I tried many years ago but I was never able to keep the QWERTY and DVORAK separate in my head and ended up really messing up my coordination. Later on in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and I believe the two are connected. A good resource for people in the same boat as me but still want to try, sites like learn.dvorak.nl/ exist so you don't have to officially change your layout.
I still use a QWERTY now, but I did swap out my normal keyboard for a Razer with five macro keys on the left side. I put "I" on my Caps lock key and the O, and U on the macro keys and instead of my pointer finger being on "F", it's on "D" with I, A, and S under the other fingers. Having two places to go for most vowels seems to have sped me up without destroying the layout. For those reading, though, don't ever assign letters to the Alt, Ctrl, Shift, or most labeled keys. I replaced the Caps lock (& num and scroll) because I don't use them at all and reassigned them to hotkey combinations.
Thanks for the great read. I forgot how much fun it is to tinker with the keys!
P.S. I noticed a grammar error and I'll probably lose sleep if I don't mention it. Under the heading Dvorak and Other Layouts, you have a sentence: "...there is a disproportionately higher percentage of Dvorak users up there than there are numbers of Dvorak users."
I tried many years ago but I was never able to keep the QWERTY and DVORAK separate in my head and ended up really messing up my coordination. Later on in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and I believe the two are connected. A good resource for people in the same boat as me but still want to try, sites like learn.dvorak.nl/ exist so you don't have to officially change your layout.
I still use a QWERTY now, but I did swap out my normal keyboard for a Razer with five macro keys on the left side. I put "I" on my Caps lock key and the O, and U on the macro keys and instead of my pointer finger being on "F", it's on "D" with I, A, and S under the other fingers. Having two places to go for most vowels seems to have sped me up without destroying the layout. For those reading, though, don't ever assign letters to the Alt, Ctrl, Shift, or most labeled keys. I replaced the Caps lock (& num and scroll) because I don't use them at all and reassigned them to hotkey combinations.
Thanks for the great read. I forgot how much fun it is to tinker with the keys!
P.S. I noticed a grammar error and I'll probably lose sleep if I don't mention it. Under the heading Dvorak and Other Layouts, you have a sentence: "...there is a disproportionately higher percentage of Dvorak users up there than there are numbers of Dvorak users."
Oh, I like this! Wish I knew about this site when learning. I was learning using typing tutors designed for QWERTY. thanks for the recommend