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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

As a point of warning: at some point I started learning Dvorak.

I learned it well, switched to it completely, and it was great.

Except that it was absolutely horrible.

Not because of the layout, but: maybe it's just me, but I completely un-learned QWERTY.

Every time I had to touch someone else's computer, or a phone, or work with some kind of QWERTY embedded keyboard, it devolved into either immediately switching the layout, or looking like a clueless old person doing one finger typing while staring at the keyboard.

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Yeah, that's super common. Apparently you can avoid it entirely by practicing half an hour a week with QWERTY, but who has time for that? I find that it's not much of a problem these days, because of phones. I keep my mobile keyboard in QWERTY, so I always have some memory of where those keys are, even though the finger movements aren't hardwired into my motor cortex anymore.

I just checked, and going into it cold, I can squirm at about 35 WPM on QWERTY (vs 130 on Colemak). It's annoying, but serviceable if I'm using someone's computer for a few minutes. For a longer situation, if they're using a mac or linux, I can switch them to Colemak in about thirty seconds (I had to do that in some onsite interviews a few years back), and if it's Windows, having to use QWERTY is probably the thing I'm least annoyed about.

Interesting. I found I was able to naturally switch keyboards between machines and even OS'es on the same machine, but if I tried it within a single window it would confuse me. Ssh would freeze me up, too. But then I've been switching between natural languages in my day to day my whole life.

I plan to put effort into maintaining qwerty. I can comfortably type qwerty with upwards of 100wpm and 99% accuracy (even right after doing a session on colemak). Right now, colemak is still in the 30-40 wpm stage, but only in last 2 or 3 days have been drilling it and got 10wpm jump.

Could it be a matter of time/effort? After 1.5 years into Dvorak, I could switch between it and QWERTY seamlessly. It was only hard for the first year or so.

Yeah, probably my mistake was just dropping QWERTY completely, and not using it at all anymore.

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