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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a particular beef in the great Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate.

But I really wish I had a brain which could do things like acquire muscle memory fluency in one keyboard layout without losing it in another.

Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here... I feel like I'm not using that much of my regular qwerty muscle memory, and what's optimal for a swiping keyboard is probably quite different from what's optimal for a typing keyboard.

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> I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...

Perhaps, but as someone who has been proficient in QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, and who now uses Colemak-DH I can say that I leave my phone and small tablet keyboards on QWERTY.

The separation of common letters in QWERTY forces your finger to move farther when swiping, but that provides a bit more distinguishing information for identifying words. When I tried swiping with Colemak and Dvorak my finger basically scrubbed back and forth across the home row and words were often mis-identified.

There are slightly improved swiping input methods like 8pen, Typewise, Hero, etc but if you are entering enough text to be able to amortize their learning costs you might be better off getting a portable Bluetooth keyboard or just using voice dictation.

Same here. I adopted Dvorak as a youth, so when I got my first smartphone I put the keyboard in Dvorak.

That only lasted a few days for two reasons:

1) What you said about the mistakes. It is so much easier to fat finger in a way that makes autocorrect clueless.

2) The muscle memory doesn't translate at all anyway. Obvious in retrospect, but typing with your thumbs is a completely unrelated skill to touch typing. Turns out both live separately and equally in my brain.

for phones, have a look at thumbkey https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key (messagease like)

I also recommend dactly (see also https://ryanis.cool/cosmos/ for a more generic keyboard generation)

Huh, I do use Dvorak on my phone. I have a weird phone typing style with my left thumb and my right index finger.

My biggest issue is how often I hit '.' instead of 'p' for some reason.

> Though, I'm typing this on a swiping keyboard. It's different enough that a better layout might have been worth it here...

This seems to be an interesting place where the type bar optimization problem of the earliest typewriters came back in a new weirder form. For swiping keyboards to work the words need recognizably different shapes and for irregular pairs to be closer together (just as with the type bar problem) and so QWERTY is very strongly and weirdly optimized for swiping even though it seems very unlikely its inventors could have ever imagined swipe typing.

I can anecdotally admit that touch typing and swipe typing are extremely different muscle memory. I touch type Colemak and swipe type QWERTY. (One of the things that prompted the move to Colemak for touch typing was that I needed to unlearn a ton of bad muscle memory from self-taught/self-"optimized" QWERTY, as it was inflaming RSI/RSI-like symptoms, so the loss of "fluency" there was a requirement/feature for me.)

FITALY

I switched to Dvorak at the same time as switching to a split, columnar keyboard. I have never used Dvorak on a traditional staggered keyboard, and I have never used QWERTY on a split columnar keyboard. By separating the layout usage on such distinct form factors, I haven't lost QWERTY even after not using it as my primary for years :)

I also do still use QWERTY for touchscreen devices, because you can't keep your hands on the home row on touch screens, so you lose the benefits of Dvorak (and I actually found the common letter combos being near each other to be way more cumbersome on a touch screen).

My first layout was AZERTY (french one), and I added Colemak 4 years ago. I am slightly faster in AZERTY compared to Colemak still (100wpm/90wpm), I never lost the AZERTY, the key is to just use both all the time. I have a shortcut and I alternate constantly, because I need to write french, or because I wanna code.

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