Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I'm not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I'm typing on right now from memory either.
Just for a laugh, try changing your phone keyboard to Dvorak. It seemed like a good idea but felt alien to see the keys I naturally use. Swiping was just ridiculous.
Obviously it’s just practice but I don’t mind using qwerty on my phone. It keeps it vaguely present in my memory.
I've been typing Dvorak on my computer since middle school and so I thought it'd naturally be a good idea to switch my phone... turns out not so much. While having all the common letters on the home row is good for regular typing, it is not good for phone typing which is heavily dependent on autocorrect. If I miss a letter by one key it's still likely for it to be a valid word because common letters are clustered and autocorrect misinterprets. For example, I might type "i" and then "t", "n", and "s" are all adjacent meaning if I meant to type "is" and I miss by one key and type "in" then it is not corrected. Other annoying ones are "by" and "my" because the b and m are next to each other.
Sadly, I'm in a bit too deep to go back to Qwerty on my phone (I'd be very slow for awhile). I do still enjoy Dvorak on the computer and while I don't think I'm a faster typist than I would be with Qwerty, I rarely (pretty much never) experience finger strain when typing for long periods.
Supposedly the entire reason Qwerty was designed was to prevent typewriters from jamming by making the keys as disambiguous as possible, which is now ironically ideal on tiny screens.
I switched to Dvorak in the early 2000's and typing qwerty on a keyboard is totally alien to me now.
However, any attempt at using Dvorak on a touch screen keyboard has failed as I can't rely on my muscle memory.
I found that for touch screen input I preferred using qwerty since I have a better feel about where keys are to hunt and peck. Funnily when typing dvorak, my fingers knows where the keys are but I don't have a good conscious mental map of the layout.
Maybe it's due to the fact that you have to touch type dvorak without any visual help since most users use regular qwerty layout keyboards.
Can vouch for colemak being hard to type correctly with on a phone. Normally with qwerty I felt I didn't rely so much on autocorrect, but with Colemak I make certain mistakes quite frequently. Especially given eio are all next to each other a lot of times when I want to type o I type "i" instead. I think it's gotten better in recent months but certain combinations on Colemak just seem to be very sub optimal for a phone. Especially the placing of the vowels.
I'm used to it now and it doesn't quite bother me enough to relearn qwerty on mobile. Kinda stuck in this weird limbo of relying on autocorrect for every 5th word. Hahaha.
Funny story. I started learning Colemak must have been close to a year ago now. I switched my home computer and phone to Colemak, but kept my work computer on Qwerty as I wasn't quite ready to suffer the initial productivity hit even though I knew I needed to do it in order to really breakthrough. In the end I couldn't commit, so I switched everything back. About 6 months later my wife received a text while she was driving and asked me to reply to it. I picked up her phone and fumbled through typing out a reply. Something felt off. I opened up my phone to compare. I had never switched my phone back to Qwerty and my brain had completely adjusted. So much so that I didn't even realize my keyboard had been Colemak for the last 6 months.
I did this many years ago, and am now terribly slow at typing on a phone with a qwerty keyboard, and still cannot use a Dvorak keyboard on my computer...
It is painful to use Windows on my surface as a tablet, since I want the physical keyboard layout to be dvorak and the osk layout to be qwerty (because I've never really seen the dvorak layout). Microsoft obviously has no interest in making it accessible to dvorak users.
I think the dvorak equivalent of an osk is something more like MessageEase. If they would bother to update their Windows offering to something a little more recent (high dpi instead of scaling etc) it would be nice tho
Amusing story - when I was in uni I decided to learn dvorak and since I'd just got a shiny new smartphone I set the keyboard in it to dvorak too.
I was never able to get over my qwerty touchtyping skills and gave up very quickly but I left my smartphone keyboard that way as I thought people's reactions when they tried to use it was funny.
Six years later, I bought a kinesis advantage and discovered to my horror that my touchtyping skills were useless with the alien key layout and I couldn't remember where any of the keys were because I'd not looked at them for so long.
However - the kinesis had a "dvorak" button and after having used it on my phone for so long I found it easier to learn that then re-learn qwerty. 4 years later and I get hopelessly lost every time I try to use qwerty.
Wow doing that would make so little sense. The benefit of dvorak is less finger movement when touch typing. It would be interesting to optimize the keyboard layout on a phone for less finger movement while swiping, but that probably looks a lot different than Dvorak.
For swiping it’s the opposite: you need to move your finger more to clearly disambiguate which letters you want to “select.” The hardest words are things like “as” and “tool” where there’s letters close by to miss-swipe over. At least in my experience.
I've been using it for about 7 months now and it's been great. I especially like being able to type complex passwords without looking at my phone's keyboard. (like when joining a new wifi network, for example)
I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years.
Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak versions for other languages. Whereas all localized keyboard layouts that I've seen are based on Qwerty (for languages using Latin chars obviously). So for people communicating in more than English, like myself, anything non-Qwerty would be a pain.
