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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

I have used dvorak for around 15 years now, and I'm very happy with it. Took me 2-3 weeks to type as fast as in QWERTY, and hands feel way more relaxed and easy.

For those who are afraid that it will somehow affect QWERTY typing speed, such fears are totally unfounded, I can type QWERTY as easily as I could before, just with some more strain compared to Dvorak.

That said:

- for developers, the typing speed is not the productivity bottleneck, so you are unlikely to see any real gains

- hotkeys are generally a MESS, especially if you use 2 languages on a system. More so on Windows. Less so on Ubuntu.

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As a counterpoint, my ability to type on Qwerty is shot now that I am on Dvorak. I'm back to searching around on the keyboard with my eyes and tapping with single fingers. I feel sure people question my ability to work on computers when I have to go and fix something on their computers and spend ages just typing out basic stuff..

Maybe you weren't all that good with qwerty before? I always felt it's like learning an extra foreign language: learning French doesn't make your German worse.

YMMV but after 3-4 weeks of dvorak, I actually did have difficulties when using qwerty. I gave up dvorak because I don't want to have to modify every keyboard/system I'm on, as opposed to just sitting down at a terminal and getting work done.

I think you might have tried a bit more. I'm typing this on my wife's qwerty laptop and have zero issues with blind typing on it, just a little more strain from having to move fingers more that it is possible on Dvorak.

But not using German makes your German worse.

True. But you can't be isolated from QWERTY in the real world: my wife's computer uses it, as do a lot of computers out there, so I still do get practice with it from time to time.

I’ve met people who lost their native language for another one (Portuguese —> Italian).

So maybe GP was that good

I could touchtype like crazy on qwerty before. It's possible because I learned dvorak when I was older - early 40s - I only have space in my brain for a single layout now..

I have to agree with the other poster. My typing speed was in the 70+ WPM on qwerty prior to learning dvorak, and now I'm a glorified hunt-and-pecker on qwerty keyboards.

The only exception to this is typing on my mobile device, which is configured to qwerty.

Really? I always feel like I'm mixing up my 3rd/4th/5th languages.

I can type Qwerty, Dvorak, and Colemak all over 100wpm (https://youtube.com/watch?v=mQ6iSYMMHv0). You definitely have to practice all three together if you don’t want to lose them.

Also happened with language learning. I speak English and Spanish natively. Learned Italian (very similar to Spanish) in high school. After college learned Chinese in China. One day I ran into an Italian person in China and tried to talk to them in Italian. I kept jumbling Italian and Chinese, even though on paper Italian is so much easier for me than Chinese. It was like my brain only had space for all native languages, and just one foreign language. I’m sure with practice I could speak both Italian and Chinese, but that’s the whole point of this comment. It takes practice to maintain them all.

I agree with this. Colemak is a skill. Qwerty is a skill. Switching between the two is a separate skill. But all 3 can be learned.

I think it is exactly the opposite.

If your speed did not fall it means you did not learn well.

I actually learned to type at school (yeah, funny business school my parents sent me to). We had an actual specialist teacher to teach us to type on electric typewriters using pretty nice methodology.

To learn to type well is to train "muscle memory". This means you think the letter and your body does it for you, automatically, without any part of your conscious brain involved.

I don't know where keys are on my keyboard. It is unmarked, so I can't look it up. If somebody asks me, I need to lay my hands on it and think the letter and see which finger "wants to" press the button. In that regard I am a passenger and once I think a word or sentence I don't have any further control -- it is some uncontrollable part of my brain that takes over and does it for me.

Even when typing at speed I am still free to think about anything else. Just as when you walk you don't need to think about walking itself and can concentrate on whatever else you want.

It does actually. The time you spend practising French is time you are neglecting German and hence, your knowledge will decay. If it's not a long time you won't notice it (maybe some very specific words that you rarely use will be forgotten).

Any long-term migrant learns this over the years, sadly. Obviously you can still use the language, but the farthest borders of language-specific knowledge become frail and tend to fall off the edge of your brain. I now struggle to give "flourish" to my speech in the "old" language, and have to make a conscious effort to remember difficult words.

When I was around 12 I learned Dvorak and lost the ability to touch type in Qwerty, then my parents forced me to go back to Qwerty because I kept leaving the family computers in Dvorak. Because of that I can type in both, though my Dvorak is still faster.

Same problem here.

I learned to type on Dvorak 20 years ago and my ability to type on QWERTY still did not recover to even 1/5th of my previous speed.

It is pretty embarrassing sometimes.

On the other hand I use completely unmarked keyboard which coupled with Dvorak makes me largely invulnerable to pranking by coworkers by writing mail in my name (assuming I forget to lock my workstation which happens about twice in a decade).

