Dvorak vs Qwerty

In 1868, when the typewriter was first invented, the keyboard was laid out in alphabetical order – which makes complete sense.

The problem here was that the type bars that strike the paper would often get jammed when particular letters were typed too quickly together in sequence.

The solution, was to separate these letters as far away from each other as possible on the keyboard, slowing down the typing process but reducing annoying jams as much as possible – enter, the QWERTY keyboard.

Of course, today, we don’t use typewriters nor do digital keyboards suffer from the jamming problem, yet it would be safe to say that most of the world still uses this outdated, inefficient, even RSI inflicting keyboard layout.

The truth is that every computer has multiple software keyboards to swap out QWERTY with other alternatives.

The DVORAK layout places the most common letters used in the English language right on the ‘home’ position where your fingers rest, allowing you to at least double your typing speed and more than halve the distance your fingers need to ‘walk’ to type any document (or blog post!), all the while making fewer typing mistakes.

So in this typewriter-less day and age, why does the world still use QWERTY and not DVORAK?

Because that’s what we’ve always done, everyone else is doing it and its easier not to change.

Even if staying with a bad system costs us time, money and pain.

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