Ask HN: What is your experience switching away from QWERTY keyboard? I'm trying to switch to dvorak because the people I know who switched raves about it. I went cold turkey in my switch and I'm having an incredibly hard time adjusting. I now actively avoid the computer because typing in dvorak is so mentally draining. I'm close to giving up. Does it get better? Has anybody successfully switched to another keyboard, and what are your experiences? |
I have adjusted to doing Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, Shift-Delete, I just have to constantly refrain from doing Shift-Delete when handling files, but it's still not as comfy as the QWERTY shortcut positioning.
Overall I'd say it's still worth it, the positioning of the punctuation marks is better and my fingers travel a lot less.
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 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.
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.
I’d imagine it would be hell to have to unlearn the qwerty muscle memory.
tl;dr: I learned to touchtype thanks to Dvorak
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 first two weeks are a nightmare, you literally hear the gears in your brain turning in a direction they never knew they could turn.
Then the first 3-4 months are just hard and annoying.
After that it quickly becomes super nice. After a year, you look back at your QWERTY self and think "heh".
Do not give up. It's worth it.
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 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.
I tried to mimic the programs we used when I was in elementary school to learn the keyboard - start with getting the home row keys under muscle memory, then expand outward slowly from there. I would mindlessly (and slowly, and often incorrectly) transcribe TV shows as I watched Netflix, which helped a bit.
The thing that made the biggest difference was buying a keyboard cover [1] (as opposed to trying to re-arrange the keys on my Macbook Pro and not having the right home key nubs). The keyboard cover really paid for itself; it made the whole learning process way, way easier.
I guess it also helps that macOS makes it incredibly easy to swap between keyboard mappings. It takes all of 5 seconds to add the Dvorak keyboard and a quick shortcut to swap between Qwerty and Dvorak (I use cmd-opt-ctrl-space). (I have to keep Qwerty around for things like Blizzard and Steam games, and Steam itself, which often don't understand virtual layout mappings)
On the other hand, whenever I set up Windows, it takes about an hour or two to figure out how to set up a second keyboard layout, you can't change the keyboard shortcut to swap between them, and often when my computer goes to sleep, the layout is reverted. My Google-fu is pretty strong, and I still have an incredibly frustrating time re-learning how to set it up again. I don't if that's others' experience, but I hate going through the process.
It does get easier. You're retraining your brain to do something very fundamental. One piece of advice I'd have is that if you're getting so much anxiety that you're avoiding it - change your methods. Maybe it means going back for a day while you think of a new plan for learning. Don't wear yourself out over an extracurricular activity; it's just not worth it. Also: I don't know if there's any scientific proof that Dvorak is any faster or better or easier, so I'd say if that's the reason you're switching, well, you may end up disappointed.
Bonus: have you ever seen that Vim learning curve picture [2]? Yeah, the first part of that graph is about 3x more difficult using Dvorak. ("hjkl are for movement and it makes sense because they're all next to each other" etc etc etc). Still worth it IMO, though.
EDIT: It's crazy that I struggle to type meaningful sentences in Qwerty on a keyboard these days, but I still type in Qwerty on phone keyboards. I even tried to use Dvorak on the phone once and it was basically impossible - it's almost like it's a completely separate stored muscle memory in your brain.
1: http://kbcovers.com/dvorak-keyboard-cover/ 2: http://www.thejach.com/imgs/vim_learning.jpg
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.
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.
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/oauth?state=%2Fissue%2FIDEABK...
This just see a little of the keyboard effect is surprising and may be one reason why some people have some difficulties starting with Dvorak if they do it on a Qwerty printed keyboard.
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.
My observations are: Cold turkey is the only way to go. It will take you a couple weeks to a month to regain your old speed. Then you will be faster. Your speed has nothing to do with the advantage of one layout over another. There is no speed advantage to Dvorak or Colemak because the intrinsic efficiency of one layout over another is dwarfed by the mind's ability to establish a skill in autonomic memory. The additional speed comes from the effort of re-training itself, and unlearning bad habits in the process.
