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I switched to Dvorak on a keyboard without changing the key caps. That has about the same effect. It took me 2 days of staring on a colour coded map (each finge

by bjoli 6y ago

I switched to Dvorak on a keyboard without changing the key caps. That has about the same effect. It took me 2 days of staring on a colour coded map (each finger had a different colour) taped to the top of my screen before my brain just went "ok. I got this now" and I went from about 25wpm to 80 in 20 minutes. Such a weird experience. 4 days after switching I was back to 110wpm where I left qwerty, and now I am at 120 in one-minute bursts. About 90 sustained. I switched mainly because I was a nerd poser in high school, but also because I had some warning signs of carpal tunnel syndrome. No issues since.

allknowingfrog 6y ago
Oh man, I did a similar thing in grad school, but I made the mistake of trying to keep both layouts in my head. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I couldn't seem to do it. I finally committed to Dvorak and it has scored me some nerd cred over the years. Interestingly, numbers and symbols continued to trip me up, and they are one of the few areas of overlap between QWERTY and Dvorak. I finally switched to a blank keyboard and that did seem to help.
- bjoli 6y ago
  I have moved several symbols to an extra layer under the right alt (or "alt gr" as it is called in the Swedish layout), and that helped a lot. I can type parens without leaving the home row, which helps my scheme programming by about a billion percent.
jerf 6y ago
In my opinion, the reason people don't learn to touchtype is that the QWERTY keyboard layout doesn't reward touchtyping. You have to beat yourself up to "force" yourself to keep your hands over the home keys, because the natural use for QWERTY is to wander away from the home row. If you learn Dvorak, or, frankly, any layout designed to minimize movement, you will naturally learn to touchtype, because the layout rewards being on the home row. You don't have to try to force yourself to stay on the home row, your hands will be there anyhow. And from there, with your newfound hand stability, it's not hard to learn to touch type without looking. It'll just happen and one day you'll notice that you've been doing it for weeks. It may literally be easier to switch to Dvorak than to whip yourself hard enough to learn to "touchtype" on QWERTY.

by bjoli 6y ago

allknowingfrog 6y ago

Oh man, I did a similar thing in grad school, but I made the mistake of trying to keep both layouts in my head. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I couldn't seem to do it. I finally committed to Dvorak and it has scored me some nerd cred over the years. Interestingly, numbers and symbols continued to trip me up, and they are one of the few areas of overlap between QWERTY and Dvorak. I finally switched to a blank keyboard and that did seem to help.

bjoli 6y ago
I have moved several symbols to an extra layer under the right alt (or "alt gr" as it is called in the Swedish layout), and that helped a lot. I can type parens without leaving the home row, which helps my scheme programming by about a billion percent.

jerf 6y ago

In my opinion, the reason people don't learn to touchtype is that the QWERTY keyboard layout doesn't reward touchtyping. You have to beat yourself up to "force" yourself to keep your hands over the home keys, because the natural use for QWERTY is to wander away from the home row. If you learn Dvorak, or, frankly, any layout designed to minimize movement, you will naturally learn to touchtype, because the layout rewards being on the home row. You don't have to try to force yourself to stay on the home row, your hands will be there anyhow. And from there, with your newfound hand stability, it's not hard to learn to touch type without looking. It'll just happen and one day you'll notice that you've been doing it for weeks. It may literally be easier to switch to Dvorak than to whip yourself hard enough to learn to "touchtype" on QWERTY.