Cool article, I like honest reviews like this. I think a lot of people who learned Dvorak won't admit to themselves that it hasn't been worth it, because of the

Cool article, I like honest reviews like this. I think a lot of people who learned Dvorak won't admit to themselves that it hasn't been worth it, because of the sunk cost (?) fallacy hindering objective self-reporting. The thing with Dvorak is that putting all the vowels on the homerow for one hand actually turns out to be a bad idea. It's a classic example of a technical person trying to optimize something and actually making the thing worse. In Dvorak, one hand is flying all around the keyboard and making a wide variety of motions while the other is stuck in place, stiff as a board, typing at the homerow like a machine. You really can feel the difference after a day of typing like this -- the consonant hand feeling healthy with the vowel hand feeling cramped. If RSI were a real phenomenon then learning Dvorak would surely make it worse, but fortunately RSI is psychological so Dvorak and the expectation effect actually make it better usually. QWERTY turns out to be a pretty good layout because of the mostly random location of the keys. It's actually a good thing. You want your hands to be moving, not staying in one place or they'll stiff up. Learning alternate layouts has negative net benefits and the worst thing is that because of human psychology, people who undertake the difficult (but useless) endeavor of switching layouts can't look at the results objectively.