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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes. I grew up in the sixties, and I pounded my father's portable Hermes since long before I could actually write. Transitioning to computers in the early eighties, it took me unreasonable amounts of time and effort to unlearn my muscle memory and stop typing l and o for 1 and 0.

Also, in seventh grade I took a typewriting class. Since school start I had turned in absolutely all the homework I could get away with in neatly typewritten form, while I got the impression that none of my classmates had ever even gone near such a wrting machine. I expected great things!

Alas, I flunked. The only one to do so, and hugely. I still typed better than anyone else, but I never got the hang of touch-typing. Sad to say, I haven't to this day. I seem to be stuck with the method developed by four year old me.

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I converted to Dvorak out of general geekery a few years ago. But since I did that one a 'normal' keyboard, it essentially forced me to learn how to touch type.

(If you want to give it a try, have a look at Colemak, I hear great things about it on HN every once in a while. Or Neo2 layout, if you need non-English characters.)

For true geekery, compile a corpus of text that you typed and generate a good layout for your inputting needs using a genetic algorithm or something like that. There is some code on github that you can steal.

Yeah, you could do that. Dvorak has the advantage of being comparatively mainstream, it even comes with random Windows computers.

Also by now I have a keyboard that speaks dvorak natively. The Kinesis Advantage. Of course, that keyboard is programmable enough that I could make it speak custom layouts too, or just fix it in the OS.

I wonder how Unix and Linux commands syntax would look like if they were developed with dvorak keyboards

Commands are perfectly fine. But you can't practically use the hjkl keys for navigation in vim.

I converted to Dvorak over a decade ago, and am happy with the results. My fingers stay on the home row much more, and typing rolls more smoothly. (I have a long write-up at https://www.nayuki.io/page/i-type-in-dvorak )

I got a lucky break when I learned to type around 1960, after my mom got a Smith Corona Galaxie Electric portable. This typewriter did have the 1 and 0 keys, and better yet, it came with a free Smith Corona 10 Day Touch Typing Course.

That was a set of two LP records and a 20 page textbook printed on heavy card stock with a plastic ring binder at the top so you could open it tent style and read it as you listened to the record and typed along.

The first page was ergonomics: how to sit and how to type.

Then you learned the keyboard, row by row. The first two lessons covered the home row, followed by lessons for the top and bottom rows, numeric row, and finally shifting and advanced topics.

It was great fun!

I remember typing class with typewriters and the little cardboard boxes to cover your hands freshman year in hs. The kicker was, this was in the 90's in the heart of Silicon Valley.

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