Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tome | Hacker News Reader

I had a painful (in two senses) transition to Dvorak about eight years ago.

The first pain was RSI that I got through typing a lot. I decided to try Dvorak to see if it helped.

The second pain was touch typing incredibly slowly for a few weeks whilst I learned the layout. It was a great experience, typing is a lot more comfortable, and I've never looked back.

Regarding the negatives:

You need to switch back when using other peoples’ computers

Kind of. If you type on their computer for 5 minutes, just hunt-and-peck. If you type on their computer for an hour, go to the control panel and switch their layout into Dvorak!

Nearly no availability of keyboards with dvorak layout

It doesn't matter at all. If you're using Dvorak for a sensible reason then you're touch-typing. If you're touch-typing you're not looking at the keys.

Having to relearn all your hotkeys

I can understand why Vim's hjkl would cause an annoying transition, but location independent hotkeys will cause you no problem.

My dirty secret is that I haven't remapped Vim's control keys. I make up for it by moving around my searching a lot more than by using hjkl.

After the first few months I tried suggesting to people that they should try dvorak, but mostly they just look at me like I'm an alien, so I kind of stopped. My mom actually tried it though - that was pretty cool (even though she decided not to make the switch).

> You need to switch back when using other peoples’ computers.

I find it's exactly like speaking two languages. I have no problem just typing QWERTY on other people's keyboards, though it is slow going for the first minute if it's been a while.

I learned vi after switching to Dvorak - so I don't have any vi-Qwerty muscle memory. That makes for a painful 5 minutes at someone else's desk, but they pick up vim commands better if I tell them what to do.

I echo the RSI sentiments though. Dvorak is more comfortable for myself. I'm somewhat tempted to try Programmer's Dvorak for the brackets/braces/parens at some point, but I do like having my (Dvorak) TypeMatrix 2030 keyboard reflect my actual keymap.

I tried the programmer dvorak and, though it has some more accessible keys, the number keys as 753190246 and the fact you needed to type it holding shift (or pressing caps) eventually seemed worse than normal way, point being I type a lot more numbers in a row than symbols in a row, so holding shift or pressing caps for numbers got very frequent

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