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Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

You'll only make up those months spent adjusting if you now spend decades using nothing else, and any time spent on a conventional keyboard will be slower than it would have been if you had not switched.

I simply do not understand the "increased performance" claims people in these situations make. There is no way.

All keyboards have fundamentally arbitrary layouts, some are just slightly more or less arbitrary than others.

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This. I work as a sysadmin and the number of keyboards I have to interact with makes using anything other than QWERTY more of hassle than benefit. On a typical day I will interact with my phone keyboard (blackberry priv, hardware keyboard), my primary work desktop, my secondary desktop (used by colleagues sporadically), my gaming PC (used just for gaming), and my personal laptop. Now add the times I have to jump onto someone else's station or a family member's system and the constant context switching is just not worth it. I tried dvorak some years ago, but found it more trouble than it was worth it, since everyone else doesn't use it.

You're not in the target market then.

I use dvorak, on an Ergodox at home and a TECK at work. My phone keyboard is changed to dvorak [1].

The only times I have to use someone else's keyboard, it's only for maybe a word/login here and there, I'm not typing novels.

I'm very happy I've switched to dvorak on ortholinear keyboards.

[1] Dvorak is not a great layout for phones, it's good when using two thumbs, but all the switching from left to right side is bad for single-finger or single-thumb typing.

Hi, that's not true for me, 10y ago after months of thinking of the layout I'd stick with for decades I tweaked the Dvorak keyboard layout (switching the U and I) and went cold turkey. Qwerty is still in my muscle memory, I occasionally have to use it on other computers and I am slower with it. I am much more comfortable typing in Dvorak, the typing is significantly more relaxed. I never did it for speed reasons as I figured speech to text might catch up in the future.

Why would you switch the U and I? Just to make it even more difficult?

I use dvorak, and I've found it a hassle many times just switching the layout of the various PCs I'm using into dvorak. Worth it, but a hassle. At least the dvorak layout is semi-standard though.

Custom dvorak is a bridge too far...

The typing speed increase wasn't my main concern, it is just a side-effect that I felt would be easily measurable and that some people might care about. I also wanted to get an estimate for how long it would take me to become accustomed to the new keyboard, so measuring typing speed in a rigorous, empirical way seemed the best option. The main reason I did this was ergonomics.

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