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Comment by pooriar | Hacker News Reader

I tried to learn dvorak, and colemak, and both ended up requiring too much investment to be worth it. This is very tempting, even though I promised myself I'd stop messing with keyboard layouts

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I’m not here to convince anyone as I could care less what layout you type in, but are you really saying a few days or weeks of typing slightly slower isn’t worth a lifetime of increased ergonomics and comfort?

But there’s the constant switching cost any time you encounter a keyboard that is t yours

How often is that? And, what cost exactly? Just type in QWERTY. It’s just not a big deal.

I haven’t learned Dvorak, but I presume that doing so overwrites a lot of the muscle memory used for qwerty and it’s not like you retain full proficiency in the old layout.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that I will frequently mistype switching between different warty keyboards (eg, standalone mechanical vs laptop)

I almost exclusively use Colemak-DH and have 0 issues typing in QWERTY when I have to. I chalk it up to my phone keyboard still being in QWERTY so I get enough exposure from that to not forget the locations of the keys (it's certainly not as well retained as it used to be, I no longer remember the location of all the keys in QWERTY from memory). I do use a columnar split keyboard though (Moonlander) so it's possible the radical difference in how I use the keyboard helped to keep the muscle memory separate.

It's like driving stick vs automatic.

I don't know how it works, but when I switched over (20+ years ago) I was dysfunctional in both qwerty and dvorak for a good couple of weeks if not a month, then slowly got the hang of it. I use qwerty now at work and dvorak at home, except that I've switched the main keyboard layout at home to qwerty and just use dvorak for programming and anything in a terminal (on linux), which is where I spend a lot of my time.

I can mentally switch over to dvorak and program for a while, mentally swap back, and type normally for other things. I mainly switched the default layout back to qwerty because I was tired of remapping all the keys in every game I play. Sometimes when I come into work on a Monday morning I'll type gibberish for a couple of sentences then mentally flip back to qwerty and be fine.

So, never?

I get your point in principle. I actually switched to Colemak in college, and it worked really well. Then I got a job doing IT support and it was a pain in the butt to keep switching every time I interacted with a customer laptop.

But now I remote work from home. I can’t remember the last time I touched a keyboard that wasn’t mine.

> a lifetime of increased ergonomics and comfort

I've never felt any discomfort from qwerty, so, no, this business about increased ergonomics and comfort is a false promise to me.

I have, however, helped multiple people who thought they had problems in their hands and wrists who actually had problems in their necks and shoulders, and showing them diagrams of the brachial plexus nerves helped them eliminate their pain through posture changes.

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