I noticed the other day that my life was far too easy and that life was simply too much fun. To this end, I accepted a challenge from a friend that has shown me levels of frustration that I never imagined possible. I’m speaking, of course, of switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout. Although taken as a challenge, the level of difficulty is much greater than I expected. It feels like the keys are constantly moving about the keyboard making it impossible to hit the intended keys. I’m getting a little better at it than when I first started a few days ago, but I have a feeling that it will take months to get back to a normal typing speed. My goal is total immersion into the Dvorak layout, so I have rearranged my work and home keyboards, leaving my Thinkpad the only unmodified keyboard that I use. I want to rearrange those keys as well, but the laptop keys aren’t exactly the easiest things to take on and off.
Well, now that I want to throw my Model M keyboard out the window from writing this, I think its time to get off the computer.
“my life was far too easy and … simply too much fun”
You sound like a Catholic.
i made the switch during a semester break; my second attempt. improvement was tediously slow at first. i can’t imagine how long it took you to write that post. then suddenly, I made rapid improvement. a year after the switch, i think i made the right decision. i really noticed less traveling of my fingers to keys outside the home row. some things suck about dvorak. like hotkeys. cut copy paste aren’t neatly organized. Also, few people understand why you did something so stupid as trying to change the way you type. and sometimes you use a computer and you can’t switch the keyboard, and you can no longer type efficiently in qwerty. that’s the worst.
good luck. i got myself a typematrix keyboard. it has a dvorak switch on it, plus it rearranges the keys more thoughtfully. http://www.typematrix.com/