Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I'm not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I'm typing on right now from memory either.
Obviously it’s just practice but I don’t mind using qwerty on my phone. It keeps it vaguely present in my memory.
Sadly, I'm in a bit too deep to go back to Qwerty on my phone (I'd be very slow for awhile). I do still enjoy Dvorak on the computer and while I don't think I'm a faster typist than I would be with Qwerty, I rarely (pretty much never) experience finger strain when typing for long periods.
However, any attempt at using Dvorak on a touch screen keyboard has failed as I can't rely on my muscle memory.
I found that for touch screen input I preferred using qwerty since I have a better feel about where keys are to hunt and peck. Funnily when typing dvorak, my fingers knows where the keys are but I don't have a good conscious mental map of the layout.
Maybe it's due to the fact that you have to touch type dvorak without any visual help since most users use regular qwerty layout keyboards.
I'm used to it now and it doesn't quite bother me enough to relearn qwerty on mobile. Kinda stuck in this weird limbo of relying on autocorrect for every 5th word. Hahaha.
It's still Colemak to this day.
I think the dvorak equivalent of an osk is something more like MessageEase. If they would bother to update their Windows offering to something a little more recent (high dpi instead of scaling etc) it would be nice tho
I was never able to get over my qwerty touchtyping skills and gave up very quickly but I left my smartphone keyboard that way as I thought people's reactions when they tried to use it was funny.
Six years later, I bought a kinesis advantage and discovered to my horror that my touchtyping skills were useless with the alien key layout and I couldn't remember where any of the keys were because I'd not looked at them for so long.
However - the kinesis had a "dvorak" button and after having used it on my phone for so long I found it easier to learn that then re-learn qwerty. 4 years later and I get hopelessly lost every time I try to use qwerty.
I've been using it for about 7 months now and it's been great. I especially like being able to type complex passwords without looking at my phone's keyboard. (like when joining a new wifi network, for example)
I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years.
Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak versions for other languages. Whereas all localized keyboard layouts that I've seen are based on Qwerty (for languages using Latin chars obviously). So for people communicating in more than English, like myself, anything non-Qwerty would be a pain.
So the biggest problem with Dvorak is that it is non-standard and it ain't worth it imo. I have issues with using other workstations, of friends and colleagues, just by having reconfigured Caps Lock into another Ctrl.
Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row.
You can spot a Dvorak user by just watching them type: their fingers walk a lot less distance than other users. It's a trick that I learned from other Dvorak users who had spotted me.
I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes.
I type around 145 wpm, including in the 3 languages I speak (all ASCII based though) and languages or frameworks that I know by hearth.
To make it easy for colleges and friends, I just have 2 aliases:
alias aoeu="setxkbmap fr"
alias qsdf="setxkbmap -I ~/.xkb code -print | xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb - $DISPLAY"
As you can see, the four letters of the how row, in dvorak switches to french, in french switches to dvorak. Of course it could be more complicated with more layouts if I had to support them but then I guess a systray icon would work.
Anyway, also using Kinesis Advantage 2 LF, absolutely love it, and plenty of other "non-standard" stuff like the OP says, such as a tiling window manager.
Highly recommend learning or making a better layout than Qwerty because the drawbacks are largely country balanced by the benefits IMHO.
It's not about whatever someone thinks is "standard" it's about how you want to touch the machine for the rest of your life.
That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it.
My hands never hurt, even though I love writing long texts, long emails, long code comments, etc. I can also do 120 wpm but I don't feel the need to do it because it's stressful, not necessarily on the hands, but on my thought process. Speed isn't an issue.
If Dvorak solved your RSI, that's awesome, I can understand why you switched, however I don't think this is a causality issue, meaning that I don't think it was Qwerty that caused RSI in the first place. If Dvorak is a good strategy for you to manage the pain, then great, but it's pain management, not a cure.
I also used to configure my machines a lot, going into a yak shaving rabbit hole every time it wasn't functioning properly. I was on Linux back then, but I gave it up and nowadays I'm much happier. The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.
I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand work means less pain, so maybe you're right, maybe it's just a coincidence.
Or maybe less finger distance means less work which means less tension accumulated in the muscles and then indeed less pain.
Nonetheless, I changed "fixed my RSI" by "fixed my RSI problems" thanks to your feedback, which should clear out the misunderstanding.
I'm a long time Vim user, myself (and no, not looking to spark a holy war here). One observation I have about my own habits is that I subconsciously slap the ESC key every time I'm done with something, even if I'm in a non-modal editor like Notepad or SQL Management studio. It's just become so ingrained in me that I can't stop doing it. Mostly because there's no negative feedback loop associated with doing it.
But I just aliased `us` and `dv` to setxkbmap shortcuts, so thanks for that!
(That said, I still use Colemak because it happens to work better for my native tongue. If I only wrote English, I would have been a Dvorak user.)
Fortunately, I haven't had RSI ever since I switched to Dvorak.
Switching to Dvorak is quite tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a good reason to do so.
Regarding internationalization, I write in English, Spanish and Italian in Dvorak with no problem. It really doesn't any difference to me as compared to Qwerty.
I definitely recommend Neo2 for German users. Ctrl + a,x,v and c still with the left hand. Letter frequency optimised for German first, English second. All programming symbols easy accessible, additional layers for Greek symbols and math notation. Also, users of non-US layouts have much more to "gain" by switching from query-like layouts: Due to umlauts or accents, brackets tend to be way harder to reach.