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by oliver101
2142 days ago
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After 20 years of QWERTY I could sort-of touch type but it’s very hard to unlearn bad habits and position your hands properly. The best decision I made was to switch to DVORAK. I was very unproductive for about a month. Training involved blank key caps and a small print out of the layout above my monitor. The result is I type much faster, with fewer errors, and I never look down (usually pointless since your keyboard will be qwerty labelled anyway!) EDIT: doesn’t have to be Dvorak but the point is switching layouts forces you to learn from first principals: feeling out the keyboard notches (F and J keys on standard US) and going from there |
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Overall I'm pretty happy that that I learned Dvorak and feel that my typing is much better than it ever was with Qwerty. However I'm always hesistant to recommend that other people follow the same path. There are numerous downsides to Dvorak (or any non-standard layout)
* I have kind of un-learned Qwerty. When I have to go to someone else's machine at work (game dev studio) to diagnose a crash, Qwerty feels very foreign and I look like an idiot when I go to type (looking up and down, making lots of mistakes, and generally typing like an old uncle who has never used a computer). This is a bit less of a problem now that Covid has hit and we are all working remote and screen-sharing instead of visiting each other's physical machines.
* Family members get annoyed when they come to a computer and it is on "Dvorak Mode", and they don't know how to get it "back to normal". Having separate accounts helps with this, though I have had some Dvorak software that sometimes annoyingly "leaked through" to other user accounts, switching the settings for my wife
* Shortcuts are a pain. Some software (particularly things like 3D modeling packages) have tons of shortcuts and they are all well thought out around the idea that you have a QWERTY keyboard (the important shortcuts will be in the left hand, like mode-changing keys on QWER so that you can use a mouse with your right hand). It sort of sucks when you go to use those softwares and the hotkeys are all over the place. This even applies to the normal Cut/Paste/Copy hotkeys. I have software-remapped those so they are in the same location as QWERTY (on Windows, using Autohotkey) but that causes secondary issues where Ctrl-K shortcuts are unavailable because the V key is K in the Dvorak layout and I'm using that for pasting. vi/vim is also weird on Dvorak, but I stay away from those anyhow.
* It is hard to know where keys are when not in the "touch typing position". This kind of goes along with the last point about shortcuts. Since my physical keyboard is QWERTY, I cannot look at it and know where are particular key is. And all of my training in Dvorak is muscle-memory so I only know where the letters are by feel and not by knowing which QWERTY key they are mapped to. Consequently, trying to press a specific letter hotkey when my hand is not in the standard "home row" position is a bit of a guessing game. This is a problem in situations like using a 3D software where you are mostly mousing and only poking at hotkeys here and there. Obviously getting a labelled keyboard would solve this issue, but there are other downsides to that as well. (confusing other family members with my strange keyboard, paying extra for a niche product and having more limited choices)
If you can get past all of those issues... Dvorak is fantastic!