I learned to type on Dvorak 20 years ago and my ability to type on QWERTY still did not recover to even 1/5th of my previous speed.

It is pretty embarrassing sometimes.

On the other hand I use completely unmarked keyboard which coupled with Dvorak makes me largely invulnerable to pranking by coworkers by writing mail in my name (assuming I forget to lock my workstation which happens about twice in a decade).

One time I had an interview where they handed me a Windows laptop on QWERTY to code some problem and I looked like I could barely use a computer :D

Besides, why would you need to use qwerty other than occasionally?

Reminder: sharing keyboard with other people is really bad for hygiene, due to the shape of the keys preventing any deep cleaning.

To me, this is the best setup. Only pain point is that it required me to configure the 2 PC games I play to fit with my Dvorak configuration, since the PC sees it as me typing on a QWERTY keyboard with alien hands.

Also happened with language learning. I speak English and Spanish natively. Learned Italian (very similar to Spanish) in high school. After college learned Chinese in China. One day I ran into an Italian person in China and tried to talk to them in Italian. I kept jumbling Italian and Chinese, even though on paper Italian is so much easier for me than Chinese. It was like my brain only had space for all native languages, and just one foreign language. I’m sure with practice I could speak both Italian and Chinese, but that’s the whole point of this comment. It takes practice to maintain them all.

If your speed did not fall it means you did not learn well.

I actually learned to type at school (yeah, funny business school my parents sent me to). We had an actual specialist teacher to teach us to type on electric typewriters using pretty nice methodology.

To learn to type well is to train "muscle memory". This means you think the letter and your body does it for you, automatically, without any part of your conscious brain involved.

I don't know where keys are on my keyboard. It is unmarked, so I can't look it up. If somebody asks me, I need to lay my hands on it and think the letter and see which finger "wants to" press the button. In that regard I am a passenger and once I think a word or sentence I don't have any further control -- it is some uncontrollable part of my brain that takes over and does it for me.

Even when typing at speed I am still free to think about anything else. Just as when you walk you don't need to think about walking itself and can concentrate on whatever else you want.

The only exception to this is typing on my mobile device, which is configured to qwerty.

So maybe GP was that good

One place that really sticks out is job interviews. Asking your interviewer to change keyboard layouts is a bit intrusive. It's not a huge deal on a Mac, but it's a challenge on Windows since Colemak isn't built in.

I use qwerty on mobile just fine. I don't think dvorak on mobile would be of any help since I type with thumbs.

I could type around 90 WPM in QWERTY and now I hunt and pick at it. I'm at that speed in Dvorak now so it doesn't really matter. If you play games at all it kind of sucks having to switch back and forth, but that's a small price to pay to not have career ending RSI.

So you have collisions. ("Does Y mean "yank"? Or does it now mean "to"? Well "to" can't be T anymore, because that's now the motion up command.")

So you have to either remap everything back to qwerty positions, and learn the new mnemonics, or keep the letter associations the same, and give up on the clustered motion commands.

I'm thinking it's probably better to do the latter, but I'd love to hear from vimmers that use non-qwerty layouts.

I find that remapping shortcuts is generally not worth it. Yeah, undo/cut/copy/paste are weird and that sucks, but it's better than fighting every application you ever use, on every machine, including machines you SSH into, until you die.

For gaming, on the other hand, mixed up keybinds are intolerable. I just switch back to QWERTY for that.

So even if I ever did make the jump to Colemack or Dvorak, I'd probably keep those mappings to the same physical keys. Working in vim, I'd just use my "arrow" keys rather than the native motion keymappings.

I also try to avoid using them in the first place (instead using w/b/f/t/n/etc), but sometimes it's faster to just tap the key a few times rather than "formulate a plan" to reach my target

A 60% (no arrow keys) has 61 keys (ANSI) and the next “bigger” one, a 65% has 67 keys and usually already arrow keys.

Is it some non-standard ergo mech build?

Basically this. Not really ergo, other than being ortholinear and having space between the resting positions of my hands.

Here's a photo: https://imgur.com/0UBSi74

I would definitely advise against remapping vim bindings. The first is because if you ever has to use vim on a non-colemak machine, figuring out the keys will be very painful. Secondly because vim has influenced a lot of other programs (man, less, gvim, etc) and most of them are much harder to rebind if they even support it at all.

