Dvorak

Just a quick post to keep me sane during the leadup to finals :^)

I’ve been typing dvorak since my junior year of high school. I had wanted to learn it for a few years at that point, and my school decided to force us to all get iPads, which presented an excellent opportunity to force myself to learn. Paired with a bluetooth keyboard, I could change the keyboard layout with a quick command+space, and I rearranged the keys on the keyboard itself.

There’s no… real reason to learn another keyboard layout. Qwerty gets the job done. But dvorak had some alleged benefits that interested me — namely, better ergonomics (concentrating most used keys on the home row) and possibly better typing speed. But above all, it was fun to learn! And I wanted to prove to myself that I could.

Minimizing movement to reach keys is probably (although not really studied or proven in any capacity as far as I know) good for fighting arthritis/other forms of RSI. In my experience, good posture is the best thing you can do, but I intend to do a lot of typing in my life, so any measure I can take to mitigate later problems is worthwhile. (Which is why I’ve done things like built custom keyboards).

I can still type Qwerty without a problem, though I’ve memorized the linux commands and various windows/macos GUIs for changing keyboard layouts, which I use whenever I need to use a given computer for more that five minutes. Using dvorak also carries the benefit of making your computer slightly harder to use for other people — which prevents silly posts to your social media.