Ask HN: What is your experience switching away from QWERTY keyboard?

I switched to Dvorak about ~10 years ago. Took about 1 month to get comfortable. After 2-3 months I still wasn't as fast as qwerty, but it already felt more comfortable to type than qwerty for some reason.

Unfortunately I gave up after about 3 months, mostly because I kept changing computers at that point and it was a bit annoying to have to switch back and forth. In retrospect I regret that – maybe it's time to give it another shot

I switched to Dvorak for a summer and it got easier and much more nautral after a few weeks. Until Qwerty I did learn it the right way so it really did help with my typing speed and accuracy in the end.

But I ultimately went back to Qwerty when I ended up working for someone else as I was pair programming and dvorak was not working out so well with others. Haven't bothered picking it up again since.

Switched to programmer dvorak. Does it get better? For sure, it'll become second nature in a matter of months. Is it better? Maybe but I don't really know. All I know is I can't type QWERTY anymore and if I'm at someone else's desk I have to hunt and peck.

Seven years ago I switched to Colemak, smartest thing I ever did for my hands/wrists. It took two weeks of pain and very slow typing but considering the benefits it was very worth it.

I don't mean to start holy war here but consider Colemak instead of Dvorak. I did a lot of reading years ago before picking the right keyboard layout.

the only thing i routinely do is make caps another control.

i use probably 6 machines on a regular basis, and keeping them all keybound correctly is enough of a pain. i can't imagine the annoyance of a full remap. i never felt it was worth it.

It gets better in terms of ease, especially if you practice and drill a bit. And it's really cool when you realise one day that you can type in both keyboards at about the same speed (because you will encounter qwerty more often than you think). The human brain is wacky.

But the fact is we live in a qwerty world. Even though I used dvorak for a while, I switched back. Partly because I'm a vim guy. The hjkl religion has a different god with a different keyboard and it all goes to shit. I mean there's dvorak-friendly vim mappings but at that point you're going down a rabbit-hole of ridiculousness.

That said, if the world was more dvorak-friendly (or you could convince your smaller world to be), that would be a good thing. And I would jump back in a heartbeat.

Also, I think I've read some keyboards like colmak are supposedly even better, so in terms of bang for buck it might be best investigating alternatives so you can optimize your degeneracy.

I spent several months learning Dvorak a few years back. I got up to an almost decent speed (50-60wpm), but it was still less than what I could type with Qwerty (maybe around 70wpm).

I also found though that as my Dvorak speed increased, my Qwerty speed was decreasing.

Then it was very frustrating whenever I had to use anyone else's keyboard. Bam. Back to struggle town and confusion.

Then I realised that if I had put the effort I had spent on Dvorak in to training Qwerty, I would probably have been better off.

And so I gave it up. Now I've forgotten it entirely.

I am competent in both dvorak and workman alternative layouts. Both took approximately two weeks of use to not be completely awkward, annoying and slow. Then probably about another month to be up to scratch with my qwerty speed.

Switching between the three layouts is completely painless for me, so in that sense I'm fine with using other peoples' keyboards or swap layouts on the fly (if you're worried about being confused if you need to swap back and forward in the future).

Specifically connected to dvorak: I found that the uppe right region of the keyboard is required more frequently than it should be, so your right pinky finger ends up performing more tasks than all others. This I found quite annoying - and one of the reasons why workman is now my default layout.

What works for you though will of course be different, but I do think changing from qwerty is worthwhile. So keep at it! It definitely gets better.

Disclaimer: not an answer, but a follow-up question. I'm seeing lots of Colemak and Dvorak responses; has anyone switched to Workman layout and had a positive experience?

I also went cold turkey a couple of years ago. The reason for me was that I experienced pain in my fingers after typing. After a day at work I was guaranteed to be in pain. At the time my productivity plummeted and it took me maybe two months to get to a level where I wasn't constantly frustrated.

That said, I've never regretted the switch. Even though I still feel pain sometimes when using a laptop keyboard the pain is mostly gone. Other benefits include that I've properly learned how to type and I am able to type without looking at the keyboard, something I could never do using QWERTY. I don't know if I write faster, but since the pain is gone I'm satisfied.

I suggest you stick with it. It will get easier and you won't regret it.

This site is great for practicing: https://learn.dvorak.nl

   xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

    ! 108 = Right Alt
    keycode 108 = Return

For the context, I have been using the Dvorak layout since February 2009, so nearly 8 years. My keyboard is the TypeMatrix 2030[0].

