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Comment by aaron_m04 | Hacker News Reader

One YouTube comment echoed my experience with Dvorak:

> Often overlooked is that the main reason for switching to dvorak isn't speed for most users. The dvorak layout is layed out for minimal movement while maintaining a roughly even split between hands. This reduces strain on a typists hands and helps a great deal with comfort when typing for longer periods of time.

I may not type faster than if I had stuck with qwerty, but I definitely don't have the wrist problems I keep hearing coworkers complain about.

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This was my driving factor for switching to Colemak (I considered Dvorak, but felt Colemak was easier for _me_ to learn).

I'm starting to get some finger pain again, but that's almost entirely from overuse. QWERTY was crushing my hands. Far too many, weird twisting moves to hit consecutive keys between top and bottom rows.

Split keyboards is my recommendation

Split keyboards can help with wrist positioning but not finger travel, both of which can contribute to wrist problems.

That's why you should also choose a small keyboard, like one with 34 keys or similar.

For typing alphabetical characters, I'd expect a more significant impact from "adopt Dvorak instead of QWERTY" over "adopt a smaller keyboard".

For reducing strain to access keys like shift/backspace/escape/tab, I think that's where "use keyboard with multiple thumbkeys" would have a benefit, yeah.

What type of layout do you use for 34 keys?

I've got a 42 key split board so I'm not a total noob to minimalist keyboard but struggle to see how 34 keys can be used effectively.

This is my layout: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2022/09/06/the_current_t-34...

In reality it would be easy to go down to a single thumb key, making it 32 keys.

In short I have layers for numbers and symbols, I make heavy use of combos (pressing multiple keys at once) where I have modifiers, big keys like escape and enter and also the numbers and symbols (for typing singletons). I also have different functions for long press and I use capsword and numword (caps lock / layer that turns off intelligently).

I spend the majority of my time in the shell (usually bash) or emacs. Learning the key-maps, especially for zsh and bash, was one of the best things I ever did. Wow, that cut my keypresses down immensely. So did remapping lynx(1) keybindings.

My experience is that Dvorak solved my RSI problems, and split keyboards do not. The amount of time it takes to retrain into Dvorak is irrelevant to me, because the alternative is something more extreme, like quitting my job, using speech-to-text, or living in pain.

Split keyboards solved my hand problems 6years ago. I started learning Dvorak this week to reduce my left index finger strain.

Yeah, I think this sums up every Dvorak debunking story that pops up on HN twice a year. You can type 100 WPM with two fingers as seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqyiyh_hrUs so layout does not matter too much for speed. You can see his physical movement does not appear superhuman, and this is well above average typing speed of 40 WPM.

Debunkers: It's not any faster!

Dvorak users: We know, and we don't care.

As another anecdote this was my driver switching off of QWERTY as well, with no regrets.

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