Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by akira2501 1108 days ago
For me it was the burden of typing 'ls'. I'm in the shell a lot, and the dvorak layout is very much _not_ shell friendly.
2 comments

This depends on taste. I find it very easy to type "ls" on Dvorak, where it is typed with the same finger on adjacent keys.

Moreover, the variant of Dvorak that I use is much more shell-friendly than any QWERTY layout.

While for the alphabet and for the punctuation signs that are used in natural languages I use a layout closer to the initial Dvorak layout from 1932 than to the modern Dvorak layout, for the other non-alphanumeric symbols I have made a few changes that I consider best for typing shell commands or other kinds of programs.

The pre-WWII Dvorak layout does not say anything about most non-alphanumeric symbols and there are no suitable standards for them (i.e. any standards than are based on rational criteria, not on preserving a random historical layout), so anyone who wants an optimal keyboard for programming or work with a command-line interface should design a custom layout for the non-alphanumeric symbols, according to taste and experience.

Sorry, I don't follow: `ls` is dragging your right pinky downward. How is that not shell friendly?

(I mean, to each their own, I use dvorak because other layouts hurt my hands, but I would presume there are better non-shell-friendly examples -- but interestingly, I couldn't readily find them since `mv` is also just the right hand, unlike its qwerty friend)

"ls -l" is a bit awful as it's all with the right pinky finger. Compared to pretty much everything else I type on Dvorak, it's terrible.

I have "alias hh='ls -l'" in my .zshrc.