Learning Dvorak

I saw a blog post today about someone who's been using Dvorak for 20 years, and a commenter asked how long it took to learn. I learned Dvorak in my first job after college, when I had a lot of downtime and wanted to give it a try. I practiced by transcribing Wikipedia articles, and I remember it as a three-month process.

In the first month, I typed very slowly and made lots of mistakes, all with the much higher cognitive burden of having to remember where a character was and which finger should press the key before I could type anything. A very frustrating month. In the second month, my fingers began to know where they needed to go, but by then I had developed the habit of thinking about each key before I hit it. Many times a finger found a character before I could remember where it was. At that point, I knew I could drop the mental load, and I spent the third month learning not to think about each key. After that, it just took some time to get back up to my old Qwerty speed.

I related that three-month learning curve to my grandfather not long afterward, and he thought it felt very similar to his experience learning Morse code in the Navy after he was drafted for World War II.

I don't know if I'm faster using Dvorak than I was with Qwerty. I don't have any data, but qualitatively I feel like I type about the same speed. What has changed is the amount of effort. At the end of a long day of typing, my hands were less tired using Dvorak than they were using Qwerty. When a coworker found out I used Dvorak, he exclaimed, "Oh, that's why your hands don't move when you type!"

Despite using Dvorak as my main keyboard for more than 15 years, I can still type Qwerty, though not as fast and I have to look at the keyboard as I type. I can't touch type Qwerty anymore. I knew a guy who used Dvorak when in Emacs and Qwerty everywhere else (or vice versa), and he had learned to switch between layouts fluently, but I never tried. The closest I've come is typing on an iPad, where I still use the default Qwerty layout. An iPad, of course, has no tactile feedback, so I have to look anyway, and I don't feel that I would be as fast looking at a Dvorak keyboard. It's as if my eyes know one layout and my fingers another.