As a Dvorak user, I find it very odd that he has a version of the keybinding (http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html http://xahlee.org/emacs/er

As a Dvorak user, I find it very odd that he has a version of the keybinding (http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html http://xahlee.org/emacs/ergonomic_emacs_keybinding.html) with all the letters swapped around so that shortcuts are in the same physical place that they would be on a QWERTY keyboard(!). I can see relearning C for copy, as it's logical and would reduce the burden of switching between normal Mac/PC applications, but having J mean copy because that key would have been C in QWERTY is just too weird. I think about lots of Emacs bindings mnemonically: C-b, C-f and friends, obviously, or C-c because that's just the "bindings having to do with this mode" key, and you see it a lot when you read documentation -- in my head, it's a letter, not a physical position. I touch-type Dvorak pretty fast, but two-finger type it very slowly, because in my brain the letters are wired to finger movements starting on the home row. A possible reason for this is that he has an "inverted T" for cursor movement (but on the left hand, like vi, not WASD like I believe PC gamers would be used to). If your set of cursor keys is based on the physical layout of QWERTY, like vi, it doesn't translate all that well to Dvorak (vi manages to be not horrible since J and K stay next to each other, but in this proposal J and K are not on the same axis), but if they are mnemnonic, like Emacs, there's no problem. If the idea is to fit better with what the vast majority of "normal" people expect computers to work... well, normal people use the arrow keys. Telling them an invented abstraction is better because they don't have to move their hands from home row isn't going to sell them, I think.