bdlf1729

If all one does is write grand 700-page novels six days a week then Dvorak's an easy reccomendation; but short of that, if one's working a normal typing job with articles and scripts and that then I think that just learning how to touch-type (as it's called) on a normal QWERTY keyboard is worth it. It's a lifetime long skill: a hard short-term change (especially as you start doing work in it you'll be slowing down a lot, and that's super frustrating) but you've got decades of simpler keyboard interaction in front of you if you can get past those first few months. Oh and by the way, there's little bumps on the F and J keys, where the index fingers go on the home row. Even if you don't learn how to touch-type, you can use them to get your hands into the right place when you switch away from the mouse.

I can drop a bit on Dvorak and for anybody who's interested. If you're really enthusiastic about keyboard layouts and keyboard design, then you should probably learn Dvorak and/or other layouts like Colemak and Workman and such simply because you'll find it fun -- hard work, but fun. Similarly, if you care a lot about the feeling of typing (like you're collecting keyswitches and such), then it's almost rediculous to not be well-versed in a second layout (if for anything but the fun of it). Otherwise.... there's not really anything in it for other people. Personally I started using Dvorak because I needed to break a lot of bad habits really quickly. My home row was Shift+WAD and JIOP/arrow keys, one of my thumbs anchored itself awkwardly on the front edge of the keyboard, and over the course of a year I was starting to get a really burning in my wrists after typing (noting here that I'm 20 years of age and an aspiring programmer, go-figure). Learning a proper, clean way of using the keyboard doesn't get rid of the build-up of pain, but over the course of two years it's far milder. (Because of this, I also use a 42-key Atreus keyboard so I don't have any far-reaching stretches when I type.) If you want to type more productively, then learning a new keyboard layout isn't for you -- unless maybe you want to get into stenography, but that's a whole separate skill. Faster typing is a product of practice, and a new layout is going to set you back with a 100 hours of awkwardness. Then there's the technical problems: changing your keyboard layout is a native function of Windows and Linux and BSD and such, but all the default shortcuts for programs are meant for QWERTY, not all of those shortcuts are re-mappable, and some programs are going to ignore your OS's selected keyboard layout and will try and parse the keyboard scancodes with their own half-assed methods. Depending on whether or not you're using a native Dvorak keyboard especially messes with this stuff. The final note I'd like to make about this is that after using Dvorak full time for a month, I completely forgot how to type in QWERTY. To other people I'm like this big computer expert, but I sit down in front of their computers and I have to stare face-down into the keyboard and type with one or two fingers.