Ask HN: How long does it take to learn a new keyboard layout?

I haven't done the switch to DVORAK. But maybe this will help. I have switched between number oh phone keyboards, and their special character mappings are all different. I went from a Custom mapped droid4 to a blackberry priv. It took me 3 weeks of steady usage before I stopped hitting alt+m for double quote, which generated a period on the Priv. then I got a Gemini PDA, and this is a third mapping, that is closer to a desktop mapping, but the camma and period are different. It took me about 3 weeks to stop making mistakes. The Gemini PDA is not my main device, and I switch between the Priv and the Gemini. It is rare that I use the wrong mapping now.

Are you actually limited by your current typing speed?

I tried Dvorak for a month a few years ago. For me it was just useless agony, not only with key positions but also with app/OS shortcuts that are very much designed for qwerty layout.

I have since switched to a split ergonomic keyboard (Diverge 3) and adjusted the layout somewhat (kept qwerty, but put all the modifier keys in custom locations). That took me about a month to exceed my previous speed. Typing on standard keyboards when needed is not a problem either.

I never cared to measure my typing speed though.

1. I became proficient (fluent) in a new keyboard layout within a few weeks. At that point my typing speed was on par with qwerty (not faster though, I believe). Fully adapting to a new keyboard layout went a bit faster than I had anticipated.

2. Switching back and forth was NOT easy. Whenever I used a new (qwerty) computer I would fumble and it would take minutes before I could type normally at all! Perhaps if one switches between two layouts often it becomes easier.

I’ve twice spent a few months on alternate keyboards. Once Dvorak and once Colmak. (about an hour a each day of dedicated practice plus using it for work and play each day.)

Unfortunately, at the time I was moving between several computers, some of which weren’t mine, and I could switch them all over. This daily switching back and forth was painful.

In the end, it wasn’t really worth it. It took at least a month to get back to being able to type without mistakes with QWERTY, and the first few days were torture. Took months to get back to my old speed.

You know that scene from Space Jam where the NBA player looses his talent, tries to play with some kids on the street, gets crushed, and wanders away in confusion and sadness... well, that was pretty much me. https://youtu.be/mWeII9xkTnw

1. It took me 4 months, give or take 2. No

I’ve been using Colemak for a few years now, and I find it very easy to switch back and forth (mainly because I have to regularly). I became fluent in colemak in around two weeks to a month of pretty much exclusive usage. I type faster in Colemak, because ironically I still can’t touchtype QWERTY.

My tips are: print your new layout and stick it in your FOV for where you usually type. I used the new layout on my phone, which helped with memorising placement. Try and mentally map old keys -> new keys, so that until you have the muscle memory there, you’ll at least know it cerebrally.

I learned Dvorak in high school and was proficient in it after a couple weeks. In addition to actual practice, I found it helpful to just practice mentally during downtime.

I used Dvorak exclusively and lost the ability to type on qwerty keyboards. This became pretty inconvenient, so I re-learned qwerty, but then I couldn’t type in dvorak any more.

A while later I practiced dvorak again and have been able to switch back and forth without issue ever since (even though I don’t use dvorak very often now).

I found that dvorak wasn’t actually that good for programming due to the positioning of punctuation, math, and auxiliary keys. It’s also annoying for gaming or using hotkeys in general (especially copy + paste).

I am typing fluently this using the Colemak layout and I can switch easily to Qwerty. Colemak is the easiest/fastest layout for me. It is like driving stick vs automatic, I can change whenever I want without thinking about it. I also tried Dvorak. However, shortcuts like CTRL+C were not possible with one hand anymore. This was a no go.

The hardest part of learning a keyboard layout is the first week. During this week you cannot type on the autopilot at all (even my qwerty skills were fucked up).

I recommend starting learning a new layout during a holiday because it will break your productivity. For training, you can use http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/en/index.html, which has support for Colemak.

After 4 weeks of typing more than one hour per day, I managed to hit the 50 WPM at Colemak. It is also important to type 30 minutes per day using qwerty during this 4 weeks so that you will not lose your qwerty skills.

I'm interested in what reasons there are to switch besides speed, which I assume is not a problem unless you are a stenographer i.e. I cannot think of code faster than I can write for longer than a fraction of a minute.

If you're already typing 130 wpm on QWERTY, wow, and don't bother with other layouts. You might eek out a bit more speed, but it's a lot of pain for not much gain. I've never exceeded my QWERTY speeds and I've been typing DVORAK for over ten years now. I'm sticking with DVORAK because I find it more comfortable and, as an added bonus, it keeps the kids off my computer.

No long-term experiences in the same language but I'm typing in CJK & English. I think it's quite a similar situation. When I typing CJK in desktop & mobile, it's also a slightly different way to choose the word but my brain able to handle it well.

