The Monkey Cage

Almost everybody in the U.S. who uses a keyboard — i.e., almost everybody — uses one with a qwerty rather than Dvorak configuration of the keys. This is an anachronism. Back in the old days of typewriters (remember typewriters?), adjacent keys would often stick together if depressed one after the other. If the keys for the popular letters were clustered together, numerous keyjams would occur. To avoid them, the keyboard was laid out so that the most frequently struck keys were scattered all over the place so they wouldn’t get in one another’s way — the rationale for the qwerty keyboard.

Advances in keyboard technology have meant that keyjams are no longer a consideration, giving new life to advocates of a more “rational” keyboard layout — the Dvorak setup shown above. Dvorak advocates — a small but hearty band — claim that that configuration enables them to type faster and with less strain. But converting Americans to the Dvorak configuration turns out to be pretty much like converting them to the metric system: too many people have learned to type the old way and the costs of changing over to the new way would be considerable. So the Dvorak fans have been limping along with various work-arounds that involve reprogramming qwerty keyboards to think they’re Dvorak keyboards.

All well and good. But now along come smartphones — Blackberries and iPhones and the like — and guess what? They come in qwerty-only configurations. And so now the Dvorak people have a new war to wage. Here’s a more complete update on the situation, as told by Joseph De Avila in today’s Wall Street Journal.