= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
dlthomas comments on Spend Money on Ergonomics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (208)
Do note that portability is basically a non-issue. If you expect to spend one-twentieth of your typing time on other computers (an insanely high estimate even for a backwards company's "IT guy") and we pessimistically assume that learning a new layout will magically reduce your old layout skills to hunt-and-peck[1], the gain in speed only has to be something like 5 wpm before it drowns out the lost speed on old layouts.
[1]: This is not supported by my experiences; two of my close friends have remapped to Dvorak and their QWERTY skills only mildly deteriorated. None of the concerns you have raised have been a problem for them; although one thing that did happen is it became impossible for any of us QWERTY users to type on their computers (something they quite enjoy).
I don't spend 1/20th of my typing time on computers I don't control, no. But I do think the time I spend on other computers is more likely to be particularly time critical, and I don't expect to get any real speed gain from the transition as my work is generally more thought or compute bound than typing-bound (data entry might be sped up significantly, but I don't spend 1/1000th of my time at the computer doing data entry).
They aren't married, are they? My wife complains enough about my running ratpoison...
Sure, and learning a different layout would make it even more thought- / compute-bound.
It doesn't work like that. Typing does not take conscious thought - it is overlapped with my thinking. Speeding up my typing even tenfold would not significantly speed up my output.
If your typing speed increased tenfold, you would go from "generally thought/compute bound" to "always thought/compute bound".
Except when bound by something unrelated. My point is that the gains are minimal, and putting my optimization effort there is ridiculous from a speed perspective - that's not how you do optimization, if you want to do it well. If there are actually large RSI gains to be had, that's another matter.