[a-priori]

I have used Dvorak full-time for 5-6 years now. Back in high school, a friend of mine discovered Dvorak and a few of us switched cold-turkey; everyone else switched back within a week, but I'm still going! It took about two weeks for me to be comfortable with it. If you're like me, it's the punctuation that will screw you up the most when switching.

I'm an Emacs user, but I learned Emacs after I learned Dvorak, so I don't find the keybindings to be awkward. I do some strange things, such as using Escape as the Meta key (with my left thumb on the chord letter).

Vim, however, is hard to use (e.g. "HJKL" are in the "JCVP" positions), which may be part of the reason I gravitated to Emacs. For games, I either rebind the in-game commands, or I switch to QWERTY while I'm playing (e.g. "WASD" being in the ",A;H" positions is just no good).

[zcrar70]

You do get used to the layout in Vim eventually, but I agree it isn't intuitive. I've been tempted to remap HJKL to HTNS (the right hand home keys in Dvorak) in Vim, but haven't done so yet.

The main reason that I haven't tried out Colemak or other more unusual keyboard layouts is that they aren't installed by default on all OSs yet (unlike Dvorak), which makes it more of a hassle to switch layouts when using other people's machines.

[twopoint718]

I learned Dvorak over a summer break late in high school/early college (about 10 years). I was never a very good typist, so maybe this colors my 'switch' story. I think that I just generally have a hard time with feats of manual dexterity (no musical instruments, etc.), so I consider myself about the worst case scenario for QWERTY Dvorak switch time; I hope this gives someone who's on the edge the push to give Dvorak a try. It took me about 2 weeks to be able to use it such that it wasn't aggravating, 3 and I was using backspace way less, 4 I could use IM, 5 I was faster than I ever was with any QWERTY method and in 6 weeks it was very natural. So if you think it'll be a painful ordeal, just think that you'll almost certainly do better than me.

I'm also a post-Dvorak Emacs user. The way that Emacs works is just wired into my fingers now, I don't have to think about what the keys are, I just think "Find file" or "Suspend Emacs" etc. Some chords are probably a little tougher to do, but they are the exception rather than the rule. If there is a weird fringe benefit of Dvorak use it is that it makes me way more reluctant to reach for the mouse in any circumstance. I've never moved the keycaps on my keyboard (so there is no "cheating" while looking down) and so I have to depend on my fingers always being on the home row. I have to agree with Steve Yegge ("Effective Emacs") and consider using the mouse to be a pretty grave cache miss.

I'm a relative newbie to vim but I have no trouble moving around, I just developed a "feel" for where the HJKL keys go. It is hard to describe but you can kind of "unroll" their directionality in your brain. In some ways vim is nice (although it won't ever move me from solid Emacsity) in that the commands are simple letters which Dvorak makes really easy and comfortable to hit.

[Hovertruck]

Is it wrong that I use the arrow keys in Vim?

[silentbicycle]

Nah. The navigation keys on the home row are a throwback to when terminals were less likely to handle control keys correctly. If that's not a problem you have, then don't worry about it.

You'll probably benefit from getting the commands to move by paragraphs, functions, pairs of () {} <>,

[ken]

One of my coworkers uses only C-[pnbf] for cursor movement in Emacs, and so has mapped the arrow keys to scrolling the viewport.

So: "maybe, if you would have used them for something better".

[throw_away]

my philosophy is that arrow keys are only bad if you're using them while in insert mode. I find that this was added to appeal to novices, but in the long run, really interferes with learning to use the editor to its fullest.

[drhowarddrfine]

Only if by accident.

[silentbicycle]

FWIW, I use Emacs more than vim, but don't find the jcvp to be awkward. cv is down/up and jp is rocking the right hand left and right. Were j and p swapped, it would be annoying (pressing the left one to go right), but I think it's fine.

Maybe an improvement over hjkl, which is always one letter off from touch-typing.