anybody use Dvorak?

Hi Loren,

The composer was Antonin Dvorak and the keyboard layout was designed by Antonin's cousin, August. Took him 9 years of work, and he finished it in the early 1920s. Well before John Dvorak's time.

I got my first toy typewriter in 1979, when I was 7 years old and ever since then, I've had two strong convictions: firstly, I wanted to learn to touch-type; secondly, I hated the Qwerty keyboard layout.

Fast forward 27 years. About 2 and a half years ago, I was looking for ergonomic keyboards on the net when I stumbled across the Dvorak layout. I had never seen it before, and it was love at first sight. I knew at that moment that I was finally going to teach myself to touch type and I was going to do it on the Dvorak layout.

I found a website that generated words made from the letters on the Dvorak home row, and then steadily became more challenging in stages. At first, I was predictably awful. But I just kept plugging away for 60 or 90 minutes per day. It took me about 3 weeks to be able to type whole sentences with reasonable accuracy, although I was still slow.

Since then, I've just got more accurate and quicker. Don't know how fast I am in "words per minute", but I'm certainly not the 'hunt and peck' typist that I was when I was using Qwerty.

Hope this helps. If you've any more questions, just ask.

No problem, write-stuff.

To be honest, I was a bit spooked when I saw Loren's OP because just lately I've been thinking about putting together some kind of information product that teaches noobs how to type on the Dvorak layout. I don't think that an e-book would be the right media. It would need to be screen-based and very interactive. Hmmm.... <John scratches chin and thinks for a while>

Sherice, you don't have to buy a new keyboard to use the Dvorak layout. You just change the chosen keyboard layout in your computer's "International Settings" and then keep this on your screen while you learn...



You'll notice that all of the vowels are on the home row under the left hand and the most often used consonants are on the home row under the right hand. So the theory is, your fingers spend more time on the home row which is the easiest row to type on. And the least used letters are on the bottom row, out of the way!