Dvorak typing vs Qwerty. Which is better?

[Freejack2]

I saw this at: http://www.planetquake.com/jitspoe/

Dvorak
Well, while I was busy doing whacked out stuff, I decided to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. See, QWERTY (the keyboard layout everyone uses) was designed to actually slow typists down because the old mechanical typewriters would jam. Nowadays we don't have to worry about keyboard jams (not ones due to typing too fast anyway), but we're still stuck with the horrible layout. Fortunately you can do what I did and go to the control panel and set your keyboard to Dvorak, which is actually designed for efficiency. It takes a while to get used to. I memorized the layout in a day by printing out a picture of it and taping it to my monitor (compared to the weeks/moths it took me to memorize qwerty, heh). I'm still slow with it (some thing I read said it takes about a month to regain your old typing speed). I don't think it'll take me that long. Hehe - probably the fastest way to learn is IRC Also, if you don't drop QWERTY completely, it'll take a lot longer to learn - that's why most people give up.


What do people think of this. Is this something people who want to type faster should look seriously at?
I never learned to touchtype the normal way. I can kind of touch type but it's more like a 4 finger method instead of using all 10 fingers. I think it'd be cool if it was really faster to learn it?
Opinions? Experiences? Etc?

 

[Viper GTS]

Dvorak is a much more sensible layout, a huge portion of the dictionary can be typed with just the home row. QWERTY was actually designed to slow people down. Ironic, isn't it?

I won't switch, however, since

1) I can already type 90 WPM on QWERTY keyboards
2) All the PC's at work use QWERTY
3) 99.99999% of the PC's I run into use QWERTY.

Viper GTS

 

[jamesave]

How many times this kind of thread will be posted?

 

[Viper GTS]

How many times this kind of thread will be posted?

And when will you learn some proper sentence structure?

With 60,000+ people & two years since the last crash, things will be repeated.

Get over it.

Viper GTS

 

[pulpp]

yup Dvorak was designed to slow typers down so they wouldnt break the typewriters back then, actually in the 30`s i think, they did a study and foudn out that childred learn to type in Dvorak much faster than on qwerty. but like viper said, qwerty is what you find everywhere so it makes more sense to stick with it.

 

[RossGr]

I would like to switch to Dovrak but when you share computers with others it is a hard thing to do. Some of my co-workers have switched, I believe that NT will allow you to set the type of keboard in your profile, so you can have dvorak while others don't. You just can't move the keycaps. The printed map sounds like a pretty good idea.