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Is DVORAK Gaining Traction Among Coders?
coderpath asks: "At a recent Seattle Ruby Brigade hack night someone asked how many people used the DVORAK keyboard layout. Out of 9 people, 7 used DVORAK and only 2 were using QWERTY. I personally made the switch last Christmas, after 25 years of typing with QWERTY. What do you use? Have you switched to DVORAK? Have you been wanting to make the switch? Has anyone else noticed an increase in adoption of DVORAK lately?"
Very few people are switching. Very few people ever did switch. And very few people will switch in the future. I use Qwerty, or a national variant of it, as is 99.99% of everybody else using a computer. I have never switched to Dvorak. I once considered it, and determined it would be a waste of time, as I'm not a secretary, I already type pretty fast, there is no Dvorak for Norwegian, and I like having labels matching output on the keys of my keyboard. Also I'm weird enough as it is, and don't need to type weirdly too. So in conclusion, no I haven't really wanted to make the switch, otherwise I would have done it long ago. I have absolutely not noticed an increase in Dvorak use lately. It's probably the same two people who are still using it now, as it was in 1952.
I use the Colemak layout, which has a custom mapping for vim.
Colemak is much better than QWERTY, from a research paper listed the Colemak site:
"All things considered, I believe Colemak is better than Dvorak and the best alternative to QWERTY."
The layout is similar to QWERTY in some ways QWZXCVBM stay in the same place, but everything else moves.
CAPS becomes BACKSPACE. Colemak was entered in the CAPSoff competition (a contest for keyboards with CAPS lock), which it won.
Colemak was designed by Shai Colemak after considering the most common digraphs (two letter combinations).
When you start to type quickly, your brain works on it's memory of key combinations, not key locations, so you'll start typing in QWERTY while you're learning, as you speed up.
It took me 3x 10 hour days using ktouch to learn the layout well enough to use it well and about 2 months to equal my QWERTY speed. All progress from there.