Dvorak keyboard layout

[7][8] However, most major modern operating systems (such as Windows,[9] macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, and BSD) allow a user to switch to the Dvorak layout.

Dvorak was designed with the belief that it would significantly increase typing speeds with respect to the QWERTY layout by alleviating some of its perceived shortcomings, such as:[10] August Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of the hand and created a new layout to alleviate the above problems, based on the following principles:[10] The Dvorak layout is intended for the English language, since other European languages have letter frequencies, letter sequences, and bigrams differing from those of English.

In 1914 and 1915, Dealey attended seminars on the science of motion and later reviewed slow-motion films of typists with Dvorak.

The Dvorak keyboard uses the same letters in its home row, apart from replacing R with U, and even keeps the consonants in the same order, but moves the vowels to the left: AOEUIDHTNS.

In this environment, the General Services Administration commissioned Earle Strong to determine whether the switch from QWERTY to Dvorak should be made.

The carefully controlled study failed to show any benefit to the Dvorak keyboard layout in typing or training speed.

Strong recommended speed training with QWERTY rather than switching keyboards, and attributed the previous apparent benefits of Dvorak to improper experimental design and outright bias on the part of Dvorak, who had designed and directed the previous studies.

However, Strong had a personal grudge against Dvorak and had made public statements before his study opposing new keyboard designs.

[17] Later experiments have shown that many keyboard designs, including some alphabetical ones, allow very similar typing speeds to QWERTY and Dvorak when typists have been trained for them, suggesting that Dvorak's careful design principles may have had little effect because keyboard layout is only a small part of the complicated physical activity of typing.

[19] The work of Dvorak paved the way for other optimized keyboard layouts for English such as Colemak, but also for other languages such as the German Neo and the French BÉPO.

Amiga operating systems from the 1986 version 1.2 onward allow the user to modify the keyboard layout by using the setmap command line utility with "usa2" as an argument, or later in 3.x systems by opening the keyboard input preference widget and selecting "Dvorak".

Many operating systems based on UNIX, including OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, Plan 9, and most Linux distributions, can be configured to use the U.S. Dvorak layout and a handful of variants.

Several engineers devised hardware and software to remap the keyboard, which were used inside the company and even sold commercially.

[citation needed] The Apple Lisa did not offer the Dvorak keyboard mapping, though it was purportedly available through undocumented interfaces.

By keeping familiar keyboard shortcuts like "close" or "copy" on the same keys as ordinary QWERTY, this lets some people use their well-practiced muscle memory and may make the transition easier.

Mac OS and subsequently Mac OS X allow additional "on-the-fly" switching between layouts: a menu-bar icon (by default, a national flag that matches the current language, a 'DV' represents Dvorak and a 'DQ' represents Dvorak – Qwerty ⌘) brings up a drop-down menu, allowing the user to choose the desired layout.

iOS 8.0 and later had the option to install onscreen keyboards from the App Store, which includes several free and paid Dvorak layouts.

[28] Google's Android OS touchscreen keyboard can use Dvorak and other nonstandard layouts natively as of version 4.1.

[29] The traditional method for touch typing requires typists to rest their fingers in home position (on QWERTY, the "ASDF" and "JKL;" keys).

[31] Because the Dvorak layout requires less finger motion from the typist compared to QWERTY, some users with repetitive strain injuries have reported that switching from QWERTY to Dvorak alleviated or even eliminated their repetitive strain injuries;[32][33] however, no scientific study has been conducted verifying this.

In contrast, there are only a few words requiring a hurdle on the Dvorak layout (e.g. "spiky", where the "piky" is typed entirely on the left pointer finger; it corresponds to ";rgvt" on QWERTY).

However, this benefit dwindles for longer words, because one English syllable can contain numerous consonants (as in "schmaltz" or "strengths").

Programmer Dvorak was developed by Roland Kaufmann and was designed based on code in C, Java, Pascal, Lisp, HTML, CSS and XML.

The Dvorak layout is designed to improve touch-typing, in which the user rests their fingers on the home row.

[40] In 1956, a study with a sample of 10 people in each group conducted by Earle Strong of the U.S. General Services Administration found Dvorak no more efficient than QWERTY[41] and claimed it would be too costly to retrain the employees.

[51] Finnish can also be typed reasonably well with the English Dvorak layout if the letters ä and ö are added.

The Finnish ArkkuDvorak keyboard layout[52] adds both on a single key and keeps the American placement for each other character.

The Norwegian implementation (known as "NorskDvorak") is similar to Parment's layout, with "æ" and "ø" replacing "ä" and "ö".

This major design goal also makes it possible to "convert" a Swedish QWERTY keyboard to SVORAK simply by moving keycaps around.

key retains its classic Dvorak location, top right, albeit shifted[citation needed].