Just wondering. I've used a QWERTY all my life and my typing speed is fairly decent. I don't have major problems but I feel like I could be typing a little bit faster. Are the gains in speed and the reduction in fatigue worth the effort of learning it? And will it become a hassle to swap between DVORAK and QWERTY at will?
I've never been tempted to learn the Dvorak keyboard. I can type fast enough. Is your writing speed really that dependent on your typing speed?
I did not even know that such a thing existed. I just googled it after reading this post. I don't think I would want to learn another keyboard, I can touch type, and the thought of relearning all that muscle memory is exhausting. If you're good with QWERTY, i'd stick with it. But then, like I said, I didn't know that a Dvorak was a thing until 15 minuted ago... so I'm not the best source of information.
Dvorak keyboards are not all that easy to come by. If you learn Dvorak well enough to benefit from the speed increase, your proficiency with a QWERTY keyboard will suffer, unless you are truly exceptional enough to switch easily between two sets of muscle memory. I have a hard enough time switching to a German keyboard layout, mostly due to the Z and Y keys being swapped.
And QWERTY sounds cooler than PYFGCRL. I saw a Dvorak keyboard once and I hope I never do again. As Cogito, pointed out, its difficult enough learning other language keyboards, I don't think it would be worth trying to use PYFGCRL when QWERTY is perfectly fine and its keyboards are ubiquitous.
It's not worth it personally, you'll find QWERTY is commonly adopted, and even regional keyboards are generally based upon QWERTY with minor differences.
You don't need to buy the keyboard - just install it and you can switch as you wish. I have Czech and English keyboard on my laptop, for example - you just press Alt + Shift and the little "EN" at the bottom right hand corner near the little clock switches to "CZ" - or whichever keyboard you've chosen to install. It is however pretty hard to remember where the keys are when the physical printing on the keys tell you something else, so you might have to create little labels and stick them to the bottom of the keys just until you learn it off by heart. So considering that, why not give it a go? I just googled it - the Dvorak does look like it'd be really easy to use actually. But I personally type quite fast enough even though I can't touch-type, so I probably wouldn't bother lol, but why not if you wanna give it a go? And I'll bet Dr Dvorak had Czech roots - Dvorak is a common Czech surname
why would anyone want to use it?... seems to me that if it were easier/faster to learn/use as it was touted to be, it would have long ago replaced the qwerty... that most of us had never heard of it till this post proves to me that it didn't live up to its inventors' claims...
I believe it is faster (QWERTY was designed in a way that prevents too fast typing, after all), but probably not so much to make it worth relearning. Most of the posts here seem to follow the same train of thought.
It's not so difficult to become familiar, and equally fast, with other keyboards. I'm sure there are many people on this forum who use more than one keyboard because English isn't their mother tongue. I use both QWERTY and the Turkish version of QWERTY (although there are only a few differences), and my mother touch types QWERTY, the French AZERTY, and she also learnt the little typewriter thing they use in law courts (can't remember its name). But that is just through necessity, so I doubt it's worth learning that keyboard (which I'd never heard of). Is it really all that much faster?
Not worth it. You'd get confused if you'd get behind pretty much any other computer in the world but your own because no one uses DVORAK. French and German keyboards have one or two keys different from standard QWERTY. It always annoys the shit out of me when I have to use one of those. I mean, why do they do that? I can't even begin to imagine the pain in the ass of having a completely different lay-out. Rather invest in a really nice QWERTY keyboard, like one of those ergonomic ones that Microsoft makes.