It took me about three weeks to learn Colemak. I practiced with keybr.com but Klavaro is also good. It was not easy to switch back and forth to qwerty, I forgot how to touch type with qwerty.

If you are going to need to switch to qwerty often and you already type at 130 WPM I would not recommend learning another layout.

I switched in about a month. I never changed the keycaps, so Dvorak was touch-typing only from day one (try all the keys until you find the one you want, looking doesn't help). Now when I use QWERTY I need to look down.

My speed is about the same as it was, but I wasn't looking for more speed.

I switched to Dvorak at least 10-15 years ago (and have been enjoying it ever since) so I can't tell you exactly how long it took me, but I'd say to expect to have lower productivity in Dvorak for a month. By then you should be at least near enough to your QWERTY proficiency that the switch will no longer be hurting you.

Advice for learning: Start with basic typing exercises that drill in the muscle memory. Then switch over and keep a keyboard layout visible. Switch back to QWERTY when you need to. When you rarely need to look up letters but still need to think sometimes, switch permanently and try not to switch back to QWERTY.

On keyboard shortcuts: while some such as copy and paste are worse because they involve the right hand, I find many keyboard shortcuts are actually better on Dvorak despite being designed with QWERTY in mind. J and K for instance (think vi navigation) are really convenient. There are a bunch I feel that way about, and that's in addition to other characters used in programming often being more convenient as well, such as brackets/braces and hyphen/underscore.

On fluency: I definitely have a hard time switching back to QWERTY. Funny story: an interview didn't go well once when I had to complete a programming task on one of their computers. It was Windows (I use Mac) with a QWERTY layout! I must've looked like I didn't know how to use a computer. But I'm typing this paragraph in QWERTY and it's doable. Most of what makes me feel slower on QWERTY is just that it's so much less comfortable to type in than Dvorak.

around 2005-6 i considered switching over to dvorak, but trying it out, doing tutorials, etc, never had much of an effect. i would say i was a pretty fast qwerty typer, but i hadn't learned to properly touch type. instead, i was fast enough to not need to see the keys once i had started typing but it relied on a bunch of terrible hand positions.

around 2007, i broke my right thumb by hitting a pothole and that put my typing (and all my bad habits) in a weird spot. At that point i decided to try one-handed dvorak and failed, but i found that two handed dvorak was very doable, so i spent about two weeks of my convalescence doing http://web.archive.org/web/20040803054502/http://www.gigliwo... on and off and watching movies. About a week in, i swapped all my keycaps to make the transition easier, but found that i missed having the home row nubs on f/j (u/h in dvorak) because at this point i had started actually relying on them for positioning as i had finally learned to touch type.

at this point, about two weeks in, i was solidly able to to use my modded keyboard, but i still peeked at the keys occasionally so that i would re-position my hands correctly at rest. it took me about a full month of occasional typing in dvorak while i was in physical therapy to "make the switch" mentally.

this probably marks my eleventh year typing in dvorak, by far the first few months were the most awkward, especially since at the time i was using vi and some of its key commands are optimized for qwerty while others have semantic meanings. the most annoying thing in those early months is not so much the letter positions, but recalling where all the special characters live: .,'-;/=[] are all characters that you possibly associate with certain regions of the keyboard, but in dvorak they are a punctuation-diaspora, scattered across the edges of the keyboard. by around six months in, i think i was back to my regular typing speed, but i believe i exceeded my qwerty speed easily a year into dvorak simply because i had finally learned to properly touch type and had developed muscle memory for all keys.

how hard is switching back? like you, i wondered about being keymap-bilingual, but it turns out to not be all that important day-to-day. i definitely type noticeably slower when i go back to qwerty keyboard (usually because i'm using a friend's computer). in practice this happens remarkably infrequently. one of the strange things of learning dvorak but leaving your keycaps in qwerty is that i look at a `t` but i "see" a `p`. it's strange, it's the closest thing i have experienced to having a sixth sense. because ios doesn't allow you to remap its keyboard to dvorak, i use qwerty there all the time and it's not at all disorienting.

One place, however, where you do need to remain somewhat sharp is pc gaming, where games inconsistently pick up custom keymaps (i.e. in js this is the distinction b/w evt.key and evt.code). in most cases, you just end up using qwerty because it's a pain to remap (this was especially true for games like dota2, but starcraft 2's grid layout remedies much of that). again, many apps like illustrator/photoshop also have keyboard shortcuts located for physical reasons and less for logical "this letter is short for that idea" reasons, which can make the switch harder

that said, it's doable and i believe in you! at the very least, you'll become a better typer and develop better habits from your time in dvorak. good luck!