Same for me. My fingers remember dvorak and can't work with qwerty with just using the fingers' memory.

I use qwerty on mobile just fine. I don't think dvorak on mobile would be of any help since I type with thumbs.

Colemak all muscle memory for me, so it's nearly impossible for me to remember my Qwerty muscle memory now.

One place that really sticks out is job interviews. Asking your interviewer to change keyboard layouts is a bit intrusive. It's not a huge deal on a Mac, but it's a challenge on Windows since Colemak isn't built in.

Some folks seem to be able to switch and keep their old ability and some can't. I was able to switch back to Qwerty pretty easily, but it made my wrists contort in such odd ways that I never noticed before. So I generally wouldn't go back to it.

I never had any problem in switching forth-and-back especially because the layout are completely different and this prevents confusion.

Besides, why would you need to use qwerty other than occasionally?

Reminder: sharing keyboard with other people is really bad for hygiene, due to the shape of the keys preventing any deep cleaning.

It took me two years before I could switch between Dvorak an Qwerty without much difficulty. Four years later, I can now rapidly switch between the two. The only problem is remembering which layout I have turned on, but once that's clear, there's not a problem anymore. I haven't practiced since the first year, but all that time I frequently switch because I work with multiple computers and RDP sessions where the layout doesn't carry over. Touch typing with Dvorak came after learning the muscle memory for typing characters, and afterwards with Qwerty, it was muscle memory for words/phrases that got me typing well again.

I was in this boat as well for quite some time. Early COVID, I bought a programmable (QMK-based) keyboard and hard-coded the keys to match the Dvorak layout, since most of my interactions with PCs was via RDP-like situations (Horizon Web Client, VMs, RDP). This way, I could keep everything configured to QWERTY and just use my keyboard. On my laptop, I have it set up with both layouts, so that if I don't have my QMK keyboard connected (in my lap, travelling, etc), I can just hit Ctrl-Shift and switch the built-in keyboard to Dvorak.

To me, this is the best setup. Only pain point is that it required me to configure the 2 PC games I play to fit with my Dvorak configuration, since the PC sees it as me typing on a QWERTY keyboard with alien hands.

I can still type on QWERTY without looking at keys but my skill definitely took a hit because I never use it. I bet I'd be up to par if I spent a day or two only on QWERTY again.

One time I had an interview where they handed me a Windows laptop on QWERTY to code some problem and I looked like I could barely use a computer :D

I'm at about 15 years with Dvorak as well. It completely healed my RSI issues which were getting quite bad. Learning it was a mental challenge and re-learning Vim wasn't really fun.

I could type around 90 WPM in QWERTY and now I hunt and pick at it. I'm at that speed in Dvorak now so it doesn't really matter. If you play games at all it kind of sucks having to switch back and forth, but that's a small price to pay to not have career ending RSI.

Why would you have to relearn Vim? Just remap all the key where they used to be.

Wouldn't it still be difficult? The HJKL row makes sense to remap to DHTN. But other commands are mnemonic and would make more sense to follow the key to its new location.

So you have collisions. ("Does Y mean "yank"? Or does it now mean "to"? Well "to" can't be T anymore, because that's now the motion up command.")

So you have to either remap everything back to qwerty positions, and learn the new mnemonics, or keep the letter associations the same, and give up on the clustered motion commands.

I'm thinking it's probably better to do the latter, but I'd love to hear from vimmers that use non-qwerty layouts.

I type Dvorak and simply use the default Vim key bindings. Vim defaults are weird with Dvorak, but significantly more intuitive than what the situation is with Colemak. Here's the Vim and Dvorak inspired custom keymap I use on my programmable keyboard: https://github.com/1MachineElf/qmk_firmware/tree/_sb4dv/keyb...

I'm not a power vim user but sticking to the default keybinds on Dvorak isn't so bad. JK are still right next to each other, and HL are on the right index and pinky, respectively, so the basic spatial relationships between the keys are somewhat preserved.

I find that remapping shortcuts is generally not worth it. Yeah, undo/cut/copy/paste are weird and that sucks, but it's better than fighting every application you ever use, on every machine, including machines you SSH into, until you die.

For gaming, on the other hand, mixed up keybinds are intolerable. I just switch back to QWERTY for that.

I've been on Dvorak full-time since 2008, and even though I generally don't use vim itself for programming, I do still use vim-mode in my editors and IDE. But I gave up on using hjkl long before switching to Dvorak, and I've always just either used motions like w/b/f/t/n/etc, or moved to the arrow keys for shorter motions. This also lets me share more of the muscle memory for movements when I'm typing into standard text boxes like this.

Kind of ironic. I'm on a 75-key keyboard, with no arrow keys. Instead, they're mapped to a layer under (drumroll...) HJKL.

