I switched to Dvorak recently too. Need to get more disciplined about practicing and getting back up to speed. TypeFaster is great because it tracks slowest/least accurate keys and lets you drill them.

Hey, I'm curious how your Dvorak experiment is coming along?

3. Dvorak is said to be even worse for repetetive stress than Qwerty is.

Nowhere have I heard this -- quite the opposite in fact. Sounds like disinformation to me.

smibbo, great to hear I'm not the only crazy one!

There are three reasons I don't consider Dvorak:

1. I use too many other people's keyboards for brief to extended periods, and while I could pretty easily soft-program the keyboard to Dvorak, I do occasionally look at the keyboard.

2. I've touch typed Qwerty for 35 years.

3. Dvorak is said to be even worse for repetetive stress than Qwerty is.

One more bonus reason: These days, for everything except Videosift, I am tapping things out on my iphone.

I'm curious how your experiment goes.

I switched to Dvorak a few years ago. I had a laptop at the time and switched it by using the built-in dealie with Windows preferences. Then I put lil stickers on my keys. Then I just plowed through it. Took about two weeks to get my typing speed back to where it originally was and in three weeks I was typing faster and easier. Thing is, I left my desktop in QWERTY for a while there until I decided I really did like Dvorak better and switched the preference to Dvorak there too. By then, I didn't need the stickers on the keys anymore. After I lost that laptop and the KB for my desktop, I went back to QWERTY because it was too much of a pain to put new stickers on the new keyboard and my (now) husband kept switching the layout to QWERTY anyway every time he had to tweak my system.
My brother visited me recently and told me he was learning Dvorak. He was a tad put-out to find out that I not only knew what that was but had already tried it. So he made a shortcut for my layouts and promptly went tweakin in my desktop in Dvorak. Every now and then, when I'm typing away, I accidently hit the cntrl +shift and end up typing foreign words.

I say it's a neat thing to do and I know for sure that it really isn't hard to maintain both typing styles at once.

no idea what's sendfile, but I'll upload it to my server and give you the url, if you want

In reply to this comment by MINK:
use sendfile? would be interested to check it out whilst preserving the slim thread of anonymity i feel on the sift

In reply to this comment by looris:
I remember there were somewhere a layout which had most common used signs in the middle of the keyboard...

anyway, @MINK, if you have a mac, gg, I'll pass you the layout file...

don't you have any instant messanger? gtalk/jabber, icq, msn?

use sendfile? would be interested to check it out whilst preserving the slim thread of anonymity i feel on the sift

In reply to this comment by looris:
I remember there were somewhere a layout which had most common used signs in the middle of the keyboard...

anyway, @MINK, if you have a mac, gg, I'll pass you the layout file...

don't you have any instant messanger? gtalk/jabber, icq, msn?

There is a part of me thinking WHY did I do this to myself?!? I too have over 20 years of experience with QWERTY, and am lightning fast and almost error-free at it. But I expect to be even faster on Dvorak fairly quickly.

One of the things that convinced me to switch was an an article by a guy who said that it only took him two weeks to get back up to speed. My experience seems to be bearing that out -- I'm only five days in and I'm fully touch-typing, if slowly.

Part of the reason it's quick to switch is that you already have the movements down. You don't have to relearn how to move your fingers, how to type spaces or how to shift. And the number keys (and their shifted characters) are in the same places -- which for me took the longest to learn.

And there are real benefits. I can already feel how much less my fingers need to move around. If that translates to a 20% increase in my typing speed, it will give me a big boost in productivity. It is also supposed to reduce the risk of carpal tunnel and RSI.

I'm also finding unexpected pleasures. The hyphen is within easy reach, instead of being way off in a corner. The comma, period and quote are easier as well. And some common words that were awkward before are now a delight -- I will never again type 'teh' instead of 'the'. Except when it comes to "teh cuteness", of course!

As far as portability goes, it's a snap to switch any modern operating system to Dvorak, so I'm not worried about it. Some say you can retain the ability to type in both; that remains to be seen in my case.

The first thing I did to switch over was to pop off all my keycaps. Then I discovered that my ergonomic keyboard has non-interchangeable keys, so I put them back and just wrote the letters in with permanent marker. Which promptly rubbed off. But that's ok, it's all about the touch-typing.

Thylan is right about the keyboard shortcuts. That definitely adds another layer to the learning curve. But while some are less convenient, others are more, so it probably balances out in the end.

As to whether I would recommend it to anyone else, I'll let you know in a week!

i'm on a qwerty with some keys broken, like 4, -, =, [, cursors (except left)

try coding with that!
actually i am now quite fast at clicking the broken keys on Keyboard Viewer.

The thing that stops me switching to dvorak is that i am good on qwerty anyway (since 5 years old!), and i use a lot of different computers so i am not gonna carry a keyboard with me or fuck around with my girlfriend's language settings every time i want to type something "a bit faster". And i am definitely not going to learn how to switch to dvorak on windows, there's enough problems there already.

it seems to be a solution looking for a problem that isn't really there.

looris's "php layout" sounds great though. that is something i would be more interested in because i only code on one machine. maybe i could remap my broken keys to something less useful... hmmm

(or i could just buy a new keyboard hahaha)

oh, and i guess lithuanian special characters would kinda fuck up the dvorak layout yeah? it must be based on english...

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Keep us posted on how it goes Arvana- I've considered it in the past as well.

Did you buy little letter stickers for all your keys? How hard is it to switch your PC over to Dvorak? Is there any good typing tutor software for it?

What about a chorded keyboard? It lets you type with one hand which has ... benefits.

I'm not planning to use dvorak, I'm too used to qwerty: 20 years of mastery to the point of writing fast without watching are an investment I'm not going to throw away.

But I'm not confortable with the non-letter layout, i.e. the positions of signs and numbers.
So I've completely re-designed it, optimized for php programming, which I do.
And that's totally a great thing, now coding is so much faster!

I'll have to fine tune it and share it sooner or later...

Love Antonin Dvorak!!!

I type 106 WPM with 0% errors with QWERTY so I don't see myself switching to DVORAK anytime soon

Tags changed from "dvorak, qwerty, touchtyping" to "dvorak, qwerty, touchtyping, silent" by gold star member choggie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPfevKbJRmQ
should be posted as well. it is an explanation of the theory behind dvorak touch typing. I have no idea how to post 2 videos in one and I'm a new member so I can't post 2..