An oversight in the layout, in my mind—the human hand is better at typing in certain directions… the hands very naturally roll towards the center, but it is less natural to rotate away from the center. This is… somewhat covered in the article under SHU…

> It is much more efficient to ride the momentum of a single arm or wrist stroke and type a combo rather than just one key.

Try ASDF versus FDSA on a QWERTY layout. ASDF feels much more natural, doesn't it?

So, I’m concerned about the sequences like TH in the Workman layout. It looks like Workman is optimized more for minimum distance, and less for other factors. I think this is what happens when you optimize for the metrics that are easiest to measure! The thing about Dvorak is not just which keys press the fingers, but how you alternate.

So if you write THE on Dvorak, your right hand naturally rolls TH using strong fingers, and then you type E using the left. On Workman, you are rolling away from center, which is less natural.

Some clumsier words in Dvorak: SPHINX. PIX are all left 2nd digit, but they alternate with the right hand, to give the 2nd digit on the left time to move.

I may be biased. I switched to Dvorak in high school and it fixed my RSI. Dvorak is also available everywhere. I can sit down at an unfamiliar computer and change it to Dvorak within a minute. The alternation, to me, means that my fingers have more time to move and can move more slowly and gently at the same typing speed.

As a technical note—you should not be changing capslock in your layout like this on Linux. The option to choose a keyboard layout like US QWERTY or US Dvorak is a separate choice from the choice to map capslock to something else, and they shouldn't be combined.

I’m also a bit surprised that the bottom row is ZXMCV. This is so close to ZXCV… why not just use ZXCV?