I can’t really compare the typing speed before and after. Before, I had slightlly different keyboard layouts on different PCs (US, UK, German, French), which greatly annoyed me and slowed me down. Now I use Colemak on all PCs, and this has restored my sanity.

Colemak is great for writing accented characters in multiple languages (ñ, ç, ä, ö, ü, ê, à, ß), and all the characters used for programming (#|[]{}%\) are in the same place as on a US keyboard. For my purposes. it is really the ideal keyboard.

As for why I went with the whim, I cannot say other than enjoying being different—in all honesty the benefits of faster typing and more comfort were ancillary. I almost abandoned my efforts because I have a word-processing-intensive job and my typing was painfully slow (and doing everything by dictation defeats the point of learning to type in a new style). It took me over a year for my typing to equal (and then surpass) my QWERTY speed.

Amazingly, since learning to type in Dvorak, I have also learned to type fluently in Hebrew—which took me less than a week. I am curious if learning Dvorak helped me pick up the new style faster, just one who learns a second language can learn a third.

A lot of people seem pleased with it though, but it should like a lot of work to change?

Today, I can switch between the two. If I type correctly, it has to be in Dvorak. If I type in my old “cheating” style, it comes out in Qwerty.

By the way, I do think I type faster in Dvorak than I ever did in Qwerty.

But I’ve found that it’s possible to memorize the letter pairs for QWERTY and a nonstandard keyboard for each key.

And if I know the pairs, I can transpose between layouts as I write.

For example, the pairs for ‘e’ ‘h’ ‘l’ and ‘o’ between nTheia (my board) and QWERTY are ‘eg’ ‘ha’ ‘lc’ and ‘op’. Typing “agllp” on a standard board gives me ‘hello’.

And I do agree with Andrew Flusche, companies that produce gadgets like the iPhone should be pressured to make the keyboards customizable.

Ciao e mahalo,
Søren

*answers.- 4 years ago, because I was spending so much time in chat rooms, IRC and Instant messangers, I decided to change to Dvorak anytime i can. So far it’s been amazing, i type faster and I am able to reduce the wrist strain. The mind switches automatically. I had two keyboards side by side for a bit when i was doing website testing,(qwerty and Dvorak) and the brain makes the switch instantly. The only problem is that it refuses to switch BACK. Say for instance the left keyboard is qwerty and the right is Dvorak, your brain has memorised this pattern. If i switched the keyboards around, i found i was unable to use them for a few seconds until i actually made a visual report of which was which. Minor, but i don’t change keyboards anymore. I have switched labtops, (mac and PC) and popped keys on keyboards and even bought stickers , and still constantly used a dvorak. My goal is the split dvorak keyboards. One annoying note. PC’s do not allow you to log in using changed keyboards so i always have to qwerty my way in if i have it set up in International.

If you write alot, go ahead and switch, it takes about 6months to be entirely comfortable, but only about 2 weeks to get the gist of where the keys are.

Using a Qwerty keyboard, I had begun to suffer carpel tunnel syndrome, and I didn’t enjoy the pain at all, I changed over to DSK at home and at work nearly 4 years ago, and left the pain behind.

I have looked at Programmers Dvorak but not installed and used it yet, as I do coding rather than programming, I’m not sure how advantageous the move will be, but I went through all that once moving from Qwerty to Dvorak, the additional learning curve is set to be a minor change to the major change of the past.

My Qwerty speeds were around 72 wpm, but I always ran everything through a spell checker as I’m a low level dyslexic, it always came up with errors, and there would be 50 to 60 errors on a full page, after the change over it took between 2 and 3 weeks of cold turkey typing to get back into the swing of touch typing, it took about another 3 to 4 weeks to get back to around 68 wpm, but I noticed that my errors went down to 20 to 25 errors per full page.

I am now typing at 85 wpm and my errors are at 12 to 15 per full page, I run 90% of my typing through a spell checker, and the total errors are about 25% of the errors I used to get with a Qwerty keyboard.

So from my point of view the past 4 years of DSK have been “No pain. Great gain”.

In terms of productivity the Dvorak keyboard makes me at least 20 – 25% more productive, in a purely subjective estimation, this is based on eliminating the pain totally, improved typing speed, and reducing the errors/page by 75%. The greatly reduced finger mileage has changed some things, that would make any typing after 5 hours on a Qwerty keyboard painful, to the point that I can be pain free after 8 or more hours on a DSK

I wrote a blog article about my experience with Dvorak keymaps earlier this year, so I won’t reiterate what I put there. If you use the search form on my site, there’s a couple of other related articles too…

What interests me about Dvorak nowadays is that I have spoken with a lot of people who never looked back after switching to Dvorak, a handful who couldn’t get over the resistance of switching in a few days and went back to QWERTY, but not one person who spent a little time becoming proficient with Dvorak and then decided that on balance QWERTY was worth going back to…

Nowadays Dvorak layout is almost as mainstream as QWERTY, and the vast majority of OSes and devices that have any kind of keyboard internationalisation facility offer a Dvorak keymap.

Cheers,
Gary

@Jenika – Was it designed to slow the typist down or just to space things out so the keys didn’t jam? I’ve heard a lot of people say it was to slow typists down, but the stuff I’ve actually read said it was just to keep keys (or possibly the arms that hit the platen) from jamming.

I remember playing with a mechanical typewriter as a child and there were certain keys that when hit close together would jam. Fortunately these keys were combinations that didn’t occur much in actual typing.