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• About Lost Squadron
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• Dvorak keyboard layout
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About Lost Squadron

Currently we at exDream have finally started working on the next project and will produce a nice graphic demo/prototype in the next 3 month. I will try to sneak in a couple of screenshots of it from time to time.

Todays topic

We talked a bit about other keyboard layouts like Dvorak, which is way more effective and relaxing than any qwerty layout, but I got no free time back then. You will need around a week to learn to type at low speeds and at least a month to get back to a better typing speed.

Dvorak

After Arena Wars was finished last year I got finally some time to start learning Dvorak. Dvorak seems very nice (see the links below for additional information) and has a lot of advantages for typing "normal" text (but some people exaggerate "a little").

Anyway, while playing around with Dvorak (us default layout) I really found some things VERY annoying, especially for coding and playing games:

• It is fairly hard to learn a new layout and getting really back to the old speed again. Additionally hotkeys you typical need on a computer are totally crazy and unusable. Hard to learn when you used QWERTY all your life, learning can be done in a week or so, but really being able to get back to your old speed can take months (and is painful).
• Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V can't be used as easy. I always use my left hand while my right hand can use the mouse, especially for browsing, code comparing, getting text from one place to another, etc. and all this happens VERY often! I know you can also use Shift+Insert, Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Delete, but these shortkeys are just plain unuseable, maybe for lefties, but the keys still suck.
• Hotkeys can't be used the way they used to be, for some games its possible to change hotkeys, for others not (like starcraft, at least its not easy to change) This does not only apply to games, but also a lot for applications, especially when you remembered just the location where to press and not the name of the hotkey, e.g. when using photoshop, you have to re-learn the hotkeys. Also stuff like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+O, Ctrl+F, Ctrl+R, etc. is usually remembered by the positions on the keyboard and not by the key and relearning this keys is pretty hard!
• Dvorak is optimized for typical english words, but not for programming, some keys are even worse than the german keyboard layout. But what I really don't like is the way Dvorak handles symbols like []{};:?+-/, etc.
  Its not that QWERTY is really good for coding, especially when typing stuff like () or -, = or +, but overall it performs still better than Dvorak (counting only symbols).

I've also collected some interessting facts when comparing Dvorak and QWERTY considering c#/c++/java code. Click this link to test it yourself.

• When pasting random stuff into the Keyboard Compare Applet, QWERTY performs almost twice as good as Dvorak (Note: We are not random key generators, usually we type text or code which makes sense ^^).
• When just pasting c# code stuff without much text like
  if ( a == 0 )
  {
  doIt( a!=0?a:0 );
  } // if
  QWERTY still outperforms Dvorak, which can't be good!

I created my own keyboard layout to solve all the problems (yeah, now its getting real geeky), but I based it on the Dvorak layout, which is really efficient and nice for typing "normal" text (which is still required a lot, even by crazy coders).
To solve the Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V problem I simply moved that keys to the QWERTY position and exchange the other keys accordingly. This didn't matter much because there isn't much of a difference between X,C,V and Q,J,K according to the key usage (see below).

At this time I was already using Dvorak for about a week or two and had spend a lot of effort into learning and thinking about improvement, I wanted a perfect solution. I checked typical c# and c++ code and wrote a program to count how often each key is used. Now I got the most important keys and asigned the best spot for each symbol using the distance (see the Keyboard Compare Applet) and how much it is used. Using shift is also a major impact IMO, especially when keys are far away.

So I wrote a little test program to count the used keys in all my *.cs files in my code folder, check out the results below.

Screenshot of the program (I improved it yesterday, it was a console tool before):

abi/blog/CountMostUsedKeys.zip">Download the CountMostUsedKeys program.

abi/blog/CountMostUsedKeys_src.zip">And the source code for anyone interessted
(may be useful if you want to write some line count tool yourself)


CountMostUsedKeys results:
Search mode=Everything, File type=*.cs, Directory=C:\code\
Number of files=4041, Number of lines=2031908, Number of keys=67829575

Same results without space and letters, very useful to assign the most important symbol keys:
Search mode=ExceptLetters

Based on that I created my own keyboard layout, which was updated 9 times until I was happy with it.

Version 1 looked like this (pretty much like dvorak, some cosmetic changes at the right side):

Version 2: The next thing I did was moved the Z X C V keys back and copied some keys around, () are moved to normal keys, () is used much more than [] or {}.

In Version 3-6 I tried moving some keys around based on the distance and effectiveness, but I moved most of them back because they felt really uncomfortable and were bad for hotkeys. One bigger change was moving the . , () keys back down, which improves typing speed a lot because we really need more keys on the left side when using the mouse with the right hand and when typing the right hand can easily handle most of the symbol keys on the right side.

Version 7 was pretty much the final version, I trained this version a week and except some minor cosmetic changes in the upper row everything stayed this way till the last version:

Version 8 and 9 changed only the positions of J D F K B and the ? | and + - keys, at first I didn't like the position for b at the right side, but b is used a lot in combination with vocal keys unlike j, it is much better to have it on the right side. The + - key on the upper left is now the same as the key on the lower right (which is not present on all keyboards).

This is the final Version 9 I am using for nearly 6 months now, I got up to my old speed in the first 1-2 months and now I type even faster and more relaxed than before (maybe around 400 keystrokes per minute for normal text if I try hard). I wouldn't suggest changing your keyboard layout just because you might be a little faster with Dvorak or my keyboard layout, I think the comfortablity is at least as important as the speed. In my option the greatest thing about my keyboard layout (or dvorak for normal text) is the fact you can type most of the time without moving your fingers much (90% of the most used keys are directly on the center row).

abi/blog/abiKeyboardV9.zip">Download AbiKeyboardV9 installer

I was not trying to create the best keyboard layout ever or to make Dvorak obsolete, I just want to improve it for me and other interessted programmer. If you get started with Dvorak or my keyboard layout you should use some keyboard training tool and spend a couple of hours (but not much longer) each day training it. I found this website very useful: Learning Dvorak

The main reason I wrote this article now was the nagging of some people I told about this and who wanted to know more, so keep nagging if you want to see articles like this :)

If you got comments or some ideas to improve this even more, let me now!

Useful links