An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
I use Dvorak. I started learning in September, and caught up to my QWERTY speed in November. Here's a graph I recorded for science:
(Green is Dvorak, red is QWERTY, as I'm sure you guessed. Also 69 days lulz.)
As you can see, it didn't entirely kill my QWERTY speed*. As of now I average around 65 WPM and can max out in the mid-70's. Here's a few reasons why I chose to learn Dvorak:
1) I heard it was easier on the fingers and wrists (less movement, more natural feel).
2) I wanted to properly learn how to touch-type.
3) My QWERTY speed is pretty slow for someone who spends all his time on the computer.
If you're like me, you learned how to type by playing games (Battle.net was my typing tutor), and you probably just learned something that worked for you. Well, this worked fine for me, but if there was an easier way to do something, I would be eager to learn. Unfortunately, the way I learned QWERTY was burned into my muscle memory, so when I had typing classes in high school, I would only type something like 20 WPM if I tried to type properly, versus 60-70 WPM if I just did my own thing.
I did try to touch-type; it was uncomfortable and felt sluggish. Whenever I needed to actually type something, I would switch to my informal typing format instead of using the home row, because it was much faster. So this was the problem I had with QWERTY: I became too used to the way I typed with it that I couldn't learn how to type properly with it.
So I picked up Dvorak. The first week was really hard; do you have any idea how slow 10 WPM is? Ugh. And I switched cold-turkey, too (since that's the fastest way to learn). I'm a programmer, so I'm on a computer pretty much all day, and it felt almost embarrassing when typing super slow around others. Of course, since I'm in the tech industry, my coworkers were understanding when I told them about it, and my supervisor didn't have an issue with me learning it on-site as long as it didn't impede my work. I made sure to learn it properly, too, using the home row and touch-typing; if I'm going to start from scratch, I'm going to do it right.
The only time I used QWERTY was once every day to measure my typing speed (for the graph above). Surprisingly, it didn't impact my typing as much as I thought it would*. It took me about four months (basically almost up to now) to not have to think about typing in Dvorak, and now it flows naturally like I've been typing in it my whole life (muscle memory is pretty amazing).
If you're looking for a new keyboard, I would recommend you check out the keyboards from
this page. The keyboards from that site are buckle-spring (like the oldschool IBM keyboards) and feel absolutely amazing. I had a Das Keyboard with cherry browns prior to my Black/Black UltraClassic 104, and I feel like I've made a huge upgrade (even though it miraculously costs less). You can customize it to be in several different layouts, but I'd recommend the blank keyboard just because it looks awesome and will prevent you from looking at the keys and "cheating" as you learn Dvorak. The blank keyboard I have at home is in the QWERTY layout (because I want to be able to switch back to QWERTY for games that won't customize keys), but I plan on getting another for work in the Dvorak layout (right now I'm using a QWERTY keyboard and telling the OS to convert the layout to Dvorak, which sucks because you have to set it up for any VMs as well, and anyone proxying/VPNing into my box will be subjugated to Dvorak as well, which pisses off the service department
). You can email them with questions and/or additional customizations (I'm going to when I request a blank keyboard in Dvorak). It's a really nice keyboard, and I recommend it to you (and anyone else, even if you aren't learning a new layout).
Another keyboard option is the
Kinesis. A coworker of mine exclusively learned Dvorak on this keyboard, so when he has a standard keyboard, he can easily switch to QWERTY because of the physical layout change. These keyboards are super expensive, though, but I like the idea of having a different physical layout to help trigger your mind to use a different key layout as well.
The MAJOR issue with Dvorak (aside from the F key being in a less-than-optimal location) is that program and system shortcuts/hotkeys are all designed for a QWERTY layout, and so some of them (like CTRL+F or CTRL+C) are more difficult to execute in Dvorak. There's a layout called Colemak which has
remarkably similar improvements to the QWERTY layout as Dvorak does, while still keeping a lot of QWERTY keys (and therefore shortcuts) in the same place. I haven't tried it because I've been happy with Dvorak, though.
* I cannot type in QWERTY without looking at my keyboard anymore. After I got my blank keyboard, my QWERTY WPM went to 12. When I can't see the keys, my muscle memory defaults to Dvorak.
Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Jan 1 2013, 11:07 pm by Roy.