The first 4 to 6 months where really hard, having the feeling to go back 10 years or more in the past with respect to typing speed. But after that, I improved a lot my typing speed and I am now to a point where I type as fast as I can formulate the sentences in my head. What is impressive is the feeling that the keys are where they are supposed to be, I never have to try to remember where are the keys, they are just there, my fingers are nearly not moving because most of the keys I use to type the text right now are on the home row. This is also definitely an effect of the TypeMatrix, I cannot recommend enough this keyboard.

The only drawback is switching back to the Qwerty layout when travelling with my laptop or using the keyboard of someone else (once a month for 2h maybe). So sometimes, I wonder if I should not simply go back to qwerty with a TypeMatrix, maybe I would get the same relaxing grid layout without the need to adapt between Qwerty and Dvorak. Maybe I should simply use my laptop as laptop a bit more, like in the bed in the evening to go through my family/friends emails. This is a point in the day where I do not need to be fast and this could help me ease the switch between the two layouts. The people who are using two different layouts everyday have no problems switching from one to another, a bit like one switch from a language to another as foreigner.

Do not hesitate to ask me more and do it, it is worth it.

[0]: http://www.typematrix.com

Moved to France 10 years ago and had to decide between buying a QWERTY keyboard or laptop online and getting it delivered, or just buying a local AZERTY keyboard. Went local, had a couple of weeks of re-learning how to type, and then things were fine.

From time to time I encounter a QWERTY keyboard (some in the French office here prefer it as they trained on QWERTY while in university or working internationally) but I’m basically lost right now on QWERTY. The little things that drove me crazy at first (Shift+ to get a number, Shift+ to get a period, AltGr+ to get a hash etc.) are now ‘normal’.

I imagine Dvorak will take you a few weeks to learn, a month longer to start touch-typing effectively, and then it’ll be your new normal, too.

I switched to Dvorak back in high school. It took me a month to be comfortable, and after a few months my typing speed got to around 90 wpm, while I never surpassed 45 in QWERTY.

I honestly don't use other people's computers much, but I can still type around 30 wpm in QWERTY. It's very easy to switch your keyboard layout to Dvorak in any commonly used OS.

Speed aside (little in my life is actually capped by my typing speed) the comfort and the entertainment factor when others try to type on my computers has absolutely been worth it.

I once switched to DVORAK, but then I noticed I couldn't easily do ctrl-z, ctrl-x, ctrl-c and ctrl-v, ctrl-s, ctrl-a with my left hand, so I switched back. (Maybe some combinations are possible, too lazy to find out ;))

Colemak here, switched something like 6y ago. I was training with few programs to learn to touch type properly (my qwerty was touch type level but bad, wrong fingers pressing wrong buttons etc). The one I used to most on Mac is called Type Fu, but there are many others. I trained for ~10m for some time while using qwerty normally. I made total switch when I could type 40wpm on Colemak. After 2 weeks it was 60wpm. Very happy with it.

I've tried a few times but given up each time. I learned to touch type QWERTY at age 13 and use it at well over 100wpm. I'm in my early 30s and I think I'm stuck with it now.

Even after living in Germany for ~10 years, I still buy and import US keyboards and laptops so that the enter key (and backslash) are in the right place. (It's not just mapping - the physical buttons are laid out differently.)

I read about these people who switched and it seems totally impossible to me. Months of slow typing?! Ain't nobody got time for that.

MY DVORAK JOURNEY

2009

- I type in QWERTY.

- I can hunt-and-pick at 60 WPM.

2010

- I discover Dvorak.

- I start to despise QWERTY.

2011

- I buy a Kinesis Advantage (https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage-for-pc-mac/).

- I learn to touch type.

- I learn Dvorak.

- I can touch type at 60 WPM (after 1 month).

2012

- I convert a fried to Dvorak.

2017

- I still type in Dvorak.

- I can type up to 100 WPM.

- I find regular (non-ergonomic) keyboards uncomfortable.

- I struggle to type in QWERTY (certainly can't touch type).

- I use QWERTY on my phone.

- I never suffer wrist pain or fatigue.

- I don't despise QWERTY anymore.

I've been on Dvorak for ~ 3 years now. I kept a small log of typing tests for QWERTY and then for my dvorak adventure. Once performing the complete switch (which took about a month) there was no difference in typing errors or wpm ( I do about ~60). I've actually been able to switch inbetween QWERTY and Dvorak with relative ease, given about 5-10 mins to reacquaint myself with qwerty I get right back up to my old test scores. The main difference is qualitative for me, they feel very different while typing. QWERTY feels bunched up and tight, while Dvorak makes my hands feel more spread out.

