If you use Dvorak, please tell me how you like it, the pros/cons, etc. And if you can still type on qwerty keyboard alright

thanks.

I've used dvorak for about 2 years and i love totally love it, the design makes much more sense. The reason I switched was that I wanted to learn touchtyping so why not at the same time try out dvorak and force the touchtyping (qwerty-layout on the keyboard).
If i have to type on a qwerty keyboard I have to look on the keys, if I type on it for too long my dvorak-skillz will fade a bit but I catch up again in notime.

dvorak is dumb.

I thought dvorak was optimized for English. Ie no point for any others to learn it.

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And Qwerty is optimized for...? Dvorak is good enough for writing swedish too, vowels and consonants are still seperated so the basic concept of switching hands remains.

Yes Sassa, we know how to use Google too

I personally think the idea of a dvorak keyboard is pointless.

I'm that second (first actually) guy who voted for Dvorak. I had used Dvorak for half a year, switched back to QWERTY, now using Dvorak for half a year again.

I like it how much less overall finger travel you need on Dvorak. Fingers just rest on the home row most of the time. Good for a lazy person like me.

Speed-wise I don't think I've reached my QWERTY speed yet (around 70 wpm). But the speed is building up gradually, and I hope to surpass QWERTY in a year or so.

I can still type in QWERTY pretty well, just need to spy on the key labels for a couple of seconds to make the "context switch", and then I'm touch-typing away again. But it's a silly situation if have to use QWERTY on a Dvorak-labeled keyboard (e.g. when connecting with rdesktop to another PC): the lack of proper visual feedback prevents me from doing the switch, and typing every key is a slow, error-prone process.

Now speaking of the "context switches", it's not easy to be a Dvorak typist in a QWERTY world, especially when you have to deal other ppl's keyboards all the time. That's the reason I went back to full-time QWERTY typing when I worked as sysadmin a couple of years ago: it was just to annoying to have to do the switch every time I needed to type something on someone else's PC.

I'm freelancing now and so I'm quite happy typing Dvorak again.

Speaking of disadvantages, there's a couple more things. It's a lot harder to use your beloved Ctrl-C Ctrl-V (and to a lesser degree Ctrl-X) shortcuts with Dvorak. C and V are on the right-hand side of the keyboard, so it's either a two-hand combo, which is annoying if you have to combine copy-pasting with mousing, or you can use the left hand and the right Ctrl key, but that's annoying as well because you have to move your hand and you have to look at the keyboard to locate the keys.

I have remedied the situation on Windows by mapping (with AutoHotkey) the combos Ctrl-Q/J/K to Ctrl-X/C/V, so I can use the familiar one-hand gestures. I don't miss the loss of Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-J much, but it's a pity I can't use Ctrl-K for searching in Firefox any more. It's worse on Mac and in Linux where I failed to find decent (if any) remapping software.

Using Dvorak alongside the Russian keyboard layout is another story. Some non-alphabetic keys change places in the Dvorak layout, e.g. = and -; but when switching to Russian I have to remember their old QWERTY places. That's in addition to "/;`[] which are different in the Russian layout anyway. To make matters worse, the Ctrl combos switch back to QWERTY mode when the Russian layout is activated. I have fixed it in Mac OS X with a custom layout, but I'm unaware of a fix for Windows.

qwerty here

- QWERTY is standard, dvorak is kinda exotic (not to say queer )
- keyboard shortcuts are made with QWERTY in mind
- you can type "QW" really fast
- by knowing the keyboard layout name QWERTY, you already know 60% of the letter keys on the upper row

Dvorak is a paranoid and so is his freaking keyboard layout, that's why, I'll be just like him, and criticize him for EVERYTHING