: Re: Is it worth switching to Dvorak? I've occasionally thought about trying the Dvorak keyboard layout to improve my writing speed. However, I wonder if the speed gain is really worth the initial

@Candy753

I am always curious about efficiency, so I tried switching to Dvorak about four years ago. Here are some notes:


I didn't switch the keys since I knew I would be working on multiple keyboards; instead I printed out a cheat sheet.
It took me about 3-4 weeks to get up to Qwerty speed (60-65 wpm for me). The first week I was a painful 10 wpm.
Then I surpassed my speed and now have visited 75 wpm.
The weirdest thing that I wish Dvorak had done differently is putting all the vowels right next to each other. I still mix them up sometimes.
I know the guy's tests were dubious, but that doesn't mean his system was.
There is lots of debate about this: some people say Dvorak absolutely makes you go faster, others think it's psychological. For my part, I tried to be very open-minded about it and just see what happened, and I did go faster. That's about as much as I can argue.
I also don't believe that Qwerty was literally made to slow you down. You see all sorts of conflicting views about this as well. My best analysis says that it's a myth that Qwerty was designed to slow you down (though it was made to alternate left and right hands).
I'll also mention, while I'm at it, that I believe that neither Qwerty nor Dvorak is right for devices, because they are both ten-finger systems, whereas devices don't work that way. Which is why we developed Modality typing.
Everything else said, though, I'm definitely a Dvorak supporter. Not a huge evangelist, though I do talk about it here and there (like here, for instance).


So, hopefully that helps muddy the waters for you!

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