Once people know you don't type QWERTY they won't shut up about it. Every time there is an HN post about colemak or dvorak you'll get the same stream of jokes and references to 20 year old reason articles. Some people seem to think the only reason to switch is that you are secretly a keyboard evangelical, and treat you as such. It's pretty annoying.

/rant

My only metric for Dvorak's effectiveness is that my wrists used to hurt when I argued with people on IRC. I switched to Dvorak and my wrists got better, then I stopped arguing with people on IRC and my life got better. ymmv

I switched to dvorak about ten years ago when I incorrectly hypothesized that it might help resolve my wrist pain. [1] It definitely took about a month to get fluid. Once I realized that the new keyboard layout wasn't really helping my problem, I figured I might as well stick with it, since it definitely does involve less wrist movement and such. (I don't know if it will help with movement stress but it seems unlikely to hurt. And that's all I've got to go off of, since there isn't really any quality science that I know of in this area.)

But the difficulty of switching all at once is quite significant. I hypothesize that if you used a keyboard editor to switch your keys one at a time, rather than switching the entire layout at once, that you might be able to learn Dvorak while still largely being able to use your keyboard, thus reducing the pain. Given my own subsequent experiments with moving keys around and how fast I can learn single key moves, I hypothesize that it may even be net faster to use this technique than to switch all at once, because I suspect you might be able to do as much as two or three key switches an hour. Possibly even more if you're seriously just sitting there and typing an essay or some documentation or something. What I don't know is what this will do to your qwerty skills. (Though I doubt it will wreck them, but I don't know.)

I hypothesize that learning by switching one key at a time, rather than trying to swallow the entire layout at once, you can learn faster because you get much more rapid feedback when you hit wrong keys than you will from sitting there with a printed chart of keys and pecking them out one by one until you memorize them.

But since I already know a good-enough keyboard layout [2], I have little motivation to try the experiment myself. I'd be interested in hearing about how it goes if someone else tries it.

I further hypothesize that the best first thing to do would be to switch the vowels in under the left hand home row first. So the first move would be to map the O key to the S keyboard key, and thus move the S to the O keyboard key. It won't end up there, of course, but unfortunately since we can only get to the layout by swaps we pass through some intermediate steps that have keys in places they are never mapped. I still think this could go faster than switching cold turkey, though. After that I'd probably go with the right-hand home row, and then expand out from there roughly in frequency order. You may also want to switch both of the [ and ] keys in one shot.

One benefit of the alternate keyboard layouts is that you don't have to "learn" to touch type on a sane keyboard layout. The layout itself rewards you for staying on the home row and you automatically touch type without having to "learn" it. Typing classes would be essentially unnecessary if we used Dvorak on the keycaps instead. The very fact that touch typing is something you must deliberately learn with QWERTY, and apply discipline to maintain in the face of your finger's attempts to do otherwise, in some sense captures in one fell swoop all the issues with using that layout.

[1]: It turns out the correct solution for me for that was to take the keyboard off the desk; I now type with it on my lap, which has solved the problem ever since, possibly combined with an ergonomic-style split keyboard. (Nothing fancy, just the Microsoft split keyboard, not one that is literally in two pieces or anything.)

[2]: By most measurements, you can do better than Dvorak with Colemak or something. However, there's a plateau effect as you get closer to optimal. Having picked Dvorak so long ago, it's not worth to switch to something slightly more optimal. From the perspective of QWERTY, all the better keyboards are better by roughly the same amount. Plus we don't really know what measures to optimize anyhow; we're only making somewhat-informed guesses.

I switched to Colemak for a couple of years. The trick for me was using a typing tutor relentlessly over a weekend, enough that I could do around 40-50 wpm. Then I went cold turkey and never used QWERTY.

Colemak is a little bit friendlier than Dvorak because it leaves a bunch of keys intact, which is nice for preserving common shortcuts like CTRL-C, CTRL-V, etc. It also doesn't touch punctuation, which always seemed more disruptive than it needed to be in Dvorak.

In the end I switched back to QWERTY because I started working in a paired programming environment, and switching between the two whenever we would switch drivers became really annoying.

My main problem is that I was never really able to be proficient at Colemak and QWERTY at the same time. It was shocking how fast I lost my QWERTY muscle memory. When I switched back, it came back fast, but it was difficult for me to use someone else's QWERTY keyboard efficiently while I was using Colemak.

