I’ve been using Dvorak for years and I looooove it. When people find out (usually by failing to type on my keyboard), they often ask me why I switched.
Here’s a good list of pros and cons. I was convinced when I read this
Comfort: Dvorak wins this contest hands down. The Dvorak keymap is carefully adapted to the English language. For example, most typing in Dvorak takes place on the home row, so your fingers and hands don’t have to move around so much. Dvorak also divides words more evenly between hands, so one hand isn’t typing whole words like agree, fact, grass, greater, opinion, regard…
Lately I’m convinced that I have RSI in my left pinky(could be psychosomatic, like that time I thought I had west nile). I never trained myself to use the shift key on my right hand, so the burden falls on my poor left pinky. I also use it a lot when coding (that darn ;. It’s in the z location if you’re a qwerty user). I mentioned it to Dennis and he found Ukelele a keyboard layout editor for mac. It’s a great program and very easy to use.
This is my new layout:
I switched the ; key with the ‘. I figured reaching up for the ; is better than reaching down. I’ve been using the layout for about a week now and I’ve noticed a few problems with it. I still have not acclimated to the change, so I am constantly typing the wrong character (certainly not helping my attempt to use my left pinky less). I’ve also found that I use apostrophe all the time in regular typing.
Another big problem is that flex builder seems to be the only program that doesn’t entirely obey the new layout. I use lots of keyboard shortcuts (who doesn’t?) and the command key doesn’t map properly in flex. When I hold down the command, the layout turns to qwerty which ONLY happens in flex. I’ve tested it out with every other program I use regularly and it works just fine. Ukelele shows me that when I hold down command I get the dvorak keyboard. What gives? I hate eclipse.
I ended up individually remapping keys in flex. It sucked. I use flex because it’s there and it works. I’d much prefer jedit with the emacs plugin, but jedit doesn’t have as3 autocompletion. (kay I’m sorry if that previous sentence only made sense to me, and a tiny subset of other people)
Overall I’m not completely satisfied with the new placing of the ;, but I’m having a hard time figuring out where it should go. I’ll have to try a few more things to find out what is optimal.
I’m betting more people were confused by “Dvorak.”
Ha, good point.
Haha. I understood you completely
I didn’t know jEdit did autocompletion… kinda cool I guess. Apparently, there’s even a vi-style input plugin for jEdit. Hmm. Cool. I still loves me some vim, and sure enough there’s a syntax file out there for AS3. If I were a hardened jEdit user and wanted me some syntax completion, I’d write it myself (it doesn’t look *too* bad)
I was walling on soda.csua about few summers ago at work and was commenting on how unproductive I was being by configuring vim colors and syntaxes and whatnot; someone pointed out that I was, actually, doing work — learning more about my tools and making them more productive to suit me totally counts. Plus, you can give back to the community
(Granted, I’ve never posted my barak.vim colorscheme to the general public, but it’s found users on soda)
As to your keyboard mapping:
I’ve never been able to think in Dvorak — how long did it take you? I’ve got the inverse shift problem you have (I *only* use my right pinky to shift) but I’ve got another change to your keyboard mapping that you’ll love:
How often do you use Caps Lock? Map it to CTRL; old Sun-style. Switch it if you must keep a CapsLock, or if you’re like me, you’ll just do away with Caps altogether and have two Ctrls. It rocks my world, and saves my left pinky a lot of stress (which seems to be your goal). I made the change on a Monday, and by Tuesday evening I was flailing at foreign keyboards without it.
There’s even a nice way to do so in OS X built-in — it’s somewhere in Preferences called “Modifier Keys”. It’s very logical for old Unix-hands, especially Emacs/jEdit users. Imagine the stress saved from a simple C-x C-c. It’s even more logical on a Mac keyboard where the default location of Ctrl sucks; suddenly, Cmd is good for GUI-things, CapsCtrl is good for Unix-things, and Alt is still about where you want it.
Haha. And if people got confused by your post, they’ll be even more confused by this comment
(I half considered making this a trackback — and it might be if I can create a 10 Ways To Spiff Up Your Hacking list or something)
Did you touch type? I touch type. How hard was it to learn a new setup? It seems like it would be brutal. Touch typing is so natural for me now.
Every major OS natively supports the Dvorak layout, so unless you’re specifically creating a non-standard layout as Karen has above, you don’t need to install any keymapping software.
The benefits of the Dvorak layout are clear; I recently gave Dvorak an honest try myself. They say you can learn to touch-type in 10 hours, which is technically true. Within a couple of hours I had no problem touch-typing, but my speed was in the 8-10 WPM range. After four full days, I was still only up to about 14 WPM (I type QWERTY at about 70 WPM.) Realizing I simply couldn’t get my job done typing at that speed, I switched back to QWERTY… and had no trouble doing so.
Moral of the story: Dvorak is fantastic, but don’t I wouldn’t recommend trying to make the switch until you have at least two weeks (and preferably a month) to practice with no time pressure.
@Barak – It’s definitely good to spend some time optimizing your workspace. In theory, it makes you more productive in the future. I hate tinkering with computers, so doing things like this are only motivated by really strong desire to change something. I’ll try out the cmd mapping when I have a sec to tinker again. Thanks for the tip. It took me about a month to get to my qwerty speed in Dvorak, but it was a month of active chatting and writing papers. I think it would take longer if you were just coding in Dvorak. It’s worth trying out.
@BradlyDale – yep, I touch type. There are dvorak keyboard covers out there to help make it easier to learn, but I never had one of those. I have to look at the keyboard for qwerty now, but I tend not to use that mapping much.
@Jeb It does take some initial investment which is a hassle when you’re trying to finish projects. One of my friends just started learning and he just codes in qwerty and does everything else in dvorak. It probably takes longer to learn, but it’s not a bad route if you really want to get proficient at dvorak.
You know, I’ve been considering switching over for a while. Maybe it’s finally time I did.
Lucas actually had one of those old IBM Model M keyboard that he swapped all the keys on AND had set to dvorak. No one at work could ever use his keyboard.
that’s crazy. didn’t even know such a thing existed.