Also: Don't try to retain the ability to touch-type on your existing layout. I tried this every time. I could do it, but only at the expense of speed and accuracy. When I gave it up, both improved dramatically.
But did the nimbleness allow him to switch so much, or did switching so much cause the nimbleness?
I can juggle 5 balls, and when I do, I often hear people say something like 'wow, you have such great coordination, I could never do that', but they don't realise that before I started practising with 5 balls I didn't have the coordination either! I would throw 5 balls up and 5 would hit the ground.
Practice and determination over time built up the necessary coordination and skills to allow me to do it now with relative ease.
The same principle applies to learning keyboard layouts and almost everything else.
I guess the one thing that does help is memory. I was able to ditch the printed layout after a couple of days. But even then, it was slow going for the first week or so.
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
I now map right alt to return and that's helped:
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
! 108 = Right Alt
keycode 108 = Return/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
Although I'w surprised how quickly I can type 'qwerty' with this keyboard.
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 went in cold turkey, which was probably easier than for Dvorak, but still a pain. Anyway, after a couple of days I could type slowly again, and from that point on (taking notes using my laptop daily), the situation improved.
After a shorter than expected time, I was up to my old typing speed again. The downside: I lost my ability to type blindly on a QWERTY keyboard. On Macs, smartphones and linux computers this is not a problem as switching them to Colemak is trivial when I have to use them longer, but for Windows computers it is occasionally annoying. I do have a portable executable that switches such a system on a USB-stick I carry on my key ring, but it's still a pain.
Anyway, the end result is that I type faster now then I did, and the smaller distance your fingers travel does result in a more comfortable typing experience. I would definitely make the switch again with the knowledge I have now. That said, it's probably only worth it if you actually type a lot.
Then I changed a few more keys so I could have easier access to them for programming. All the punctuation as well as putting some common unicode glyphs on altgr.
This is the end result: Drix EU Latin.
https://github.com/jleclanche/dotfiles/blob/master/X11/xkb/s...
It's an xkb file, only tested on Linux. I literally install it by replacing `/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us` with this file. (There's probably a better way nowadays, but back then the way was "submit your layout to X11 and get it merged in". I didn't want to do that.)
If you find dvorak too hard, maybe give this a shot. It should be self-evident how to move glyphs around as the file is well-commented. I find non-qwerty-like layouts to be a waste of time, to be honest, compared to studying how you yourself type and moving the keys you find problematic/out of reach.
http://zokier.net/stuff/nappaimisto.png looks like this old picture is somewhat out of date, but shows still the basic idea.
This also proved really useful when I started writing in swedish and had quick access to å without having to switch layout.
Around 6 months ago my USB thinkpad-like keyboard died. Turns out if you shock the shit out of it with static electricity 3-4 times a day for 2 years, it'll eventually stop working). A coworker had an Ergodox with blank keycaps that I'd wanted to try...
I spent around 2 weeks feeling like I couldn't type. Every time I did the wrong thing I'd go back and fix it. After about a month, I was starting to get comfortable with it. After 2 months I felt like I could type dramatically better than before (and people previously would comment on how fast I typed).
And best yet, I avoid the pains of vi key mappings and of walking up to someone else's keyboard and having to switch back to qwerty.
LOVE the Ergodox.
The one thing that really helped me make the switch was changing the layout on my phone's keyboard as well.
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.
Imho it's nearly impossible to retrain decades of muscle memory and end up with the same efficiency/speed without spending a comparable amount of time to train muscle memories on the new layout. Sadly we humans only have a limited lifespan, so I rather stick to what I know and already good at.
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
#$|~`+%"';
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.
It's worth it and I don't have any problems using qwerty on other PCs. Not at the same speed as on Dvorak though.
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
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.
