Hacker News Reader

Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this keyboard and others (like Dvorak, Colemak) is nobody else uses them.

I have one of those old indestructible IBM model M keyboards with removable keycaps. I love that keyboard. I decided I'd try to learn DVORAK and work with it regularly, so I did so. And I realized something: every time I'd work with a keyboard, I _will_ be working with QWERTY. There's no way I would request to an employer that I have a special keyboard just for me, or try to reconfigure software to support it.

So I went back to QWERTY. May not be ideal but I know everyone supports it.

View on HN

> There's no way I would request to an employer that I have a special keyboard just for me

Why not?

> or try to reconfigure software to support it.

Why not?

If there's a much better alternative out there that can make you more productive - and Dvorak has been one of those things for me - your employer should be jumping up and down in joy at throwing however many $10 keyboards at you as you're asking for.

There are also plenty of USB devices that convert between the two, or keyboards with hardware switches. Or, of course, in software. I use AutoHotkey, because keyboard layout switching in Windows is completely broken, and it works pretty well.

If that's your excuse for not using Dvorak rather than anything else, you're doing both yourself and your employer a huge disservice, especially if you're going to take that attitude to other things.

I've worked several programming jobs since switching to Dvorak, and it has never been an issue---it takes < 10 seconds to change the layout OS-wide. No need to request a special keyboard (and I leave my keycaps as QWERTY because I touch-type anyways).

Touch-typing is the key, if you have to look at the keys regularly then switching to a new layout will be an order of magnitude more difficult.

I learned dvorak by printing out the layout and glancing over at the paper while typing back in high school. It took me about a month to get comfortable and I'm now basically a touch-typing bilinguist (though I'm slower at qwerty, it's more mental effort to do the conversion on the fly since my muscle memory is dvorak).

Nice learning hack.

I did the same thing! And I'm embarrassingly slower at qwerty now.

The best part for me was when I first started having dvorak reflexes on a qwerty keyboard.

Agreed. I'll add that if you can't touch-type, your keyboard layout is the least of your problems. Take a few days off and learn.

I'm relatively sure that every OS supports changing the keyboard layout without being root and for just one user, so unless your employer specifically disabled that, then that shouldn't be an issue.

The point about the keycaps is valid, but ideally you shouldn't be looking at them anyways. Additionally, I learned Dvorak an a QWERTY labeled keyboard, and found that eventually I just associated the labels I saw with what I was actually typing.

You don't need a special keyboard, or to change your keycaps. Keyboard layouts are for touch typists only.

We're talking about software here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com