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Comment by sebzim4500 | Hacker News Reader

How much has it damaged your QWERTY skill? I have avoided trying to learn another layout because occasionally you need to use someone else's keyboard and I don't want to look like an idiot.

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Probably off-topic, but I recently made the stupid decision of learning dvorak while I had to get some important work done.

I am currently at: 1) I don't type dvorak fast enough which really reduces my motivation, but I'm getting faster pretty quickly 2) My qwerty typing skills have gotten even worse, I look a bit stupid when I try to fix problems on other computers at ~15 WPM.

Generally I don't regret starting to type dvorak, I just wish I had done it another time where typing slowly doesn't affect me as much.

I started learning Dvorak my first semester of college (many years ago). I sort of "regretted" it for a while, especially when I needed to write a paper before a deadline. But I pushed through and am glad for it.

Keep at it!

If you regularly use both (I use workman on my ergo layout board at home and qwerty on my [school] laptop) I type roughly the same speed on both

I use Colemak DH, and have done for a few years. I could never touch type very well on QWERTY anyway so using QWERTY I am no slower than I was originally (in fact, I'm probably faster, since I now use my fingers properly). As long as it isn't very frequent, using hunt-and-peck on any QWERTY keyboards you come across is fine, and touch typing a different layout won't affect it.

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