4 ms·

Difference in what: long term hand health, comfort, efficiency? Anecdotally, I taught myself Dvorak for a couple of months. I never reached speed parity, but t

Difference in what: long term hand health, comfort, efficiency? Anecdotally, I taught myself Dvorak for a couple of months. I never reached speed parity, but typing felt significantly better. The number of common words which roll off of the home row was a treat. I could easily believe that this would put less pressure on keyboards than QWERTY. My ultimate blocker was keyboard shortcuts. You get into a weird spot if you choose to maintain the original character chord (DVORAK CTRL-C would be CTRL-I on QWERTY) or force the QWERTY layout character.

highmastdon 3y ago
You should take a look at Colemak. It keeps the zxcv at the same place, particularly for shortcuts. I’ve switched now 6 years ago. I had a speed of about 80-85 wpm on Qwerty. And now recently I’m on the same speed with Colemak. So that took about 5 years, without deliberate practice. However after 4 months I was already at 57 WPM which is perfectly fine to be productive. I still type with thumbs on qwerty though. So I haven’t changed my phone to colemak. I must say though that when typing at a colleague's keyboard, I have to type with 4 fingers in order not to confuse the layout. I’m not able to do both as touch typing
tbocek 3y ago
I had the same issue, so I implemented the following workaround: https://github.com/tbocek/dvorak https://github.com/tbocek/dvorak. This remaps on Linux CTRL-I back to CTRL-C when using a Dvorak keyboard layout.
opan 3y ago
I see people occasionally mention shortcuts or vim as reasons they can't switch layouts, but I've done it multiple times and you just learn the new spots, same as typing words with all the letters that moved. It never felt like a showstopper for me.
- teo_zero 3y ago
  Alas, it's not only about learning new spots. I never use any of the super useful motions with [ and { in Vi simply because they're only accessible via AltGr in my national layout.

highmastdon 3y ago

You should take a look at Colemak. It keeps the zxcv at the same place, particularly for shortcuts. I’ve switched now 6 years ago. I had a speed of about 80-85 wpm on Qwerty. And now recently I’m on the same speed with Colemak. So that took about 5 years, without deliberate practice. However after 4 months I was already at 57 WPM which is perfectly fine to be productive. I still type with thumbs on qwerty though. So I haven’t changed my phone to colemak. I must say though that when typing at a colleague's keyboard, I have to type with 4 fingers in order not to confuse the layout. I’m not able to do both as touch typing

tbocek 3y ago

I had the same issue, so I implemented the following workaround: https://github.com/tbocek/dvorak https://github.com/tbocek/dvorak. This remaps on Linux CTRL-I back to CTRL-C when using a Dvorak keyboard layout.

opan 3y ago

I see people occasionally mention shortcuts or vim as reasons they can't switch layouts, but I've done it multiple times and you just learn the new spots, same as typing words with all the letters that moved. It never felt like a showstopper for me.

teo_zero 3y ago
Alas, it's not only about learning new spots. I never use any of the super useful motions with [ and { in Vi simply because they're only accessible via AltGr in my national layout.