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Comment by lukehutch | Hacker News Reader

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout 20 years ago (in the middle of a mission-critical project, no less), and not only doubled my typing speed, but significantly reduced arm/finger strain. Once you put in the 3-ish weeks to retrain your brain, and get back to at least your original typing speed, you'll never go back to QWERTY.

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wow, it took me 3 weeks to get basic proficiency, but really slow. 6 months to parity with qwerty, about a year before I was truly comfortable with it. probably about 2 years before I was completely fluent with both, and 5 years before my brain could map my own personal keyboards with dvorak and default to qwerty in all other cases with nearly zero mistakes. These days (20 years on) I have no problem, running, say virt-manager, which does not respect the linux key remapping, and typing in non-dvorak even on my own machine in a context-dependent fashion.

You’re saying 5 years before you could Dvorak at home, and also QWERTY on anyone else’s keyboard as needed?

Completely automatically and with nearly 99.9% accuracy.

"As needed" I would say around the 2 year mark, but with a bit of a blip to think about it.

But I could do this at the 6 month mark, just not accurately.. I would still be messing up letters at a ~1% rate, let's say.

Did you do daily practice in that time?

No.

I had the experience of changing to colemak and then spending maybe two months not practicing deliberately. Progress was slow. But then, I started practicing every day and I was back to my qwerty speeds within a few weeks. The incidental practice you get from typing in your everyday life isn't enough to quickly get learn a new layout, unfortunately.

3-ish weeks is what it takes to learn to touch-type in general, whatever layout. Put in the time and choose a layout to learn. Dworak is better if you are typing only english, there are other layouts for other languages. This is where it broke down for me, I can't learn several layouts depending on the language I want to type. And convincing some programs to use the dworak layout for hotkeys can be tricky too.

Vim is a very keyboard-oriented program.

Dvorak with vim isn't that bad. HJKL is in a row on QWERTY, but Dvorak at least has JK together, and H to the left of L.

CUA keybindings like Ctrl X, Ctrl C, Ctrl P can be a pain with Dvorak. (I also don't think shortcuts like Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert are widely supported across OSs, nor USB HID's copy and paste keys).

Other than that, it's just about remembering the shortcut by the letters, not by the position of the keys.

I tried moving to Dvorak in the late 1990s and I stumbled in the multiple language problem. In addition to me typing in English and Spanish, the fact that I do programming was the nail in the coffin to really being efficient in something else than qwerty. It also didn't help that I already was 95wpm in QWERTY.

If you alreay have a large repertoire of shortcuts it’s an extra pail to worry about when making the switch. I find that im using some shortcut that i can’t recite what they unless look down at the keyboard as they’ve embedded in the muscle memory.

What about all the keyboards that aren’t Dvorak? Can you still QWERTY without thinking?

Not OP but it was definitely a struggle. I had a few job interviews where they didn't understand my request to change the keyboard layout... or the computer was too locked down, or whatever. That, and typing on literally anyone else's computer is a pain, unless they're kind enough to let you install Dvorak.

That being said, this year I decided enough was enough, and I worked to relearn QWERTY. Initially it was really hard, but after a few weeks, I managed to get to a comfortable speed. Here is an image showing my QWERTY averages since March of this year: https://i.imgur.com/RESfuFS.png My average has plateau'd around 80wpm, which is a great speed, and I managed to do that without sacrificing my Dvorak speed, which sits at 125wpm. Finally, to throw a wrench into it, I also decided to learn Colemak this year... and with enough practice I've gotten to the point where I can switch between the three without any issue.

For the curious, here's a graph of my Colemak in the same time period: https://i.imgur.com/kN9g3n6.png The hump at the beginning was from when I decided to stop learning Colemak, and learn _yet another_ layout, and then deciding that it wasn't worth it a few weeks later, and then coming back to Colemak and having to learn it from scratch again.

Personally, I never properly learned to touch type on Qwerty, and my typing ability on Qwerty is about the same as 15 years ago.

I hardly ever type on a Qwerty keyboard though.

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