: 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

@Gail2416123

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Dvorak is a bit outdated, and not all the assumptions he made have proven correct over time (such as penalties for same hand). For a more modern take, which favors same hand inward rolls, look at Colemak . It is absolutely worth the effort to learn either as an improvement over qwerty, but if you're going to go to this amount of trouble you might as well get rid of a few other issues sorted, such as the staggered key layout. Keyboards like the kinesis advantage (https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage2/) have the keys arranged in a grid, and combined with colemak have totally revolutionized typing for me.

One big advantage with using an alternate keyboard that I've found is that I never lost any qwerty skills. I use qwerty at home, and colemak on my kinesis keyboard at work. The physical differences appears to have separated the muscle memory into two entirely different skills which don't collide. A bit like learning piano playing not causing you to lose typing skills, maybe, because it feels different.

it took me about a week or two to get started properly with the layout, and about 6-8 weeks to come up to a useful speed. After 6 months I'd become a bit better than my qwerty best but seem to have stopped getting faster (been using colemak several years now). however, I notice a MASSIVE improvement in comfort, which was worth the change all by itself. There is an enjoyable slickness to colemak which has to be experienced. Some people have gone on to incredible speeds with colemak, sadly I'm not one of them and topped out at around 80-90wpm, but the comfort factor alone never caused me to regret the switch, not once.

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