This is my first article typed on a Dvorak keyboard. I just finished moving the keycaps around on my MacBook Pro and I haven’t yet had occasion to use every letter in a sentence. (Q and Z were the holdouts.) My favorite keys are B and apostrophe.
The preceding paragraph was written in eight minutes.
9 Comments
Good luck with that.. You will be my 3rd friend who types Dvorak. The other two somehow retained the ability to type QWERTY as well, which would seem to be no small feat!
I’d never heard of it before, but it looks like a good idea. I’m a terrible typist with QWERTY, I wonder if it would help.
Eight minutes. Wow! I’d be interested in how fast you can close that gap.
Took me about two weeks total to get back up to speed once I learned Dvorak. They say that it takes about an hour of practice per WPM.
Now, I’m down to maybe 30 WPM in QWERTY, but in Dvorak I will often hit 80, 90, sometimes even 100 WPM! It was definitely worth it!
Stick with it; it will pay off!
I just started using dvorak but I’m damn slow at it. Too scared to change the keys though on my macbook, after attempting on a Dell.
This took about an hour to type lol.
I switched to Dvorak back in August after touch-typing QWERTY since 1996. I averaged about 110 wpm in QWERTY, peaking up to about 125. With Dvorak, I am only at 80, but I feel as though I will catch up before long. Really the issue is that Dvorak did such a good job with the bottom row. Letters that I hit infrequently - such as B, Q, J and X - tend to trip me up, or I will hit the QWERTY key for them (B for X, etc). When I learned QWERTY, I would frequently drill for speed. I have not really done this with Dvorak yet, which is probably the other reason I have not caught back up to myself. Stick with it, you will get it. Before long you will be typing Dvorak with no problem whatsoever.
This only took me a minute or so to type.
Hey that’s great! I switched to Dvorak just over two years ago and never looked back! Now all the computers in the house are dvorak and I’m typing this message in just under 8 milliseconds. You’ll do really well, and thank you so much for your informative site. I’ll be switching my site to sandbox in the next few minutes!
Ironically, it was wordpress that first got me typing in dvorak.. or was it dvorak that got me into wordpress? I did a search on google for blogging software and I was surprised to learn about this interesting little package who’s creator was a Dvorak typist!
Best of luck!
By the way! Does the macbook have other markings on the keys that get rearranged and put in the wrong place after moving the keys around (like volume markings or function keys, or a numerical keypad?)
This message typed in just under 3 milliseconds
OK just kidding. but make sure you type with your fingers on the home row. You should be able to remember the positions of all the keys by now, so stick to proper typing form. This is one design where the layout is designed to be typed from the home row.
Here are some interesting links you might like:
The Dvorak Zine: http://dvzine.org/
An interesting little zine about the Dvorak layout
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YPfevKbJRmQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FkMB5Q27nQI
Two youtube videos about the Dvorak layout outlining the results of August Dvorak’s original study at the university of Washington.