Dvorak, a superior keyboard layout | Hacker News Reader

Dvorak, a superior keyboard layout

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2 pointsmos27 comments

I set out to learn Dvorak in high school. It took me two weeks before I could more or less just touch type the way I did with qwerty layouts.

I switched back after a couple of months for a two main reasons:

1. It became hard to use other machines. A friend's computer, a significant other's computer, and others became hard to use and my machine was hard to use for them.

2. Keyboard shortcuts are designed with Qwerty in mind. You either change the shortcuts in almost every app, or you wind up stretching fingers for shortcuts that are now super awkward.

The typing was great, but in a way, typing is about more than just, well, typing.

I agree about both points. I guess I was in the position where I use my own computer or one I can change to dvorak about 99% of the time. The keyboard shortcuts are not great though. Especially for things that are meant for left hand keyboard and right hand mouse simultaneous movement, like in photoshop or most games. I usually just switch to qwerty in a pinch.

vim, is also especially awkward in its movement commands. ST IMO doesn't have this same level of awkwardness.

I learnt dvorak and vim at roughly the same time and never found an issue with movement. It's probably a good thing to encourage you to use the more effective movement commands anyway rather than moving one step at a time.

I kind of think that it should be renamed, just because initially I thought it was a foreign language keyboard until someone told me that it was an English keyboard with superior layout.

There are other variants for other languages. There is Bépo for French.

The Dvorak layout is ideally suited to typing in english where you have a constant switching of vowels to constants. All the vowels are on the left hand so the idea is that you alternate and it is unlikely that you will type much more than 2 or 3 in succession and often only 1.

The whole thing about Dvorak keyboards being faster to type on is a myth. See link for details: http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors

I learned Dvorak a few years ago but for a totally different reason than most people. I used it to stop myself from looking at the keyboard and learn typing the right way.

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