Re: Dvorak keyboard (was Re: Simple Lojban questions)

[George Foot <george.foot@merton.oxford.ac.uk>]

On 30 Sep 97 at 10:38, Edward Cherlin wrote:

> I use Dvorak except when I am on other people's systems and am not allowed
> to change their settings. It does nothing to help with consonants in
> Lojban, but having the vowels on the home row under one hand is certainly
> an advantage over       QWERTY, French AZERTY, and so on. V'V is a bit
> clumsy, though.

I use Dvorak, and type in Lojban (not a great deal recently, though).
I certainly don't find it a problem; I agree that the location of
thte vowels will be as useful in Lojban as in English, particularly
since Lojban has a habit of alternating them. Analysing the right
hand use would involve a study of valid consonant clusters, seeing
where they lie on the keyboard.

As for the left hand, `Y' isn't used much in Lojban, `Q' not at all,
so their location near the vowels isn't a problem. `K' seems quite
common, and this can get uncomfortable (a lot of work on the
forefinger). `X' also falls on that forefinger but doesn't seem too
common. `J' comes up quite a bit, but `.' is (apparently) optional,
so there's not too much for that finger to do. `,' is extremely
rare. The location of the apostrophe is somewhat annoying, but that
finger isn't overworked; switching to/from `A' is awkward.

Something I do tend to do (bad habit...) is move my left hand one key
to the right; this shares the load on the forefinger more. Very bad
practice, I think... :)

I do think Dvorak is more comfortable than QWERTY in Lojban (I was
using QWERTY when I started Lojban) but not to the same extent that
it's more comfortable in English.

--
George Foot (george.foot@merton.ox.ac.uk)
Merton College, Oxford.