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Like many others, I had heard the QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow people down so the old school typewriters wouldn’t jam. I was young and let the information settle into the back of my mind without much thought. Finally, years and years later, it was brought back to the fore-front by an exclamation of “WHY IS THE SEMICOLON ON THE HOME ROW!?” from Jess. This time, I decided to find out what I could about QWERTY and the ‘other’ layouts I had vaguely heard about.

I took my search to the interweb and was surprised to find a particularly heated argument between the QWERTY people and the group supporting the Dvorak layout, a layout patented by Dr. Dvorak in 1936 to maximize efficiency when typing in English. If you haven’t heard about Dvorak before, I suggest you check it out. At the time I am writing this the Wikipedia link is rather good, but there are never any guarantees there. Some key points about Dvorak:

• The most common english letters are on the home row
• The most common digraphs are split between hands to encourage alternation - the longest english words you can type on dvorak using only one hand have 6 letters (papaya, opaque, etc), compared to stewardesses, aftereffects, desegregated on QWERTY with 12.
• Dvorak is laid out to minimize movement between rows, with the most common letters on the home row, next most common on the top, and the very least common letters on the bottom.

There have been a few studies, even one by the navy, that suggest one side or the other is correct, but no matter what the studies show, the other side will claim the data has been manipulated or the study was done incorrectly. There are literally hundreds of sites about each study and why it is or is not valid. You may want to check out some of the famous articles supporting each side. The chains of papers and responses are sometimes rather entertaining (check out “The Fable of the Keys” written at UTD in ‘90 and a response “The Fable of the Fable”).

Finally, unable to find any satisfying information (but leaning HEAVILY toward Dvorak), I decided it would be fun to switch and document the change myself. My goal is not to prove anything ‘once and for all’, nor is it to provide sound research data. I DO intend to show as much information as I can about a specific case where a very capable QWERTY typist switches over. To best document the change, I would need a typing program with these special features:

1. Dynamic content - To document my typing over a long period of time, I need a large amount of changing content, both for my sanity and the data’s sake (typing memorized text is faster than new text).

2. Automatic Data Tracking - While I certainly could copy/paste my results from some free typing test, the idea of doing that a few hundred times makes me cringe.

I looked around online, but didn’t immediately find anything suitable. Granted, I didn’t look very hard so there are probably programs out there, but whatev. After my brief search yielded no results, I decided to write my own program that exactly fit my needs, and that is what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks.

Finally, version 1 is finished and ready to be released. The program, called WPMC for words-per-minute counter, is a simple multi-user typing program that tracks your typing speed and accuracy over time. It generates content through a system of plugins. Anyone with a little python knowledge can easily write a plugin to create source text from anywhere they desire, but WPMC ’ships’ with 9 plugins that read information from e-books and online news feeds (plus one that reads the Sol category of this blog). The source text from my plugins can be pretty hardcore — some of the names in “The Odyssey” can really take your WPM hostage, but if you want easy things to type, writing a plugin for it is simple enough. If you have a good idea for a plugin but don’t want to write it yourself, send me an email or post it in a comment and I’ll do what I can.

I am releasing WPMC as freeware for now so anyone can download it and see what program I am using to document my Dvorak progress. Version 1 has some limitations in it, but if enough people are interested in WPMC, I will code up version 2, which will be a lot more user friendly. As of right now, WPMC works just fine, but it doesn’t have the plethora of options that might be necessary for a full-fledged program.

Anyway, I plan to make the switch to Dvorak next week when I return from out of town. In the days between I will be using WPMC to document my QWERTY speeds so I can get some good WPM and accuracy numbers to base observations on. If you want to download and check out WPMC, please go to the download page here. I’d greatly appreciate any links to that page or this one.