Dvorak doesn't improve speed, but it probably helps with repetitive strain.

Layouts like QGMLWB help even moreso in this regard.

real men use Colemak, right? /sarc

I tried Dvorak for a couple of weeks and got to OK speeds, but in the end it wasn't worth throwing out the countless hours of experience with qwerty, or the slight discomfort of using other computers and having to switch mentally.

I've been using Colemak for the past 10 years now and couldn't be happier with it. I have abandoned the German QWERTZ layout, mainly because writing code with QWERTZ is a real pain (curly braces, brackets and many other special chars can only be reached with the ALT modifier). Also, the layout for special characters on QWERTZ is different for Mac and Windows and I'm using both.

Colemak is way easier to learn than Dvorak if you come from QWERTY. With Colemak, all special chars and some common shortcuts (undo, cut, copy, paste) are on the same key as on QWERTY.

I don't know if I'm faster with Colemak than I would be with QWERTY now for normal text, but it certainly feels smoother and more natural, if that makes sense.

Unrelated to Colemak: I wrote a typing game a few years ago. It's more "playful" than Typeracer and targeted at beginners. I don't think it will improve your typing speed past a certain level, but it should still be fun:

http://zty.pe

That's because of keyboard-layout colonialism: most programming languages in common use were developed in English-speaking countries, particularly the USA, and make use of symbols that are not hard to type on the US keyboard layout.

nice three letter domain ;) Will give it a try!

edit: wow -- really impressed. Very satisfying explosion animations and sounds.

That's great game!

I switched to Dvorak years ago. Did it while working a programming job, it took me 3 days to type at the speed where I could keep up on IRC without the slowness being insufferable, 3 weeks for "this is ok but slow", and 3 months to fully transition.

So you might have abandoned it too soon.

This is my main reservation with doing things like mapping number keys to be symbols by default. With great customization comes great configuration burden.

Most of the layouts seem to have a lot less finger travel distance vs QWERTY.

http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/#/load/VPDHWn6k

Over a lifetime that's a lot less wear on the hands and fingers.

After I switched to Dvorak and achieving 80WPM, I switched back and my QWERTY had gone from 80WPM to 100WPM.

The point was that with life-long auto-didact QWERTY skills, I don't use all my fingers, and my dominant hand actually covers slightly more area. Learning Dvorak from scratch bought me some discipline. Takeaway: Besides playing speed typing games, perhaps learn a new layout simply for the dexterity exercise.

Dvorak doesn't improve speed. It does improve comfort though.