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Is it really worth learning Dvorak given that friend/libraries/internet cafes all use QWERTY?

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Is it really worth learning Dvorak given that friend/libraries/internet cafes all use QWERTY?

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The transition is hard. I’ve heard of Dvorak users who are able to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY whenever they like, but I find it quite difficult; in QWERTY, I become a lowly hunt-and-peck typist. If you’ll be using a friend’s computer often, OS X has fantastic support for keyboard locale switching. You can put a little icon in the corner of the screen to change them at will. My girlfriend, a QWERTY typist, let me do this after a while. Windows lets you do this too, although XP’s implementation is pretty bad: it retains a keyboard loadout for each individual application, not system-wide. Very annoying for multitasking. In general, you just end up avoiding public keyboards when possible. Sorry, there’s no good answer. Curiously, I have no trouble at all with the thumb-operated keyboards on smartphones.

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I switched to Dvorak in an environment where I used my own computer 80% of the time, and others 20% of the time. Switching back and forth is really no problem at all; it’s mostly automatic for me. The only times I have any trouble is after I use the mouse for a while and then have to type something, and forget that I’m not at a Dvorak keyboard so the first couple of letters come out wrong. That said, there have been periods where I’ve worked in environments that involved using others’ computers for >50% of the time, and then I usually don’t bother with Dvorak at all, even on my own computer. My reason for switching was basically that I’d never really learned to type properly, so even though I could type quickly, I had a lot of bad habits that put strain on my hands/wrists. I figured one way to cure myself of my bad habits was to re-learn to type from the ground up, so I took the opportunity to learn the Dvorak layout. It also helps to learn Dvorak on a QWERTY keyboard so that you’re no

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I know 3 persons who learned Dvorak. All of them lost their Qwerty and were struggling to recover it. It made them curse every moment they had to use someone else’s computer, and made everybody else curse when they had to use theirs. Not good. If your are a coder, the switch bring no improvement in speed, or even a degradation, since the punctuation keys are really awkwardly placed on a Dvorak, and programming uses an inordinate amount of punctuation. There is Dvorak-for-programmer layout out there that tries to fix this. If you learn it, your keyboard wil be incompatible with all your Dovrak friends, in addition to being incompatible with all the Qwerty users. In all practicality, it makes no sense. The speed improvement when writing English is around 10%, which is silly when you know you can switch to dictating with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and get a bold 10x speed increase — I have two friends who dictate at 200 wpm, one who’s

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Emanuel: Yeah, I understand that you can switch layouts, but a lot of internet cafes, libraries, places of work, and friends won’t let you do that, and it is extremely hard to learn to type Dvorak when you don’t have a Dvorak keyboard.

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I have been a Dvorak typist for over a decade. I can do an adequate job in QWERTY if I look at the keyboard, but for touch-typing it is right out. I haven’t found it to be a major stumbling block. I suppose if you had to use other people’s computers on a regular basis for typing more than a few sentences, it might be annoying. But in today’s world, you can always be using a computer you own. A slightly bigger hassle is when someone has to use your computer at work; I have had IT people freak out pretty badly and threaten to reinstall my system. I have a hard-wired Dvorak keyboard I use at the office to ameliorate these concerns; you can switch it to QWERTY by pressing a button, and if the keyboard labels still throw someone off, you can plug in the bog-standard Dell keyboard (your work computer will always be a Dell, in my experience). Sadly, it is hard to find hard-wired Dvorak keyboards these days. Dvorak is definitely more comfortable than QWERTY. After I switched, the pain I was ge

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