So even if I ever did make the jump to Colemack or Dvorak, I'd probably keep those mappings to the same physical keys. Working in vim, I'd just use my "arrow" keys rather than the native motion keymappings.

I also try to avoid using them in the first place (instead using w/b/f/t/n/etc), but sometimes it's faster to just tap the key a few times rather than "formulate a plan" to reach my target

What kind of build is 75 keys without arrows?

A 60% (no arrow keys) has 61 keys (ANSI) and the next “bigger” one, a 65% has 67 keys and usually already arrow keys.

Is it some non-standard ergo mech build?

> Is it some non-standard ergo mech build?

Basically this. Not really ergo, other than being ortholinear and having space between the resting positions of my hands.

Here's a photo: https://imgur.com/0UBSi74

I've been using vim user for about 10 years and a colemak user for probably 9 years. At first I remapped the hjkl keys to maintain the muscle memory for movement, but ended up going down the rabbit hole of remaps. Eventually I gave up and reverted to the default keybindings. At first it was weird, but after a month or so I got used to it.

I would definitely advise against remapping vim bindings. The first is because if you ever has to use vim on a non-colemak machine, figuring out the keys will be very painful. Secondly because vim has influenced a lot of other programs (man, less, gvim, etc) and most of them are much harder to rebind if they even support it at all.

That a bad idea because when you are on a foreign server then you'll be quite lost

> For those who are afraid that it will somehow affect QWERTY typing speed, such fears are totally unfounded

What! :- ) Well founded fears, I'd say: I've been typing in Colemak for 10+ years and if I switch to QWERTY I'm significantly slower than before I started using Colemak. — But I'm still glad I made the switch.

> the typing speed is not the productivity bottleneck

Yes agreed. I'd only recommend a software person to switch, if they think the learning process seems fun. But maybe if one writes novels, it's nice to type faster? Or someone who writes a lot here at HN :- )

> hotkeys are generally a MESS

Colemak: Hotkeys = fine :- )

> What! :- ) Well founded fears, I'd say: I've been typing in Colemak for 10+ years and if I switch to QWERTY I'm significantly slower than before I started using Colemak.

I'm not a Colemak user, but from my experiences with Dvorak, I have a theory on why this happens. Precisely because it shares many keys with QWERTY!

Explanation: when I type in Dvorak or QWERTY, the only hesitation is when I type the first letter of a text I need to type. Then, a muscle memory kicks in and I type without thinking. The only exception: words starting with letter "A". This letter is special, because it is the only key that has the same position in both Dvorak and QWERTY!

So when I type words starting with "A", my muscle memory kicks in not on first typed letter, but on second! With Colemak, I guess this effect might be in full swing for almost every letter you type, and THAT would be a significant problem. So what is sold as being Colemak's advantage is probably a disadvantage if you need to type on different types of keyboards.

Then you don't use the letter M? Oh, this reminds me showing Dvorak to a colleague. He asks: "So, where is the letter A?" - "Mmm, right here, where it is in Qwerty." - "OK. And where is, for example, letter M?" - "Mmm, right here, where it is in Qwerty." - "So, what's the point, then?"

Hm, you are right! M is too on the same place in both layouts, but I never had a hesitation with it. Maybe it only applied to vowels ..

Sounds like a good explanation.

Also, if I have two passwords AA and AB that are similar to each other, then, if I use only AA for a while, I easily forget AB, or start including parts of AA in AB. — Is there a word for this? For forgetting and messing/mixing up things, because they are too similar to each other

As a full time developer, I'm sure my typing speed directly affects my productivity (probably between 80-100 wpm in Dvorak). There are a lot of times I'm typing at full speed for hours, aided by code auto-completion and vim macros, and since the program already exists in my head, the limiting factor is how fast I can type it out. Other times not so much, I'm sitting there reading code, or debugging line by line, or whatever. But when I'm ready to code, my typing speed is the single biggest factor of how fast I can get it out.

Hmm I have a bit forgotten how things were, before Colemak. I was typing mostly software things, when I decided to switch. I think I a bit felt like you do.

> But when I'm ready to code, my typing speed is the single biggest factor

Especially when writing docs / comments for that code, then it's mostly English words (rather than `(){};!+-,[]` things)

So did you switch from Dvorak to Colemak? I just did a typing test on code-like things, and my typing speed is much slower, around 45 wpm, although that's normally accelerated by an IDE. I started learning Colemak for about a day a few years ago, and then decided that it wouldn't actually benefit me over Dvorak, especially because vi keybindings are quite important. Is the big improvement that it leaves {} in their original place instead of the farther reach?

I just had a quick look at Dvorak, and then picked Colemak instead because of more similar shortcuts. — It took weeks or months to get up to speed in Colemak. But it was a bit fun, fortunately. (How long did it take, with Dvorak?)

