The switch to Dvorak

When I got my first stick shift, we (my family) had to sell my automatic to afford it. My only option for driving, then, was the new stick shift I hadn’t learned yet. I sucked at it at first, but I quickly got a lot better. It’s like learning a foreign language by living in a foreign country. And so begin my adventures in learning Dvorak.

The chain of events leading to my decision to become even geekier started with one of my favorite pasttimes: aimlessly surfing the web. I came upon this blog post that talked about the Dvorak keyboard layout being a much faster & more efficient way to type. Well, I like efficiency, so the next logical step was (of course) to drop all plans for the night and learn it. I followed his link to DVzine.org and printed out their comic about the history of keyboard layouts, and if there was any convincing left to be done, that did it.

Next I decided to pop the keys off my keyboard and rearrange them, which turned out to be a bad idea, because I bricked my keyboard in the process. (I’m typing this on a spare.)

Anyway, a couple of typing tutorials later, I got bored, so here I am. I’ve been typing this entire post in Dvorak, and I’m cruising along at a whopping 10 words per minute. But just like being forced into driving a manual transmission by losing my automatic, I know that this is the quickest way to learn it. Wish me luck!

Oh, and if you do decide to follow in my footsteps, don’t brick your keyboard!

Update: The hardest part of this is definitely keyboard shortcuts. I never realized how much I looked at the keyboard for those.

Another update: Keyboard shortcuts can be saved! There’s a second Dvorak option in Mac OS 10.5 (it’s one of four options in 10.6) called Dvorak – Qwerty that converts the keyboard to Qwerty when the command key is held down. I will probably try to get used to the keyboard shortcuts in Dvorak eventually, but in the meantime, I won’t accidentally quit an application when trying to cut and paste. Hooray!

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