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Comment by richardw | Hacker News Reader

Just for a laugh, try changing your phone keyboard to Dvorak. It seemed like a good idea but felt alien to see the keys I naturally use. Swiping was just ridiculous.

Obviously it’s just practice but I don’t mind using qwerty on my phone. It keeps it vaguely present in my memory.

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I've been typing Dvorak on my computer since middle school and so I thought it'd naturally be a good idea to switch my phone... turns out not so much. While having all the common letters on the home row is good for regular typing, it is not good for phone typing which is heavily dependent on autocorrect. If I miss a letter by one key it's still likely for it to be a valid word because common letters are clustered and autocorrect misinterprets. For example, I might type "i" and then "t", "n", and "s" are all adjacent meaning if I meant to type "is" and I miss by one key and type "in" then it is not corrected. Other annoying ones are "by" and "my" because the b and m are next to each other.

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.

Supposedly the entire reason Qwerty was designed was to prevent typewriters from jamming by making the keys as disambiguous as possible, which is now ironically ideal on tiny screens.

Indeed. All the reasons Qwerty are bad for 10 finger typing are specifically the reasons it's fairly good for tiny touchscreen typing!

I switched to Dvorak in the early 2000's and typing qwerty on a keyboard is totally alien to me now.

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.

Can vouch for colemak being hard to type correctly with on a phone. Normally with qwerty I felt I didn't rely so much on autocorrect, but with Colemak I make certain mistakes quite frequently. Especially given eio are all next to each other a lot of times when I want to type o I type "i" instead. I think it's gotten better in recent months but certain combinations on Colemak just seem to be very sub optimal for a phone. Especially the placing of the vowels.

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.

Funny story. I started learning Colemak must have been close to a year ago now. I switched my home computer and phone to Colemak, but kept my work computer on Qwerty as I wasn't quite ready to suffer the initial productivity hit even though I knew I needed to do it in order to really breakthrough. In the end I couldn't commit, so I switched everything back. About 6 months later my wife received a text while she was driving and asked me to reply to it. I picked up her phone and fumbled through typing out a reply. Something felt off. I opened up my phone to compare. I had never switched my phone back to Qwerty and my brain had completely adjusted. So much so that I didn't even realize my keyboard had been Colemak for the last 6 months.

It's still Colemak to this day.

I did this many years ago, and am now terribly slow at typing on a phone with a qwerty keyboard, and still cannot use a Dvorak keyboard on my computer...

It is painful to use Windows on my surface as a tablet, since I want the physical keyboard layout to be dvorak and the osk layout to be qwerty (because I've never really seen the dvorak layout). Microsoft obviously has no interest in making it accessible to dvorak users.

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

Amusing story - when I was in uni I decided to learn dvorak and since I'd just got a shiny new smartphone I set the keyboard in it to dvorak too.

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.

Wow doing that would make so little sense. The benefit of dvorak is less finger movement when touch typing. It would be interesting to optimize the keyboard layout on a phone for less finger movement while swiping, but that probably looks a lot different than Dvorak.

For swiping it’s the opposite: you need to move your finger more to clearly disambiguate which letters you want to “select.” The hardest words are things like “as” and “tool” where there’s letters close by to miss-swipe over. At least in my experience.

I remember seeing a finger movement optimised keyboard a few years back, it was incredibly alien and based on gestures

You're probably talking about MessageEase.

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)

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