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13 August 2020
There's a lot of discussion going around about alternative keyboard layouts, starting from Cadey's post about Colemak.
For context, I've been a Dvorak typist full-time for maybe 17 years and a vim user for about 10 years. I use regular squarish mechanical keyboards, not the curvy kind.
Learning another keyboard layout is not as bad as you might think. Assuming you're not hunting-and-pecking, you already have the muscle memory to hit the key above your right middle finger from the home position, and you'll keep that. But of course it's a different letter, so the part of muscle memory you'll be retraining is the broader motions used for whole words. But learning a new layout does not take a whole month. Getting up to speed does not take a whole year.
Like fox in black, I find I am not faster in Dvorak. That's not the point. Instead, it feels nice and smooth. It's like sitting in a recliner. One way that's accomplished is through the arrangement of keys into common English language consonant or vowel blends: ns, ch, nth, oa, and so on are typed by rolling multiple fingers across adjacent keys. gh, ct, rn, ls are all typed by sliding your finger from the top row to the home position. And then, with all the vowels on the left, you're constantly alternating hands. You don't get tangled up on one-hand words like "minimum" or "redacted". So it just feels great once you're up to speed. I spend a lot of my life typing, and that made it worthwhile to me.
As for RSI, which I understand is a lot of people's motivation for trying another layout, I have never had it from typing. I did have RSI in one arm due to a stiff-buttoned mouse. Most mice have independent buttons that you click with one finger, and this was no different. I recovered by switching to an Apple mouse, the kind where the entire thing is a button. On that kind of mouse, the action of clicking can involve your arm and shoulder muscles, not just your finger. Really, my one finger was overworked, and the answer was to share the load.
If you attempt to learn a new layout, one way to train yourself not to look down is to display the layout on your screen or beside it. Anywhere at eye level will do.
After being used to Dvorak, learning vim in Dvorak was not that bad. hjkl, the direction keys, are not as conveniently placed as in QWERTY. But that's the one downside, and when I got used to them I had no trouble. It felt worthwhile to learn vim keys in their Dvorak positions rather than rebinding them, so the same skill would pay off in other programs that use them. It's a small cost for a lot of benefit. I don't think I would want to learn Dvorak and vim out of order, nor at the same time.