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Comment by globuous | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I switched to Dvorak a few years back, it was the worst experience in the world. Granted I had to fight against my qwerty reflexes

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I was lucky to never have properly learned to touch type on QWERTY in the first place, I had key positions memorized but I always used my index fingers - it actually hindered me from touch typing as the bad habit would always creep back up. Thus I forced myself to learn from square one with Dvorak, not having the keycaps on my keyboard to fall back on - it was painful, but I'm glad I did it.

Now 15 years later I really enjoy the flow of the layout, a majority of the time when typing you alternate between sides of the keyboard when typing and it just feels good.

When I learnt to touch type I switched to Dvorak at the same time. I liked the idea of improved efficiency but whenever I had to use someone else's computer or they needed to use mine it was too much hassle. Once I'd relearned to touch type with Qwerty life was so much easier. Also hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my brain around

J and K are adjacent in Dvorak, and they're down and up, respectively, which makes vertical scrolling just as easy, IMO. I never really used H and L but instead rely on mostly W and B (which aren't adjacent but are close enough). So by happy coincidence, navigating in vim works just fine, I think.

Yep, I've never felt the need to remap hjkl for other layouts. Very exaggerated issue from people who didn't stick with it long enough, I think.

I was worried about it with Workman because it was slightly less logical. h still left of l, but quite far away, j and k are placed so that it's like you've inverted your camera controls in a game. Very easy to adjust anyway and I don't really think about it now. Your point about w and b is very good as well. Advanced vim users are actually less likely to use hjkl much due to having faster ways to get around in most cases.

Yep. I use vim & evil regularly with dvorak. J and K as well as H and L are just fine. H and L are placed very similarly to where they are on qwerty; H is just shifted one position to the right, and L is one position to the right and up. So they still have the "left-right" feel, and I like that H is under the index finger.

> hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my brain around

Why not just remap? My intuition is that the cascading conflict wouldn't be that hard to resolve (at least compared to learning Dvorak...) but maybe I'm wrong.

You can easily and quickly add a Dvorak keyboard to someone else's computer, deleting it once done. I did that all the time when I worked as an editor, having to occasionally edit on clients' computers. The benefit of speed gained from using Dvorak outweighs the inconvenience of having to occasionally add and delete a keyboard on other computers.

Buy a mechanical keyboard with the ability to modify the firmware. I did this and it was worth the $200 price tag.

Forgetting to configure computers after finishing with them, not knowing what layout was in use in the login screen, initial configuration, etc all cost time. I also use RDP a lot which is layout roulette (sometimes it changes, sometimes it doesn’t)

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