[ludicast]

It gets better in terms of ease, especially if you practice and drill a bit. And it's really cool when you realise one day that you can type in both keyboards at about the same speed (because you will encounter qwerty more often than you think). The human brain is wacky.

But the fact is we live in a qwerty world. Even though I used dvorak for a while, I switched back. Partly because I'm a vim guy. The hjkl religion has a different god with a different keyboard and it all goes to shit. I mean there's dvorak-friendly vim mappings but at that point you're going down a rabbit-hole of ridiculousness.

That said, if the world was more dvorak-friendly (or you could convince your smaller world to be), that would be a good thing. And I would jump back in a heartbeat.

Also, I think I've read some keyboards like colmak are supposedly even better, so in terms of bang for buck it might be best investigating alternatives so you can optimize your degeneracy.

[Libbum]

hjkl is indeed an important aspect of the choice to switch. I found the answer to this SO question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/165231/vim-dvorak-keybind...) to be extremely helpful in that regard. Keep your fingers where they should be and remap less important actions to replacement keys.

[aliceyhg]

thank you for the Stack overflow post. I'm going to look into the mappings. I'm using vim and dvorak started off awkward but I kind of get used to it. navigating up down on the left hand (jk is cv), navigating left right on the right (hl is jp).