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Originally Posted by Minstrel  Does anyone else use the Dvorak keyboard layout? I have found it to be faster, more efficient, and easier on my hands than QWERTY.
Retraining took me roughly two weeks, at two hours of work a day. I was up to my previous QWERTY speed (55 wpm) by three weeks.
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The first two weeks are rough. You will feel frustrated, unable to communicate in either "language." But the results are amazing. |
Yes, me. I switched about two years ago.
Actually, since there's no ready-made german layout (Windows has only the english Dvorak preinstalled), I had to design my own Dvorak knock-off. While it's pretty difficult to fit in all the additional "umlaut" characters, this in turn allowed me to make some additional changes like inverting the numbers row (numbers are shifted -- as a programmer I tend to need the brackets more often).
The best change I made was modifying the "rest position" of the hands: instead of having all four fingers of a hand resting on the home "row", for me the middle and ring fingers rest on the top row. This is a *much* more relaxed position since I don't have to actively bend these fingers any more.
And, yes, I have to agree that the first few days are very frustrating. Yet the benefits really outweigh the inconveniences by far. For me, it's not so much about typing speed, but about relaxation and error frequency. I don't think I'm that much faster, mainly because I didn't put much energy into the retraining and just adopted it "on the go". But I can type much longer now, without tiring, and produce significantly less typos.
If anybody wants to try their hands on customizing the standard Dvorak layout: just download Microsoft's *free*
keyboard editor. Simple and easy to use.
Have fun,
Elladan.