sense than QWERTY, but I wouldn't deny the carpal tunnel
-> problem.  Who knows?  All the vowels are on the left side, so
-> maybe if you're writing in Hawaiian both hands balance out and
-> carpal tunnel isn't a problem.  (c:

I have been a Dvorak user for about a year and a half.  I use it
exclusively on my keyboards.  (As a system administrator, I do a fair
amount of typing on the Qwerty keyboards of my co-workers.)  I find
the carpal tunnel problems a little hard to believe.  I've actually
had less problem with my wrists since I started using it, although I
also try hard to have good typing posture.

The distribution of the letters on the Dvorak keyboard is such that
all the vowels are under the left hand and that would tend to cause
you to alternate hands when typing.  The vowels are also in the home
row so that you are moving less to reach them.  Looking at this mail
message (in a _very_ non-scientific manner), I would guess that
approximately 30-40% of the letters are vowels and when you add to
that the consonants and punctuation that are in the left hand in the
Dvorak layout, you may get at least 45% left-hand typing and 55%
right-hand -- not too far from balanced.

As for the speed issue, I don't make any claim that it is faster --
only that it is less work.  One study cited was that an "average"
typist's fingers travel 16 miles per day on a Qwerty keyboard where
they only travel 1 mile on a Dvorak keyboard.  That is easy to see in
that of the 104 non-space characters in this sentence, only 28 are not
on the home row, a measly 27 percent.  On the Qwerty keyboard, 75
percent of the characters in the previous sentence would be off the
home row.

Peter Lukas wrote:

-> You can do it in X by changing the keymap config in X and restarting the
-> server (the Linux 3-finger salute ctrl+alt+bksp).  This should be well
-> documented in the online help available so long as you remember to install
-> it.

-> Peter Lukas
-> Math Systems Office
-> University of Minnesota


-> On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, John R Sheets wrote:

-> > Peter Lukas wrote:
-> > > Dvorak and a number of other keyboard types are supported.
-> > 
-> > Know of any good utilities to switch between them interactively? 
-> > As I understand it, you can do it on a kernel level, or on an X
-> > session level (please correct me if I'm misstating).  I don't
-> > care about the former, but would like to be able to switch back &
-> > forth inside of X.
-> > 
-> > John
-> > 

On systems where I am the only one typing, I use the "kernel" method
of remapping the keyboard.  Whether it's in the kernel, I don't know,
but it does affect the entire system, including the consoles.  This
method uses the loadkeys command (/usr/bin/loadkeys) and a map found
in /usr/lib/kbd/keytables (on a Slackware system, at least).

On systems where there are both Qwerty and Dvorak users (my home
machine), I use xmodmap to remap the keyboard once X is running.  With
this method you don't need to restart the X server.  I have had some
trouble with the mapping of special keys, but I didn't look into it
since it didn't give me a great deal of trouble and I haven't seen it
in quite a while.  If you are interested I'll send you the map that I
use.

Finally, if anyone is interested in learning the Dvorak layout, the
method I used to learn the keyboard was a typing tutorial found at
www.zocalo.net/~danwood/abcd.

Eric