How big of a difference did Dvorak make for you?
While I feel no pain at all I'm pretty paranoid about getting any pain/RSI in the coming years (recent graduate now working full time)
While I feel no pain at all I'm pretty paranoid about getting any pain/RSI in the coming years (recent graduate now working full time)
I've been a Dvorak user for ~20 years. I only use a laptop, am working on it basically all day every day, and have terrible posture. And I've never had any RSI issues.
IIRC with Dvorak your fingers only travel about a third as much as when typing on a regular keyboard. Even if it hasn't been scientifically proven or whatever, imho anyone in the tech industry who isn't using Dvorak is crazy.
If you worked as an orchestra conductor, would you spend your weekends going to EDM shows without hearing protection? Of course not, because you make your living using your ears. Same idea.
Just using Qwerty for a few sentences feels awful. It doesn't hurt, of course, it's just a few sentences, usually on someone else's computer. But it's like using chopsticks to eat oily rice, when you're used to eating potatoes with a fork.
To everyone:
- Print this PDF: http://www.dvzine.org/type/OneSheetDVmap.pdf
- Change your keyboard layout to Dvorak
- Don't look at the keyboard, look at the printout to see where the keys are.
- Relax :)
(Qwerty: so much is one one hand. "st a few se", "lly on", "oily". Common things like "ter" and "sed" and "ard". This is the uncomfortable typing.
In Dvorak, the longest sequences on one hand in the above are "12 yea" and the "ng ch" in "using chopsticks".)
But anyway, as a programmer, you spend more time hitting key chords and special characters, which aren't much better in Dvorak and are probably part of why programmers are so prone to RSI despite in absolute terms not typing that much compared to, say, a secretary.
Even when I'm writing code, alphabetic characters and normal punctuation are still by far the most commonly used. It's only the rare punctuation []{};: that's worse off, and even within code I still type for more S characters than semicolons.
If this concerns you, there's Programmer Dvorak layout, but I prefer to keep compatibility with a wider range of computers and use standard Dvorak.