- The most important part of the Dvorak keyboard is that the most frequent English letters are on the home row with the vowels pushed to the left. This means that you're less likely to move your fingers from the home row and more likely to switch between hands for each letter. Thats the theory of why Dvorak is faster and more comfortable. It's a little crazy that E isn't on the Qwerty home row.
- It was much harder to switch to a new layout than I expected. It took about a month of typing with Dvorak every day and destroyed my ability to type on a qwerty keyboard. For a period during this transition I couldn't really type well on either keyboard, not fun, and not easy to explain to my boss why I couldn't fucking type. Interestingly I can still type fine on my iphone qwerty keyboard, so it is apparently a separate process in my brain.
- I think the article is similar to saying "there's no statistical proof that using the metric system is faster". Using the metric system is the kind of thing that makes sense intuitively, but if you took 100 scientists using imperial measurements and retrained them to use the metric system, it would be hard to conclusively prove that it is _BETTER_.
- To extrapolate a little bit, there I think there is a broader point here that statistics are usually used to make an argument, often deceptively. It is incredibly hard to create a clean sample in the real world, and even then its difficult to really extract meaning from those numbers. Remember, the average person has less than 2 legs.
- My personal feeling is that Dvorak is a LOT more comfortable and I type maybe 10% faster with it, though I can't really back that up. Maybe its just the fact I learned it second, or maybe I'm just fooling myself, who knows. But I spend like 10 hours a day typing, so if I type 10% faster over my lifetime then I've... turned a profit? Maybe I'll spend those extra days at the end of my life doing a better study about how much faster sailors can type on Dvorak.
Even if you don't use Dvorak, I HIGHLY recommend switching your Escape and Caps-lock keys, especially if you use Vim. Think about how much more you use Escape than Caps-lock. I use something called PCKeyboard Hack to configure that feature and Dvorak on OS X. On Windows, theres something called Auto Hotkey.