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Comment by lwb | Hacker News Reader

Looks very interesting, but re-learning how to type is so painful, not to mention devastating to my productivity at work, that I think I can only afford to do it once in a lifetime...

I recently made the switch from QWERTY to Dvorak, during a 2 week period while I was in between jobs, and it was one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. Over a month later and I'm back up to a plodding 60 WPM (from a glorious 120 with QWERTY). Not to mention how shot my vim keybindings are!

Maybe if I eventually switch again it will be less painful, but the experience has taught me that typing is almost 100% an exercise in muscle memory.

Anyway, my point is, I wish I could be the kind of person that could type fluently in multiple keyboard layouts, if nothing else then just for the heck of it, but I'm not sure I'll ever have the kind of time to make that happen. Cool project though! There are certainly words and bigrams that are needlessly hard to type in Dvorak.

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I've switched to VIM and Dvorak blind type simultaneously. And out of C++.

I am not such a great typist (ten years later still 40 WPM) but it was one of the best decisions. Comfort improved tremendously and with blind typing it feels like direct interface to screen. Yes, muscle memory is a king. To remember some passwords I had to type them in imagination.

Observing myself - comfort stems from hand alternation. Home row AOEUI is a must have feature.

I was curious about vim as well. I wonder if the defaults of vi are somehow optimized for QWERTY.

This thread convinced me to try switching to Dvorak but I'm a bit scared after reading your comment. It's not clear from your comment, did you switch back to QWERTY or are you still giving it a shot?

I've used dvorak & vim for 15 years with mostly default vim bindings. I don't think there's any problem. (I also use emacs with evil)

> I wonder if the defaults of vi are somehow optimized for QWERTY.

Only hjkl for movement. Everything else is fine.

I still wouldn't make the switch again. You'd get more millage from spending the ~2 weeks doing a bunch of speed typing practice with qwerty.

The problem is that most of the typing in vim is based on muscle memory ... thinking about it I have no idea what the keys I use for commenting out code.

I tried to learn Dvorak and later Neo ... Not being able to use Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V like I was used to was annoying ... not being able to use vim anymore was the reason I stayed with QWERTY (QWERTZ in German).

That Ctrl key muscle memory is why Colemak made the explicit decision to leave all of ZXCVB in the same place as QWERTY.

A lot of Vim is mnemonic and while relearning the muscle memory is tough, relearning the mnemonics can be useful to reinforce what you know about Vim.

(Just maybe don't make the mistake I made at one point of trying a "remap the world" configuration, learning entirely new mnemonics for classic operations, and then realizing maybe too late I'd prefer a smaller remapped config. Unlearning the wrong mnemonics is hard.)

> I was curious about vim as well. I wonder if the defaults of vi are somehow optimized for QWERTY.

A few are, such an hjkl being on the home row, but the rest are more semantic (for example, "t" is "unTil", "f" is "From", "a" is "append", "i" is "insert", etc. So all of those lend themselves to muscle memory from repeated use but aren't particularly better or worse on any keyboard layout. Dvorak keeps "j" and "k" together (in the place where "c" and "v" are, respectively), which is a nice touch.

> This thread convinced me to try switching to Dvorak but I'm a bit scared after reading your comment. It's not clear from your comment, did you switch back to QWERTY or are you still giving it a shot?

I switched to Dvorak about a month ago, and have no plans to switch back! It is a definite improvement in comfort, which I expect to translate to a speed improvement eventually. Nowadays when I type anything at all in QWERTY I wonder how I ever put up with contorting my fingers into such strange shapes to type the simplest words -- not to mention how so many words have almost zero hand alternation.

I gave up on vim after learning workman. The ability to completely remap normal mode is the single feature [neo]vim is missing.

Emacs is a great editor, and I've been looking into creating my own modal keymap for it.

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