The Matias Ergo Pro is a split mechanical keyboard with the palmrests secured by standard tripod screws. So people went wild: some used a pair of small tripods to hold it near vertical https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=53184.msg1999684#msg199... some used clamp on mounts https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=78723.0. Spurred by the first post linked, as I described in https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79810.0 you can add your own feet to the side and cobble together a contraption to hold the two sides against each other (I use a 1/4" Male to 3/8" Male Threaded Screw Converter Adapter, a Manfrotto 259B Extension pole 6"-10", a"Triopo Short Column Ø24mm for MT-128 and GT-128 tripods" and a 1/4"-3/8" spigot like the Impact SRP-109). This makes you work with a high quality QWERTY keyboard in a position which doesn't kill your wrists. You might want to use a pair of tripods at first and slowly adjust to vertical (and then perhaps return the tripods...) -- it took me about a week to get up to 90 degrees with the Ascent which is adjustable.
One thing that I felt was really helpful was having different keyboards for the different layouts and not just a software switch. I started with a Typematrix and a year after bought myself a Kinesis Advantage. Both those keyboard have a grid layout (as opposed to the staggered layout of most standard keyboards). My experience (sample size of 1) was that this allowed me to have one muscle memory for the Dvorak/grid keyboards and one muscle memory for the Qwerty/staggered keyboard.
At the beginning, I was only using the Dvorak on the weekends and with some typing tutors for some exercise 10-20 minutes a day. I think I made the switch to Dvorak as my main driver after two-three months. I haven't looked back since and still feel much less comfortable using Qwerty (only use it on the laptop which might play a role), although I can still touch-type on it quite easily.
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.
If I had to do it again, I'm not sure if I would. It's definitely more comfortable and maybe faster when typing English. Code is less clear, since the symbols are still often in weird places, but it's not bad. Keyboard shortcuts can get pretty strange. For example, the standard copy/paste keys get scattered all about instead of clustering in the lower left, unless you have your computer use Dvorak for regular typing and QWERTY for control keys, which is possible but has its own set of strangeness. Overall, though, I'm glad I made the switch and don't have any desire to stop using it.
My experience switching to Dvorak was back in 2006. At that time I was a full time student and a part time programmer. Switching to a new layout took about a week in the evenings practicing about 30min - 1hour. I flew through the tutoring program, ymmv.
The first three months of using it in the wild were hard. I had a few big obstacles. I frequently needed campus computers, for projects and helping the GF I frequently shared computers, and muscle memory for shortcuts, vi, etc.
All of those problems have multiple solutions, and I found ways to deal with them, or ignored them until they went away. :-)
I don't rave about it, but I do like it. It's good on my wrists and that actively makes me happy.
In terms of timeline, for me, it took about 4 months using it in a FT programming job before it just clicked and muscle memory started picking up big time. Until then, it started with hunt and peck (but I _always_ used my the "correct" finger to do so), then slowly getting it a little better. I had originally printed out a sheet showing all the keys as I had to reference it regularly.
It was fun though- I dunno, I like the challenge of it. I've been playing with the idea of switching to Colemak, but I just haven't made it a priority yet.
I also use Dvorak on Android, but obviously that was much later in life, so I already had it memorized by then.
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.
Braces and parenthesis aren't logically placed, characters used in coding languages aren't easily accessible in general.
And I've generally concluded that I should install games in English and switch my keyboard layout to QWERTY when/if I play. Plus, mods usually are in English, and I hate when there's a word in French and the next is in English.
I'm in Denmark now, and I'm appalled to see how bad the Danish keyboard is for programming. I tried it for a couple of days on a loaner, and went back to British qwerty. Punctuation is a disaster.
http://smartkeyboardsolutions.com/images/Danish-10019-zoom.g...
This is of course limited to the German language.
Funnily enough, Å was the one key I pushed from unmodified access to altgr layer because I have so little use for it :)