The other issue I've always had is that programs are designed to have a mix of positional shortcuts and mnemonic shortcuts. When you switch keyboard layouts, it's hard to keep both, even with customization.

For example, vim uses hjkl for navigation due to their position, not mnemonic. So you want to preserve those. But in Colemak that row is "hnei", so now you need to change "n" and "i", but those are both mnemonic (next and insert), so what do you change them to now?

I did and had to come back due to 1) nagging colleagues and 2) software that assumes you want to use vi keybindings on a qwerty keyboard.

My early experience agrees with yours: it was much harder to re-learn typing than I expected and a consistent mental load for a month or two until I internalized it. I did manage to get over the learning curve, and while I enjoy the noticeably reduced tendon strain (1/2 or 1/3 the movement, it's pretty amazing) and the fact that it cured me of touch typing, it does come with a few persistent annoyances, poor support on Windows being the worst. If you have AD-mandated password rotations, windows will copy your password from the login screen into "old password" and then silently swap the keyboard under you before you type your new password. It has three options for layout toggling keyboard shortcuts, all of which conflict with commonly used modifier key combinations, and the keyboard layout dialog seems to have a mind of its own, neither behaving like a global setting nor behaving like a per-application setting. On the balance, dvorak didn't save me time/hassle or make me faster, but it has made typing slightly more pleasant and it may have helped with RSI.

It gets better, and if you are a programmer, I recommend go straight to Dvorak for Programmers or similar coder-oriented layout.

I made the switch in 2011 and still one of the best decisions I've made. I set up the hotkey to rapidly switch between QWERTY and Dvorak because I 'defaulted' a LOT that first month (this is essential and don't let it discourage you to switch a lot!). I did a lot of drills for the first two weeks - there was a website specifically for drilling Dvorak, and it took some forcing to stick with the layout on non-critical tasks.

Peak QWERTY before was ~70-80 WPM. After about 2 months I was 50 WPM Dvorak and a slight dent in Qwerty speed. Not sure when the crossover occurred exactly, but a month or so later I was at 80 in Dvorak. I use Qwerty about 2% of the time but remain bi-lingual (bi-manual?) at ~75, with Dvorak just squeaking over 90. Occasionally I'll get [qwertial aphasia](https://xkcd.com/604/) and get stuck in the wrong brain mode for a few words when switching.

At this point, I've found the biggest limiter is muscle memory (letter patterns/n-grams), mistakes, and reading in words when taking these typing tests. But Qwerty feels like "crazy fingers", I feel like my fingers are all over the place, where Dvorak spends most of the time on home and upper row.

Started learning Dvorak for Programmers a few months ago and I really like that a lot - the number rearrangement is a bit weird but I mostly use the numpad for digits anyways, but having ()[]{}&$=!# and splat all without shift is GLORIOUS.

I'm curious about Colemak/Workman, and might take those on as a neuroplasticity challenge, but it's less of a push for me since DfP is so much win.

The only major pain is now Ctrl-Z -C -X -V are no longer one-handed, if I can, I try to rebind them to -' -Q -J -K, but mostly learned to live with what is effectively -' -/ -B -I -. . The brain is crazy adaptive.

edit: HN doesn't support Markdown-style links? Boo.

I switched to the german neo layout¹ years ago (after a year of dvorak).

Having done the jump twice: it takes some time, and in the beginning you really feel sooo handycapped, but it gets better quickly. I used to play some text centered ultima-online-like morpg which I used to get better at typing.

I don't know if it's faster, but it feels great. I can still type qwerty with 6-8 fingers rather quickly (I made the dive in to 10-finger typing with dvorak). I do change my keycaps, because I can't type blindly without using 10 fingers (like hitting any key with just you index finger while giving a presentation and standing a step away).

The big benefit of this layout for me: I have 2 more "shift" keys for these things:

1. (holding capslock)

    ¹²³›‹¢¥‚‘’    <- number keys
    …_[]^!<>=&ſ
    \/{}*?()-:@   <- homerow
    #$|~`+%"';

2.: (holding altgr)

for the left hand: arrow keys, del, backspace, esc, enter (really helps when your vi keybindings are all messed up)

For the right hand: number block (good on small laptops without one, space becomes 0)

The only downside currently: it's optimized for german wtih a bit of english, but I type more english. Vocals are popular everythere though, so it's mostly the same.

¹ http://neo-layout.org/