Hardware is not a problem. Here I am, typing these words with Colemak layout on qwerty keyboard.

Software, on the other hand, is a slight annoyance. Colemak (and any other keyboard layout) can easily be available in pretty much any OS except iOS. Also, many games implement their own keyboard input handling, and disregards custom layouts.

Hardware is the problem is you want the figures on your keys to match what they do. (I love such "tiny" details).

In the past I did try various kind of stickers, since it was hard to find my preferred qwerty layout (canadien normalise), but they were just a nuisance.

So I changed to a apple canadian qwerty layout (not many differences), it's just perfect - hardware support and software support out of the box.

And whenever I get a us qwerty I can still be efficient.

Hardware becomes problem when the keyboard you use has the wrong number of keys in the wrong positions for the layout you would want to use.

>the trouble to manage different keyboard layouts in their head

There are two main ways to type in Bulgarian on a PC: BDS - the National standard and Phonetic - a transliteration of Bulgarian (Cyrillic) letters into English ones.

I've always hated the Phonetic as its even worse than QWERTY. In high-school I forced myself to touch-type BDS so I can use it even on keyboards that don't have it. So when I heard about Dvorak in the university, I immediately decided to learn it since I already had two layouts in my muscle memory, a third one wouldn't be a problem. Initially I was using a Dwerty layout - a Dvorak when typing, a QWERTY when issuing commands (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V), but since it was incompatible with Windows 8 I've abandoned it and am currently running on pure Dvorak.

I think an affinity towards foreign languages helps a lot, but have no research to back it up [besides Bulgarian I learned French (age 5 - 14), German in high school (age 14-19) and English (age 10-19) and recently (26) some Swedish].

It's funny we have quite similar experiences but you picked up dvorak instead of qwerty - Whatever floats your boat they say :-)

I did briefly consider Dvorak but I wanted a full support and it wasn't there (ex: bios, bootloader ; for generic laptops) when I made my choice.

"Dvorak, with a larger support failed."

If by failed you mean widespread adoption. But I have been using Dvorak since 1999 on a variety of platforms without a problem. It's a personal success for me.

"the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users."

It's only on extremely rare cases that I've been forced to use QWERTY (such as at a public library) and when doing so, it hasn't been hard. So I don't have to manage different layouts in my head. I only use Dvorak, and my hardware and software supports it.

That said, I don't do any heavy typing on an iPad...

That's great that it works for you, but 'widespread adoption'? Really? If you were to take a random sample of 100 computer users how many do you seriously think have adopted Dvorak?

I think you misunderstand techiferous. This is what he said:

> “Dvorak […] failed.” If by failed you mean widespread adoption. But […] it’s a personal success for me.

I think by that, he meant, “yes, I agree that Dvorak failed, if ‘failed’ means not having widespread adoption. But I don’t agree with that definition of failure. Dvorak is actually not a failure, because I have used it successfully personally.”

techiferous means it failed to get widespread adoption but succeeded for him personally. In fact my story is remarkably similar. I adopted Dvorak around 1999 and have had no problems using it since. If I use a computer long-term I change the keyboard layout (but not the hardware). If I use a computer short-term I hunt and peck. For me personally it's been very successful.

Ah, that makes more sense. Thank you. Personally I don't see any keyboard layout displacing QWERTY. It's so entrenched in hardware, software, and people's minds. I think, if anything, it's more likely that voice recognition and things like Swype will displace traditional QWERTY typing. I can barely get family and friends to keep their phone or computer up to date despite it only taking a click here or there. A new keyboard layout? I may as well ask them to learn high level calculus. Even if we start by trying to teach an alternative layout to young children I just don't see it catching on.

IIRC, Dvorak has about 500,000 users worldwide.

Okay. If that's just food for thought, fine, but if that's an argument for widespread adoption it falls pretty short. In 2011 35% of the world's population were internet users according to a quick wikipedia reference source [1]. That's 2.45 billion people. Taking the 500,000 Dvorak users into account yields 1 Dvorak user out of every 4900 internet users. I realize these are all kind of soft numbers we're throwing around, but I feel my point stands.

[1] FWIW, http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/2011/material/ICTFactsFig...

I'm not trying to design yet another standard. I recommend that people use [Colemak](http://colemak.com/)—even though it's not as popular as Dvorak right now, it's easier to learn, so I think it has a better chance of overtaking QWERTY in the long run.

I design keyboard layouts because it's fun. I want to discover what it means for a layout to be the best. It's more of a scientific curiosity than a desire to make things better—although I do think QWERTY is in need of replacement.

> qwerty might be 1 to 5% less optimal than something else - let's even say 10%.

It's definitely a lot worse than that. If you're just talking about finger travel distance, for example, most modern keyboards (Colemak, [Arensito](http://www.pvv.org/~hakonhal/main.cgi/keyboard), my keyboard) do about three times better.

> good enough support for 8 bit chars (Brazilian Portuguese layout, us international, "canadien normalise"....)

> quick transition to different national layout (I'll be lost for some days, mostly for the commas and periods, but then I will be quickly productive)

This is actually very good point. The problem with qwerty is that there is no single qwerty. Almost every country has some weird variation of it (and some countries have several!). This causes problems on two fronts: 1) you need different hardware for every country, which means that niche/high-end keyboards (or laptops etc) become harder to get/use. 2) Software (and programming languages) designed to be used on US layout are pita on national layouts as punctuation etc symbols are shuffled around.