2011-01-15, 09:10 PM
Dusk Wrote:I type in both. You really can't just drop QWERTY altogether if you do a lot of work on public/company computers or play PC games a lot. My QWERTY isn't as good as it used to be (about 85 wpm compared to 95ish pre-learning Dvorak). About 90 wpm in Dvorak. I don't notice any sort of speed increase obviously, but with Dvorak my fingers definitely feel less fatigue after using the computer for a while.
I don't know what my speed is like in qwerty now (I don't use it at all, since I never have to use public/shared computers), but I noticed both a speed increase (95 qwerty -> 130 dvorak) and it's definitely a lot more comfortable on my hands.
A big difference is that I can type dvorak homerow style, I could never learn qwerty that way. So it's just a more natural fit of keyboard to hands. It took me something like 3 days to learn the homerow typing, then about 4 weeks to get up to decent (80+wpm) speeds. It's just improved since then, now I'm at about the limit of how fast I can think/press keys.
I type a lot every day, in the range of ~8000-10000 words, so it's important that my hands are comfortable when doing it. Qwerty used to give me finger pain on longer stretches of typing, Dvorak doesn't seem to ever get to that point.