When the typing speed difference between Dvorak and Colemak is so small (it is?), I would say to myself that any of them is better than good enough and be happy :- )

There's also tools like tmux and fzf / skim, don't know if you're using them already; if not, I'd guess they'd save more time than learning Colemak.

> especially because vi keybindings are quite important

Oh I have nice Vi keybindings in Colemak — I use Vi always: VSCode, IntelliJ etc.

On the keyboard, I've mapped the N physical key to down, H to up, and left is Backspace (and Y which I never use), and right is Space and U. So I don't use the HJKL keys for navigation (well, H but it means Up for me).

This leaves the J K L keys available to do their usual things, in Vi — they map to N E I in Colemak (apparently you've noticed this :- )) which I use all the time.

> Is the big improvement that it leaves {} in their original place

I don't think so. I'd say, it's probably the shortcuts, and that many shortcuts continue working with the left hand only (e.g. using the mouse to select text, then the left hand to CTRL+C +V copy-paste).

Dvorak plays pretty nice with default vi keybindings, for the most part. Both y (yank) and p (put) are on the left hand, as well as x (delete characters), . (repeat last), u (undo), q (record macro), @ (execute macro) and " (choose register). And even though d is technically on the right hand, it's still in easy stretch range of the left. You can do a lot quite quickly with those keys and a mouse. So I don't miss ctrl-c/v too much when I have vi keys available. Whereas the right hand tends to be a lot of movement keys, which are more important when not using a mouse: h (move left) l (move right), b (previous word), f (jump to character), t (jump before character), n (next search result), g (goto top/bottom/line number/etc).

The worst thing I've experienced with Dvorak is typing "ls<enter>" repeatedly. It's really painful on the pinky. Putting L on the right pinky stretch was a really bad decision.

One advantage Dvorak has over Colemak is that it's included with every OS and easy to switch to, whereas Colemak often requires a download and an install to use. And some games include Dvorak keybindings, but I haven't seen one with Colemak keybindings yet.

I learned Dvorak back in college, and got fast by playing muds. Type fast, or you're dead. Took a few months to get up to speed.

> The worst thing I've experienced with Dvorak is typing "ls<enter>" repeatedly. It's really painful on the pinky. Putting L on the right pinky stretch was a really bad decision.

What about `alias s=ls`, a way to avoid the bad decision :- )

> Both y (yank) and p (put) are on the left hand ... right hand .. movement keys, which are more important when not using a mouse ...

Oh I didn't know. That sounds nice. Hmm makes me wonder if maybe I'd preferred Dvorak instead.

> I learned Dvorak back in college, and got fast by playing muds. Type fast, or you're dead

Hmm I wonder if type fast MUDs and spell correctly and the right grammar, or you're dead, could be a fun way to learn languages in high school :- )

Turns out there's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD#Educational_MUDs — but seems the last ones are from the 90's

I've been typing Dvorak since age 17, so... 37 years. Despite breaking my left hand (not while typing) I haven't lost any typing skill/speed that I can tell, and I haven't ever seen a hint of carpal tunnel syndrome.

Btw there are dvorak layouts for one-handed typing, both for left and right hand. If I ever break my arm so I won't be able to type for some time, I'll definitely try that.

I tried Dvorak for a year and hotkeys are what made me go back.

Hotkeys are this bizarre mix of positional _and_ semantic locations. That is, some are the keys they are because of where the keys are placed (most notably z-x-c-v but also j-k-l-o and many others in various apps), while others are what they are because of their mnemonics. Neither preserving Qwerty locations for them nor using Dvorak everywhere is right.

Just wanted to chime in. Same experience here. Switched to Dvorak over 20 years ago and I had almost the exact same experience.

It's just like knowing a different language, there's some switch somewhere in my brain I can flip and type in either layout. If I use one for a long period of time, the other one gets slower and less easily recalled, but it takes on the order of minutes to come back to 90% speed.

Agree that the main annoyances are hotkeys and what layer of the software you're mapping things in.

This was my experience, except I couldn't switch between them very well, and my RSI more or less went away so I'm back on qwerty now, with no re-flare-ups.

Emacs with dvorak was... interesting.

2-3 weeks!?

I switched to Colemak in September (2020) and have been using it solely ever since. I started at 110 WPM QWERTY and am currently at 85 WPM Colemak.

I was at qwerty speed with Dvorak in about 2-3 weeks as well. In the past couple years I tried Colemak, but I could not make the switch for some reason (from qwerty). I don't know why; I can't say it's because of the layout itself; could be that I'm 20+ years older than I was when I did the dvorak switch.

Your wpm is high. I'm in the 60s and Colemak actually improved my speed after a few months.

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