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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt that the biggest gain in learning a new layout is getting rid of old bad habits. Learning something new from scratch allows you to do it right from the start.

The reason for why I've not tried this is probably mainly because it would scramble all keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts are designed for qwerty (a shortcut that you can't perform with your left hand anymore is a huge loss) and many combinations are a huge part of the workflow of many applications. I found this to be a complete showstopper.

I think there are ways to automatically switch to qwerty when ctrl/shift/alt was pressed and maybe I didn't research it enough but it felt like a cludge and I wan't something that is platform independent and easy to enable on any machine.

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That is the one reason to learn Dvorak; it naturally causes you to touch type, because there's no sane reason to have your hands wander around the keyboard; all the keys you use are on the home row. QWERTY affords hand wandering and hunt & peck. If you want to "learn to touch type" it's probably more effective to "learn Dvorak" and let the touch typing take care of itself.

I'm not sure about the virtues of paying the stiff startup fee of learning Dvorak if all you know is QWERTY, but if you have already paid I certainly wouldn't suggest losing it. And I'm very, very tempted to ensure that my kids, who are all too young to be typing at all, simply start on Dvorak. If you're starting from scratch entirely the choice is pretty clear to me.

The thing about shortcut scrambling is oversold; I think it sources from people theorizing about what the problems might be if they switched, not people talking about their experiences. In my actual experience, relearning the keyboard shortcuts was a negligible part of the experience.

I can't be the only one that very often have my left hand on the (left part of the) keyboard and the right on the mouse doing a lot of shortcuts while navigating the GUI.

Such as ctrl+z, ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+w, ctrl+t, ctrl+n, ctrl+s that requires two hands on dvorak ("especially" on an ergonomic keyboard) - or at least requires the right hand (=> you can't use the mouse) or you have to reposition the left hand (not acceptable).

This is not something that you can just relearn and this is something that seriously hinders at least my workflow.

There is a way to configure your Mac (with the program Ukulele, I think) to activate a QWERTY layout when you hold the Ctrl or Alt keys, thus preserving your one-handed shortcuts. Custom keymaps on Linux and Windows could probably accomplish the same thing.

On a Mac you can use the "Dvorak - Querty ⌘" layout to achieve that, it works only with the Command key as far as i know.

Colemak keeps those keys in the same position, except S but S goes where D is on QWERTY so it's almost the same. Try it out.

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