When I tell people I type in Dvorak, the most common response I get is: what’s that? You‘ve probably heard of QWERTY before, and it’s not just the first six letters on the top left of your keyboard.
Well, it is, but more importantly, it’s the name of the keyboard layout you most likely use. There are other keyboard layouts, and Dvorak is supposedly the most efficient one since all the most commonly used letters (vowels and then d, h, t, n, s) are all in the middle row.
When I was in college many years ago, my dorm mates were talking about this. I’m quite fast at typing even on the normal keyboard, but becoming faster appealed to me. So, during winter break of my sophomore year, I started learning Dvorak.
It was a very slow process. I pulled up the keyboard on my laptop screen so I could constantly see it to see where the letters are, and I practiced while typing messages to friends.
Eventually, I got comfortable enough with it and didn’t need to look at where all the keys were anymore, and finally, I was able to type at a normal speed again. I‘ve taken speed typing tests throughout the years and with QWERTY, I was hitting about 120–125 words per minute, and my fastest with Dvorak was about 135 wpm.
The only downside is that turns out I don’t actually need to type so fast, because when I’m doing my job, my brain is the bottleneck, not my typing speed. When I’m writing, I have to think about what I’m going to write and my typing speed is again not the bottleneck. So perhaps it seems that there’s not much benefit to having learned this keyboard, except now that whenever people try to type on my keyboard, they can’t.
I don’t know if I still know how to type in QWERTY, and on the occasions when I do try, I’m much slower than typing in Dvorak and probably much slower than when I typed in QWERTY. But oh well!
Learning Dvorak was fun and it’s been my keyboard layout for about a decade!
