Types Of Keyboards Based On Layouts! Do You Even Know About Dvorak!

     Keyboards are one of the most used If not the most used input devices. Your phone has a Keyboard, your laptop has a keyboard, your desktop has a keyboard, your tablet has a keyboard, and even Servers have keyboards. The first generation of keyboards was obviously Typewriters. Typewriters were the first to have an array of keys which when pressed would produce a character on the paper. Typewriters were invented in the 1860s and were really in their initial stage. All the keys were arranged alphabetically which made the type bars (Bars which connected keys from the internals) gets jammed or stuck, which was not good as the typist needed to unjam the machine.

     But, this came to an end when Christopher Latham Sholes introduced the QWERTY layout. “Which was introduced to slow down the typists”, is a misconception that many people have. The QWERTY layout was not introduced to slow down the typist but to stop the keys from jamming, by placing keys which are not commonly used next to each other. In fact, QWERTY layout was introduced to increase the typing speed and to get rid of jams.  QWERTY gained momentum with its inclusion in the Remington Standard No. 2 in 1889. Fun fact it was also the first typewriter to include a shift key to easily shift between upper and lower case characters. Eventually the layout became so popular that it is still the most used layout to this day!

     But we don’t use typewriters today as laptops and desktops have come along. Typewriters are almost old-fashioned today but QWERTY which was designed for Typewriters is still not old-fashioned. Well, there not many reasons for that but it still does not mean there are no other layouts. Many layouts have emerged over the past decades with concerns to languages, functionalities and just layout. Some of the memorable ones include AZERTY, Colemak, Maltron, JCUKEN, etc. But, the most non-QWERTY layout is Dvorak. The Dvorak layout was designed carefully by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey in 1936. Which he named after himself and was originally designed to increase the speed of typing with many things in mind.

     Dvorak layout has 70% of its writing in the home row with consonants on the right and vowels on the left. Whereas, In QWERTY 32% of the writing is done on the home row. Dvorak seem all good on the surface and all OS excluding MacOS have built-in support for Dvorak. But, if you are actually going to use it there are some hurdles to overcome. Many applications are designed e=to work best with the QWERTY layout. Many games might not even be able to work in Dvorak as the shortcuts may go away from each other. Even exert typist’s will take Months (Weeks, If you’re genius) to get used to the Dvorak layout and get back to normal typing speed. And good luck using WASD for directional gaming. But, there hasn’t just been some moving research that makes Dvorak 10 times better than QWERTY, while the ones that have been done are by Mr Dvorak himself.

     Even though we think that Dvorak is a superior layout we have not switched to it. And if you are going to switch from QWERTY we respect you already. And it should be noted that we only included layout changes entirely and not layouts based on regions such as the French layout, Indian layout etc. “Colemak is the most efficient "common" layout.” Is also what we have heard a lot of times? “By all currently measured accounts (outside of syntax-heavy programming) and on a normal, bog standard keyboard, Colemak is the most efficient "common" layout. This means that in general, it is faster than Dvorak.” Is said by Colemak lovers. To read more of such articles and Tech news visit RW Tech Blog.

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