So the biggest problem with Dvorak is that it is non-standard and it ain't worth it imo. I have issues with using other workstations, of friends and colleagues, just by having reconfigured Caps Lock into another Ctrl.
Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row.
You can spot a Dvorak user by just watching them type: their fingers walk a lot less distance than other users. It's a trick that I learned from other Dvorak users who had spotted me.
I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes.
I type around 145 wpm, including in the 3 languages I speak (all ASCII based though) and languages or frameworks that I know by hearth.
To make it easy for colleges and friends, I just have 2 aliases:
As you can see, the four letters of the how row, in dvorak switches to french, in french switches to dvorak. Of course it could be more complicated with more layouts if I had to support them but then I guess a systray icon would work.
Anyway, also using Kinesis Advantage 2 LF, absolutely love it, and plenty of other "non-standard" stuff like the OP says, such as a tiling window manager.
Highly recommend learning or making a better layout than Qwerty because the drawbacks are largely country balanced by the benefits IMHO.
It's not about whatever someone thinks is "standard" it's about how you want to touch the machine for the rest of your life.
> "I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes."
That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it.
My hands never hurt, even though I love writing long texts, long emails, long code comments, etc. I can also do 120 wpm but I don't feel the need to do it because it's stressful, not necessarily on the hands, but on my thought process. Speed isn't an issue.
If Dvorak solved your RSI, that's awesome, I can understand why you switched, however I don't think this is a causality issue, meaning that I don't think it was Qwerty that caused RSI in the first place. If Dvorak is a good strategy for you to manage the pain, then great, but it's pain management, not a cure.
I also used to configure my machines a lot, going into a yak shaving rabbit hole every time it wasn't functioning properly. I was on Linux back then, but I gave it up and nowadays I'm much happier. The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.
Indeed it's just my personal experience, but there's a fact that you seem to have missed: the distance that fingers must walk to type the same text is higher in qwerty than in dvorak, that's the whole point of dvorak and others such as bepo. So, typing in Qwerty is more physical work than typing Dvorak. There are ways to calculate that pretty accurately.
I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand work means less pain, so maybe you're right, maybe it's just a coincidence.
Or maybe less finger distance means less work which means less tension accumulated in the muscles and then indeed less pain.
Nonetheless, I changed "fixed my RSI" by "fixed my RSI problems" thanks to your feedback, which should clear out the misunderstanding.
It's also worth mentioning that some of the Qwerty pain can be psychosomatic in origin. Even for me, who hasn't suffered RSI, it was pretty clear that I didn't feel the exertion of Qwerty until I had gotten used to something better (Colemak, in my case.) Once I knew how nice it can feel to type on a keyboard, anything less nice starts mentally hurting – and I'm sure, for some people, also physically.
> The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.
I'm a long time Vim user, myself (and no, not looking to spark a holy war here). One observation I have about my own habits is that I subconsciously slap the ESC key every time I'm done with something, even if I'm in a non-modal editor like Notepad or SQL Management studio. It's just become so ingrained in me that I can't stop doing it. Mostly because there's no negative feedback loop associated with doing it.
Same here, it's a pain when working with spreadsheets where this clears the cell, drives me nuts. Also I always turn on caps lock when using someone else's computer since I rebind esc to caps.
I fee like UI/UX needs to be completely redesigned and dvorak isn't even half (or any) of the battle. Single-key copy/paste, undo/redo, keyboard driven UIs, etc etc. I say this as I type on dvorak and while I love it, I also regret it due to interoperability issues and breaking of common keyboard shortcuts (I miss Ctrl+CVX).
But I just aliased `us` and `dv` to setxkbmap shortcuts, so thanks for that!
Dvorak still has the alternating hands rhythm that Colemak lacks, being more built on one-handed finger rolls than Dvorak. Most people I speak to prefer the finger rolls of Colemak, but some people (like me) prefer the alternating hands rhythm of Dvorak.
(That said, I still use Colemak because it happens to work better for my native tongue. If I only wrote English, I would have been a Dvorak user.)
What I'm talking about is a UI/UX problem that cannot be solved by key layout, I even experimented with a Ergodox and ended up in keybind hell really quickly because supporting one application others very quickly.
I switched to Dvorak after I got RSI about 10 years ago. It was so bad that I couldn't type anymore. So I taught myself Dvorak because I did some research and it seemed it could have been helpful. I was pretty desperate to solve my problem, and it seemed Dvorak could help since your hands travel less than Qwerty.
Fortunately, I haven't had RSI ever since I switched to Dvorak.
Switching to Dvorak is quite tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a good reason to do so.
Regarding internationalization, I write in English, Spanish and Italian in Dvorak with no problem. It really doesn't any difference to me as compared to Qwerty.
> And good luck finding Dvorak versions for other languages.
I definitely recommend Neo2 for German users. Ctrl + a,x,v and c still with the left hand. Letter frequency optimised for German first, English second. All programming symbols easy accessible, additional layers for Greek symbols and math notation.
Also, users of non-US layouts have much more to "gain" by switching from query-like layouts: Due to umlauts or accents, brackets tend to be way harder to reach.
