I’ve used Dvorak for a long time and I’m happy with it. I don’t recommend switching unless you experience pain from typing, or you really want to optimize your typing skill for some reason. If you do switch, switch to Colemak, which is like Dvorak but more similar to Qwerty and easier to learn.

This post is about my own experience.

Overview

Here are reasons to switch:

• Fingers travel less distance while typing
• Might help with finger pain or RSI
• Address your problems with a new skill rather than a new gadget

Reasons not to switch:

• Takes several weeks to learn, during which time you’ll be a bad typist
• Hotkeys will move around, which is annoying and messes up vim mode
• 10% increase in typing speed probably not worth the inconvenience

Optimizing your Keyboard

If you’ve spent much time in software offices, you’ve probably noticed that programmers love to customize the keyboard they use. After all, programming involves a lot of typing, and coders are prone to repetitive stress injury of the wrists. From the strangely inverted Kineses keyboard to the split-in-two ErgoDox to the ubiquitously noisy mechanical keys, my coworkers seem to use anything but the standard grid of 104 keys.

As an aside, I haven’t noticed the same tendency with journalists and authors, who all use regular keyboards, in my experience. Are they missing an opportunity here? If you’re a professional writer, do you use a customized keyboard? Leave a comment and let me know.

But what they all mostly use is the ordinary QWERTY layout.

Alternative Layouts

First, here’s what the Dvorak layout looks like:

The letter keys are all in different places. All of the most common letters in English appear in the middle row. Vowels are on the left, and consonants are on the right, which works well because it’s easier to type with alternating hands, and English tends to alternate between vowels and consonants. Some high-frequency letters are off the home row, notably R and L, but it’s not too bad.

Here’s a heatmap of the letter frequencies in Querty and Dvorak:

You can see that Dvorak is, at least in some naive sense, designed to be easier. It’s a myth that the qwerty layout was designed to slow typists down, but it is true that the letters in the word TYPEWRITER all appear on the top row, and that fact was more important to the designers than ergonomics was.

Data

Because the more commonly used letters are on the home row, your fingers have to travel about 75% farther on the Qwerty layout compared to the Dvorak layout.

Benefits (to Me)

My typing speed is about 75 words per minute, which typingpal.com characterizes as “high speed”. I don’t know how much to attribute this to Dvorak, but I’m not otherwise especially dextrous, so I assume it helps.

By far the biggest upside I perceive, and the reason I don’t plan on going back to Qwerty despite the downsides I note below, is that it just feels less painful to type in Dvorak. I use Qwerty sometimes, mostly on other people’s computers, and I notice that it makes my fingers feel more tired. I have some pain in my fingers due to a nervous tic disorder, so I appreciate the relative ease of Dvorak.

Downsides (to Me)

By far the biggest downside is that commonly used hotkeys are scattered all over the keyboard. In particular, C, X, and Z are less conveniently placed, although Colemak does not have that problem. Also, it’s harder to use vim.

The other downside is that I also use Dvorak on my phone’s keyboard, and Dvorak’s philosophy probably hinders rather than helps typability in the on-screen keyboard.

Is it Hard to Switch?

When I was 17, I switched from Qwerty to Dvorak. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was an ineffectual typist for about a week, and then it took me another month to get up to the speed I was at with Qwerty.

I was not exactly the best student at the time, so it wasn’t too much of a problem for me. But you probably have a job or something where you can’t just take a week to practice typing, so you probably aren’t going to switch without a good reason.

But is it Worth Switching?

So my recommendation is: it’s probably not worth switching. If you want to improve your typing experience, it’s probably easier (but more expensive) to buy a different physical keyboard, like an ErgoDox. If you would rather try something that’s free, maybe try Dvorak instead.

But, if your fingers hurt when you type and you think it would help if you didn’t have to move them as much while typing, then in that case I recommend trying Dvorak.

Bonus Recommendation: Colemak

There’s a nice compromise keyboard, called Colemak, which is much easier for Qwerty typists to learn:

If I were switching layouts today, this is the one I would prefer to use. It’s statistically about as optimized as Dvorak, and it’s significantly easier to learn.

Learn more about it here.

Anyone thinking about switching to Dvorak should switch to Colemak instead.

Honestly this post is making me consider switching to Colemak just to make hotkeys more convenient again.