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I switched after High School. I learned about Dvorak in wandering the Internet (pre Wiki days) and thought it made sense. Even if the "X much faster" claims were biased, leaving the home row and less finger movement sounded good.

After my last project my senior year I figured this was the last time I would ever be able to 'switch' because from here on out it'd be College then Work nonstop.

Printed out a keymap and kept it next to the monitor. Kept up my IRC/AIM chatting. It took 2 weeks to get back to my 'old speed'. And within a month I was up +30 WPM where I eventually settled.

DV Assist is a great tool for Windows users who don't have admin access, I keep it on a thumb drive at all times, plug it in and run and switch. And it's not like you 'forget' QWERTY, it's always printed in front of you.

The worst is passwords.... I really don't "remember" my passwords. So a password: 1234',.paoeu is just the first 3 lines of the keyboard on the left... but when I go to a QWERTY keyboard I have to think it through...

I tend to use a German keyboard layout (QWERTZUIOP). I do this because, I can type English just fine with a German keyboard, but I cannot type German the proper way I would like to with an English keyboard.

While working at a company that had a one-a-month password reset policy, I actually used the "section character" (Shift-3 on the German keyboard) for my password once. This was fine, and I had no problems for the most part, except for the 5 times that I had to type my password on another person's computer (while RDPing into my desktop machine). I had to learn what the Alt+0 windows keycode was for the character so that I could login reliably.

The rest of my passwords have intentionally avoided this issue.

I switched after High School. I learned about Dvorak in wandering the Internet (pre Wiki days) and thought it made sense. Even if the "X much faster" claims were biased, leaving the home row and less finger movement sounded good.

After my last project my senior year I figured this was the last time I would ever be able to 'switch' because from here on out it'd be College then Work nonstop.

Printed out a keymap and kept it next to the monitor. Kept up my IRC/AIM chatting. It took 2 weeks to get back to my 'old speed'. And within a month I was up +30 WPM where I eventually settled.

DV Assist is a great tool for Windows users who don't have admin access, I keep it on a thumb drive at all times, plug it in and run and switch. And it's not like you 'forget' QWERTY, it's always printed in front of you.

The worst is passwords.... I really don't "remember" my passwords. So a password: 1234',.paoeu is just the first 3 lines of the keyboard on the left... but when I go to a QWERTY keyboard I have to think it through...

To remap the keyboard, which others may expect to be QWERTY, I use the DVAssist tool. It is available for download from http://clabs.org/dvorak.htm and additionally it leaves a handy reminder of what is current on the toolbar.

I switched a few years back to only Dvorak. It took maybe 3-4 months before my Dvorak speed surpassed Qwerty (not by much - even today it's no more than 15% faster). The biggest improvement has been with ease of typing. In terms of coding, what was annoying for a while was the rearrangement of /=[]{}, but eventually that became touch-typable. On my mac laptop I have the layout set to Dvorak with Qwerty commands, which I find a little faster then having to think of the remapped letter, *then* hit the command. (Also it leaves things like command-C and command-V on one hand.)

There's a handy little app called DVAssist http://www.clabs.org/blogki/index.cgi?page=/Comput ersAndTechnology/DvAssist that allows switching the layout on the fly on windows machines without needing admin access. Great for at work when someone needs to type on your machine and you need to flip it back to Qwerty for a sec, or when I need to use a different machine. I can still do Qwerty respectably if needed, but not by touch anymore - though I haven't tried to switch back for any appreciable length of time.

• Java Demonstration of Dvorak and Qwerty Finger Movement Distances
• Letter Frequencies in the English Language - How many of the more frequent letters are on Dvorak's home row, and how many in Qwerty's? Did it ever seem completely stupid that "e" isn't on the home row in Qwerty? That's because it is, and Dvorak fixes that.
• Words Possible on Certain Rows - One snippet: in Dvorak, using the home row alone one can type 99 of the 1000 most common English words. Qwerty's home row allows for only 15.

Watier

The Grinder

Selenium

Last January there was a workshop on open source web test tools in Austin.

There's a nice little Windows application that sits in your systray waiting for you to double-click on it to change the layout from QWERTY to Dvorak or vice versa. You can also set a hotkey, which can be quite handy. It's a tiny self-contained executable, so you can just run it when you get on there, and close it when you get off.

There are caveats though; it cannot be extended to support other keyboard layouts, which would be extremely useful. In addition, it's billed as an open-source program but I have searched everywhere and sent emails to the creator asking for the source to no avail.

Nevertheless, you should try it out. Works like a charm on the computers at my school.

http://clabs.org/dvorak.htm

SourceForge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvassist/

Utilities
Dvorak Assistant - Lets you change the Windows keyboard layout without administrator access. Useful for school lab computers.

Free Dvorak Tutor Software
KP Typing Tutor (Windows)
GNU Typist (*nix)

Online Dvorak Tutorials
A Basic Course in Dvorak - No frills tutorial, just make sure you repeat the lessons until you're actually proficient. You won't learn anything drilling through them only once.
dvorak.nl tutorial - Very slick, remaps the keys for you if you want (convenient if you can't use Dvorak Assistant). Non-english languages available. Works better for experienced Dvorak typists.