What! :- ) Well founded fears, I'd say: I've been typing in Colemak for 10+ years and if I switch to QWERTY I'm significantly slower than before I started using Colemak. — But I'm still glad I made the switch.

> the typing speed is not the productivity bottleneck

Yes agreed. I'd only recommend a software person to switch, if they think the learning process seems fun. But maybe if one writes novels, it's nice to type faster? Or someone who writes a lot here at HN :- )

> hotkeys are generally a MESS

Colemak: Hotkeys = fine :- )

I'm not a Colemak user, but from my experiences with Dvorak, I have a theory on why this happens. Precisely because it shares many keys with QWERTY!

Explanation: when I type in Dvorak or QWERTY, the only hesitation is when I type the first letter of a text I need to type. Then, a muscle memory kicks in and I type without thinking. The only exception: words starting with letter "A". This letter is special, because it is the only key that has the same position in both Dvorak and QWERTY!

So when I type words starting with "A", my muscle memory kicks in not on first typed letter, but on second! With Colemak, I guess this effect might be in full swing for almost every letter you type, and THAT would be a significant problem. So what is sold as being Colemak's advantage is probably a disadvantage if you need to type on different types of keyboards.

Also, if I have two passwords AA and AB that are similar to each other, then, if I use only AA for a while, I easily forget AB, or start including parts of AA in AB. — Is there a word for this? For forgetting and messing/mixing up things, because they are too similar to each other

> But when I'm ready to code, my typing speed is the single biggest factor

Especially when writing docs / comments for that code, then it's mostly English words (rather than `(){};!+-,[]` things)

When the typing speed difference between Dvorak and Colemak is so small (it is?), I would say to myself that any of them is better than good enough and be happy :- )

There's also tools like tmux and fzf / skim, don't know if you're using them already; if not, I'd guess they'd save more time than learning Colemak.

> especially because vi keybindings are quite important

Oh I have nice Vi keybindings in Colemak — I use Vi always: VSCode, IntelliJ etc.

On the keyboard, I've mapped the N physical key to down, H to up, and left is Backspace (and Y which I never use), and right is Space and U. So I don't use the HJKL keys for navigation (well, H but it means Up for me).

This leaves the J K L keys available to do their usual things, in Vi — they map to N E I in Colemak (apparently you've noticed this :- )) which I use all the time.

> Is the big improvement that it leaves {} in their original place

I don't think so. I'd say, it's probably the shortcuts, and that many shortcuts continue working with the left hand only (e.g. using the mouse to select text, then the left hand to CTRL+C +V copy-paste).

The worst thing I've experienced with Dvorak is typing "ls<enter>" repeatedly. It's really painful on the pinky. Putting L on the right pinky stretch was a really bad decision.

One advantage Dvorak has over Colemak is that it's included with every OS and easy to switch to, whereas Colemak often requires a download and an install to use. And some games include Dvorak keybindings, but I haven't seen one with Colemak keybindings yet.

I learned Dvorak back in college, and got fast by playing muds. Type fast, or you're dead. Took a few months to get up to speed.

What about `alias s=ls`, a way to avoid the bad decision :- )

> Both y (yank) and p (put) are on the left hand ... right hand .. movement keys, which are more important when not using a mouse ...

Oh I didn't know. That sounds nice. Hmm makes me wonder if maybe I'd preferred Dvorak instead.

> I learned Dvorak back in college, and got fast by playing muds. Type fast, or you're dead

Hmm I wonder if type fast MUDs and spell correctly and the right grammar, or you're dead, could be a fun way to learn languages in high school :- )

Turns out there's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD#Educational_MUDs — but seems the last ones are from the 90's

Hotkeys are this bizarre mix of positional _and_ semantic locations. That is, some are the keys they are because of where the keys are placed (most notably z-x-c-v but also j-k-l-o and many others in various apps), while others are what they are because of their mnemonics. Neither preserving Qwerty locations for them nor using Dvorak everywhere is right.

It's just like knowing a different language, there's some switch somewhere in my brain I can flip and type in either layout. If I use one for a long period of time, the other one gets slower and less easily recalled, but it takes on the order of minutes to come back to 90% speed.

Agree that the main annoyances are hotkeys and what layer of the software you're mapping things in.

Emacs with dvorak was... interesting.

I switched to Colemak in September (2020) and have been using it solely ever since. I started at 110 WPM QWERTY and am currently at 85 WPM Colemak.