I learned dvorak in high school over summer break. It took about 3 weeks to be up to my qwerty wpm.

I actually had a difficult time going back and forth for a while. Eventually my brain decided that a heavy mechanical keyboard (my model m at home) was dvorak, and lighter non-mechanical kbs (school) were qwerty.

I had to switch over to qwerty to do pair programming easily a few years back. Finally got to the point where I could type interchangeably, but I'm worried that my muscle memory will lose qwerty again over time, now that I use it less.

1. It's only one data point, but here's a chart of my typing speed while learning a new fully custom layout:

https://xsznix.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/screen-shot-2016-...

2. I use QWERTY on mobile devices, Dvorak on standard keyboards, and RSTHD on split ergo keyboards, and I can switch between all of them without any hassle. It helps if you use a different keyboard form factor for each layout, but even if not, I don't think it's difficult to maintain adequate fluency on QWERTY when you need to use someone else's computer.

I switched to dvorak and would never go back.

1. It took me two weeks to get to ~35wpm, and it was absolutely grueling. The next two months I ramped up to ~80. Now I'm slightly faster than my top qwerty speed (qwerty is incredibly hard to type in dvorak btw), but the investment is worth it. Typing is very easy, and I no longer have RSI issues.

2. I use my family's computer from time to time. There's a break in period / your brain literally flips. It's a very unique experience. I think if I switched more often I'd be able to maintain performance in both.

Thinking a little more about it, learning to type in a new format was such a strange and enjoyable experience. You feel your brain struggling and one day something just kind of clicks, a dam breaks way, and your fingers float above the keyboard, the words appearing on the screen and you're not sure how.

I'm on colemak and I am typing this by voice because of carpal tunnel I doubt any relation just poor posture, but I cannot type on qwerty anymore. I forced myself to learn colemak in about three months by having instant message conversations, it was a pain but it worked well I also used the provided application on Windows (typefaster)

What drives your desire to switch?

I ask because if it's ergonomics, you may want to explore an ergo board, e.g. the Kinesis Advantage: https://jakeseliger.com/2011/07/17/further-thoughts-on-the-k.... There are others as well, like Ergodox-EZ.

I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak 16 years ago. At my best I could do 110wpm with QWERTY. I've rarely attained more than 90wpm on Dvorak, maybe, andI'd expect a bit less day to day.

1. Judging by the times I've tried TypeRacer, I've never exceeded my old speed. But that's OK; I changed because I was having problems with my wrists, and I was worried about my career. That destroyed any interest I might once have had in typing quickly.

2. Yes - but I switched to Dvorak not long after I started using a split keyboard, and I think that really helped keep the muscle memory for the layouts separate. No problem for me typing Dvorak on spit keyboards, and no problem typing QWERTY on non-split keyboards. I can still type at ~70wpm on a non-split QWERTY keyboard, and people that have seen me do that are typically surprised to later find out it's not what I'm used to.

QWERTY on a split keyboard, I can do, but I have to look at my hands while I do it. Dvorak on a non-split keyboard, I find very difficult. But luckily I basically never have to do it.

(One thing I would also add: it's good to be able to type fast, because that lets you rattle out whatever it is you currently have in mind. Don't let anybody tell you that being able to type quickly isn't at least sometimes useful. But, in general, you can get away with typing a lot slower than you think.)

OT, but does using DVORAK prevent someone from using vim? I mean, do you have to remap hjkl or what? Use arrow key?

I switched to Dvorak about ten years ago then switched back about five years ago. I switched back because I use swipe text input on phones which works much better (only?) with QWERTY, and swipe text became and still is very important for me.

Although I could type faster and much more comfortable on Dvorak I regret ever making the change, I feel I am still not as fast on QWERTY as I was before I switched to Dvorak. I make a lot of mistakes typing now and can't seem get much faster or more accurate with practice.

It was very difficult for me to do both or switch between the two - I was much better at Dvorak until I gave it up. My QWERTY was prbly 30 wpm max while using Dvorak. It helps to switch context or use different keyboards for switching. I think I got to 90 wpm Dvorak, QWERTY is now around 65-70.

I have problems typing comfortably and motor learning / coordination issues that might make me unusual, but I have read that fluency with both is rare and very difficult.

Oh shortcuts were more annoying in Dvorak, only other issue aside from swipe text.

I switched to Dvorak in a weekend (~8 hours) using something like https://learn.dvorak.nl/

It took me about a month to get comfortable and stop making mistakes and I switched back and forth regularly for the first two years (working in IT).

Now I mostly use Dvorak and when I switch it's not a problem but my typing speed in Qwerty is about a third slower.

Having done it, I'm happy with it but I probably would have learned Colemak instead because it's closer to Qwerty and would make those infrequent switches easier.