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.
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).