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Comment by xhevahir | Hacker News Reader

I switched after developing hand injuries at work (in a job that didn't involve computer use). Since then, whenever I've had to use QWERTY for whatever purpose I've started getting pain in my tendons after a few hours which goes away almost as soon as I'm able to switch back to Dvorak. Like you, though, I found that picking up Dvorak was a total pain in the ass. A while ago I saw a YouTube video in which a guy was telling his viewers that learning it was easy and that the effort was a small price to pay. When I commented that I had had a period of months when I couldn't type anything spontaneously, he suggested that maybe this was due to my age. I was all of thirty at the time I learned it.

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Data point. Old fart who switched to Dvorak eons ago, at age 16. It felt natural after 1 week, and felt more efficient than the ‘qwert sometime between weeks 2 and 3. I suspect young age greatly affects take-up speed. Good on ya for taking care of yourself, and switching when you did.

Incidentally, at age 26, I used the “left-handed” Dvorak layout for 2 weeks while my right wrist and hand healed from a dirtbike crash. I was only becoming proficient at the 2 week mark.

The Dvorak left- and right-hand layouts are not as widely known, and look nothing like the standard two-hand layout… but are incredibly optimized. Even the number row is remapped to accommodate letters. Once I started to grok its efficiency, it felt like 10-key’ing entire words at a time. Might be interesting on modern phones.

I experience the same thing with QWERTY and tendons in wrist & forearm. I have to slow down - a lot - and take breaks. I just remap teh kbd if > 15 minutes. iOS kbd keeps my brain familiar with QWERTY; no first-party Dvorak and I don’t expect Apple to ever include one.

I tried Dvorak on Android eight or ten years ago and realized that my Dvorak skill would not transfer to a touchscreen, since it consisted entirely of muscle memory and I had no experience of looking at a keyboard that was labeled that way. That and the lack of glide typing (which I've come to rely on) made it useless to me.

I've used dvorak and workman on Android, and although you don't exactly get perfect skill transfer, I like these layouts I've invested time in, I like the reminder that I put in that work, I like where the letters are. I am writing this very comment on my phone in workman. The consistency is nice, even if it's not consistency in something as useful as the tactile feel.

On the less-bright side, lack of other layouts on the PinePhone have made using it a bit torturous for anything extensive, and that makes me enjoy using mine for anything a bit less.

Took me about three weeks when I switched cold turkey at age 14 to start typing ok. My biggest pain was that the letter I search for was always under the other hand which was resting on the keyboard :)

I'm letting my daughter learn it when she's 8 instead.. they just.. learn it. It is truly fascinating from the perspective of a typist.

So maybe the youtuber is onto something. I think that you should have a clear strategy when learning though, that will probably speed up the process alot.

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