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by Moru 2078 days ago
3-ish weeks is what it takes to learn to touch-type in general, whatever layout. Put in the time and choose a layout to learn. Dworak is better if you are typing only english, there are other layouts for other languages. This is where it broke down for me, I can't learn several layouts depending on the language I want to type. And convincing some programs to use the dworak layout for hotkeys can be tricky too.
2 comments

Vim is a very keyboard-oriented program.

Dvorak with vim isn't that bad. HJKL is in a row on QWERTY, but Dvorak at least has JK together, and H to the left of L.

CUA keybindings like Ctrl X, Ctrl C, Ctrl P can be a pain with Dvorak. (I also don't think shortcuts like Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert are widely supported across OSs, nor USB HID's copy and paste keys).

Other than that, it's just about remembering the shortcut by the letters, not by the position of the keys.

I tried moving to Dvorak in the late 1990s and I stumbled in the multiple language problem. In addition to me typing in English and Spanish, the fact that I do programming was the nail in the coffin to really being efficient in something else than qwerty. It also didn't help that I already was 95wpm in QWERTY.
If you alreay have a large repertoire of shortcuts it’s an extra pail to worry about when making the switch. I find that im using some shortcut that i can’t recite what they unless look down at the keyboard as they’ve embedded in the muscle memory.