Some people are asking for advice on switching to Dvorak.
Here is my life story:
I grew up typing Qwerty using only four fingers for typing letters, and my right-hand thumb for pressing the space bar. I could type pretty fast, which was especially useful for having heated discussions on irc. My typing speed also got me a job offer during the first dot com bubble.
At around 20, I switched to Dvorak, because I learned about the silly history of the Qwerty layout, and how Dvorak would result in more typing in less time. Over a period of two weeks, I worked my way up from the Beavis and Butthead lessons (uuuu hhhh ...) up to using all ten fingers (apart from the thumb on my left-hand, which isn't doing much apart from the occasional Alt or Super here and there.)
In this training period I suffered from terrible headaches. In retrospect, I think the main pathways in my brain connected my thoughts directly to the Qwerty layout, and this needed a complete rewiring. Also, during this period I could not respond quickly to people on irc who were obviously wrong about something. The frustration was enormous.
Eventually, my typing speed on TypeRacer plateaued somewhere at around 100 wpm. That's a lot less than Sean Wrona, but still requires you to perform a test to check if you didn't cheat.
Switching from Qwerty to Dvorak was really hard, especially in the beginning. It took about five years before I could work on somebody else's machine. I'm also hardwired to Emacs key bindings, so that's a limiting factor as well. Also, I can't seem to type Dvorak with only one finger, when I'm eating a snack for instance. This is still possible with Qwerty! And I can recite the entire Qwerty layout in a pub at night, but I require a keyboard to say aoeui.
In my early days of Dvorak, I wrote some utilities that calculated the travel distance that my fingers would make if I were to retype the entire bible. Depending on how you looked at it, Dvorak required about 5 to 30% less finger movement. Unfortunately, when you put in the Linux source tree, with numbers, curly braces, and other symbols, the advantage isn't so big.
What I do notice though, after ~20 years of Dvorak, is that it feels much more fluent than what I observe at my Qwerty typing coworkers. I guess what _really_ helped for lowering the risk of wrist problems, though, is to remap Caps Lock to an additional Control, and using C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f for keyboard navigation and C-h for backspace. Switching from keyboard to mouse and back really annoys me.
I grew up typing Qwerty using only four fingers for typing letters, and my right-hand thumb for pressing the space bar. I could type pretty fast, which was especially useful for having heated discussions on irc. My typing speed also got me a job offer during the first dot com bubble.
At around 20, I switched to Dvorak, because I learned about the silly history of the Qwerty layout, and how Dvorak would result in more typing in less time. Over a period of two weeks, I worked my way up from the Beavis and Butthead lessons (uuuu hhhh ...) up to using all ten fingers (apart from the thumb on my left-hand, which isn't doing much apart from the occasional Alt or Super here and there.)
In this training period I suffered from terrible headaches. In retrospect, I think the main pathways in my brain connected my thoughts directly to the Qwerty layout, and this needed a complete rewiring. Also, during this period I could not respond quickly to people on irc who were obviously wrong about something. The frustration was enormous.
Eventually, my typing speed on TypeRacer plateaued somewhere at around 100 wpm. That's a lot less than Sean Wrona, but still requires you to perform a test to check if you didn't cheat.
Switching from Qwerty to Dvorak was really hard, especially in the beginning. It took about five years before I could work on somebody else's machine. I'm also hardwired to Emacs key bindings, so that's a limiting factor as well. Also, I can't seem to type Dvorak with only one finger, when I'm eating a snack for instance. This is still possible with Qwerty! And I can recite the entire Qwerty layout in a pub at night, but I require a keyboard to say aoeui.
In my early days of Dvorak, I wrote some utilities that calculated the travel distance that my fingers would make if I were to retype the entire bible. Depending on how you looked at it, Dvorak required about 5 to 30% less finger movement. Unfortunately, when you put in the Linux source tree, with numbers, curly braces, and other symbols, the advantage isn't so big.
What I do notice though, after ~20 years of Dvorak, is that it feels much more fluent than what I observe at my Qwerty typing coworkers. I guess what _really_ helped for lowering the risk of wrist problems, though, is to remap Caps Lock to an additional Control, and using C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f for keyboard navigation and C-h for backspace. Switching from keyboard to mouse and back really annoys me.