I switched to Dvorak years ago. I went cold turkey. Stuck a keyboard layout below my monitor and didn't bother relabeling the keys. Also taught myself how to ty

I switched to Dvorak years ago. I went cold turkey. Stuck a keyboard layout below my monitor and didn't bother relabeling the keys. Also taught myself how to type correctly while i was at it. It was two weeks of brutally slow typing, but it was worth every moment. I'll never go back. Downside to Dvorak is that it was based on english language, but programmers type a lot of characters that are really rare in english: {}[]/;<> etc. So, those end up being a little less optimally placed than you'd want them. That being said i would strongly recommend against anything more exotic than Dvorak, because it's very close to optimal, and when you go to any computer you know that you won't have to download and custom-install some layout to be able to type anything. All modern OSs come with Dvorak on them. You just need to go to the settings and turn it on. One of the upsides to Dvorak (besides a great excuse to learn to type correctly) is that it's actually much more ergonomic. When typing English you're typically alternating hands with each keystroke. That combined with less weird finger movements left me with far less wrist strain. As for speed, I'm back at 83 WPM. Would I recommend it? I love dvorak, but I suspect that more important than it is knowing how to type correctly. If you're serious about the health of your wrists and willing to invest in keyboards that are actually ergonomic (like the Kinesis advantage) rather than keyboards which do some actively bad things and slap the "Ergonomic" label on them (Microsoft Ergo) then yeah, I believe that investing the time in switching to Dvorak is a worthwhile addition to help ward off carpal tunnel.