Martin Pool's blog

Switching to Dvorak?

I'm typing... this.. slowly.. on a Dvorak keyboard.

It's very popular among people at Canonical — which is confusing if you go to someone else's machine — so I thought it was worth a try.

I've been using Dvorak for an hour a day or so this week and I can now type without looking at my cheat sheet (much) but still not very fluently. I have to think about the spelling of words rather than that being subconscious/automatic. And I notice that I've learnt keyboard shortcuts as positions, not as letters, so they have to be retrained separately. I'm very dependent on the positioning dots as I haven't relabelled my keyboard.

I can believe this will be better for my wrists than QWERTY, which is my main goal. I'm more aware of where my fingers are, there are less bad reaches and they are more often on the home row. (And now back to QWERTY to get some work done.)

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