| It gets better, and if you are a programmer, I recommend go straight to Dvorak for Programmers or similar coder-oriented layout. I made the switch in 2011 and still one of the best decisions I've made. I set up the hotkey to rapidly switch between QWERTY and Dvorak because I 'defaulted' a LOT that first month (this is essential and don't let it discourage you to switch a lot!). I did a lot of drills for the first two weeks - there was a website specifically for drilling Dvorak, and it took some forcing to stick with the layout on non-critical tasks. Peak QWERTY before was ~70-80 WPM. After about 2 months I was 50 WPM Dvorak and a slight dent in Qwerty speed. Not sure when the crossover occurred exactly, but a month or so later I was at 80 in Dvorak. I use Qwerty about 2% of the time but remain bi-lingual (bi-manual?) at ~75, with Dvorak just squeaking over 90. Occasionally I'll get [qwertial aphasia](https://xkcd.com/604/) and get stuck in the wrong brain mode for a few words when switching. At this point, I've found the biggest limiter is muscle memory (letter patterns/n-grams), mistakes, and reading in words when taking these typing tests. But Qwerty feels like "crazy fingers", I feel like my fingers are all over the place, where Dvorak spends most of the time on home and upper row. Started learning Dvorak for Programmers a few months ago and I really like that a lot - the number rearrangement is a bit weird but I mostly use the numpad for digits anyways, but having ()[]{}&$=!# and splat all without shift is GLORIOUS. I'm curious about Colemak/Workman, and might take those on as a neuroplasticity challenge, but it's less of a push for me since DfP is so much win. The only major pain is now Ctrl-Z -C -X -V are no longer one-handed, if I can, I try to rebind them to -' -Q -J -K, but mostly learned to live with what is effectively -' -/ -B -I -. . The brain is crazy adaptive. edit: HN doesn't support Markdown-style links? Boo. |