From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Tue Sep 30 20:17:23 1997 Message-Id: <199710010117.UAA29375@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue Sep 30 20:17:23 1997 Reply-To: george.foot@merton.oxford.ac.uk Sender: Lojban list Comments: Authenticated sender is From: George Foot Subject: Re: Dvorak keyboard (was Re: Simple Lojban questions) X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1698 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.