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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-22)
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I have been practicing dvorak for 2 weeks or so now. I am capable of touchtyping at 20wpm or something like that, while my qwerty top-speed (i cannot touch type in qwerty) is 90-100 wpm in spanish and 80-90wpm in english. Typing speed is not my priority, anyway; i wanna learn dvorak mainly because of 2 reasons: learning to touchtype, and ergonomics.
Initially, i wanted to learn touchtyping in qwerty, but writing in spanish was pretty left-hand intensive (the word "correctamente", for example, has only 3 characters typed with the right hand: C{o}RRECTA{m}E{n}TE). So I looked into other layouts, primarily dvorak and colemak: the former having a spanish-designed layout was a selling point for me. I also liked the concept of alternating hands, and having all the vowels in one side has made the learning process a little bit easier.
Dvorak, at least for spanish and english, is designed to be better than qwerty in terms of the amount of hand movement, hand alternation, inbound rolling, bigrams, trigrams etc. It does feel better to touchtype in dvorak than in qwerty, because you do not need to leave the home row as much, and typing with the same hand is greatly reduced. There are some diptongs in spanish, but it does not increase same-hand-writing to a level near similar to qwerty.
The place of K, Q and V in spanish dvorak, though, is problematic at best. K is almost never used, but it is located in a really accesible position, below the 'u' or left index finger. Q, which it is used for the most important interrogative (¿Qué?), is in one of the worst positions, in the left ring finger in the bottom row. V, used in some variations of the verb "go" (venir, voy, vamos, vayamos) as well as some of the verb "see" or "watch" (veremos, vemos, viendo) and some other words, is placed in the right ring finger in the bottom row, besides the W, which is not used at all in spanish but for some english words, and Z, used in a minority of words and not even pronounced differently in some spanish-speaking regions, which means that it is only used because of historical and etymological reasons; in this respect, i really like the medieval attitude, which would be not using letters you do not pronounce, or adding innecessary letters when you already have a 1:1 letter-phonem relation. Natural development of orthography > following what language ""authority"" says based on an arbitrary principle like respecting etymologies over real-world usage. All this, however, is irrelevant to dvorak vs qwerty
It is true that a lot of ppl, including myself, advocate for dvorak (or colemak, or workman, or any of the other layouts) from the basis of personal experience rather than rigourous studies, which makes choosing a layout feel pretty arbitrary and difficult at first. This is not to say that each layout doesn't have their tangible, real advantages, but that they aren't so clear and may vary from person to person, so that there is people who prefer alternating hands or writing syllabes with one hand, thus choosing dvorak or colemak respectively.
If that's the case, we can note a paradox, where choosing another layout cannot be done before you actually know which gesture you like better, which in turn cannot be done before you actually are proefficient enough in two or more layouts so that you can contrast the gestures each one has and which one you like more; at that point, choosing may be more difficult and time consuming than to just forget about it and keep writing in qwerty.
Still, I will continue learning dvorak, hoping that one day i can actually make the full change and leave qwerty behind; i already have gone through the choosing phase, and that is at least a quarter of the way.