Dvorak layout for comfort and speed

[bononos]

Has anyone made the change and found that that their hands/wrists were more comfortable and noticed an increase in typing speeds?

 

[BrightCandle]

I didn't stick with it long enough for it to make a difference. I have heard its moderately faster than QWERTY and it can be very good for programmers due to the placement of the punctuation keys but I spent about a week adjusting to it and then found myself pair programming for 2 years! My pair didn't take kindly to my crazy keyboard layout so ended up back on QWERTY.

Another one to look at is Colemak, that is actually based on modern text rather than dvorak which is kind of old now.

But if you are having discomfort with your current keyboard you might want to change its angle, make sure your the right height etc firstly. You may also find the ergonomic keyboards highly to your liking as well, they can be more comfortable once you get used to them.

 

[Ben90]

I made the switch for a solid two months. I wanted to love it and wasn't going to let the steep learning curve or learning a new layout deter me from my long term goals, even if it meant I was typing at 15wpm and many mistakes for a few weeks. At the end of it all, I can definitely say that Dvorak is much faster/easier to learn/less stressful than QWERTY given the same time. It is a better layout than QWERTY for keyboards plain and simple.

The world runs on QWERTY. You don't realize how prominent it is until you make the switch. I knew going in that there was going to be some compatibility issues since I was using a software remap. But I didn't actually know:

Use a different computer at work? Good luck typing at 1/4th of your original speed with insane mistakes.
Got your keyboard set to Dvorak on Starcraft and think its going to work great? Nope, half the game uses raw input and conflicts.
Type on a smartphone converted to Dvorak? Autocorrect is useless because all the vowels are so close to each other.
Want to play a stupid little flash game that uses WASD? You need a macro for that.
Copy paste? You need a macro for that.
Ctrl + Save? You need a macro for that.
Ctrl + Anything? Might as well macro your entire board while we are here.

Some of these things would be fixed with an actual hardware Dvorak board, but it doesn't matter for the majority. I did learn quite a bit on with that experience though. With all the macros I made and wanted to convert back into QWERTY, I made capslock my dedicated macro-modifier. As well I realized how my FPS playing really strengthened my QWERTY keyboard skills on everything except the farthest right keys. I mapped into a OKL: setup instead of WASD and now I can type one handed at around 40wpm and relatively few errors. Great for when you are feeling lazy.

Honestly, I don't want to discourage you from trying it because your experience might be different. I would recommend against getting something like a highend mechanical wired only in Dvorak because you might find its not for you. If you want to jump into it I recommend this site because it helped me so much. If you use Chrome, prepare for your first annoyance of many.

 

[bononos]

Thanks for both replies. Macros for keeping muscle memory from vi is something that I'd like to keep. I'll probably remap them using config files.

http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/#/main
The above link is pretty good for analyzing the exact sort of text that you would want an optimal keyboard layout for. Sticking in a small sample of code, programmer dvorak (scary number key changes in the layout) was significantly ahead of the rest. I stripped out the comment lines that had many //-- characters and prog dvorak/std dvorak/colemak were clumped together.