So you want to learn Dvorak?

[The Mick-a-nator]

Hi there! I've been a Dvorak layout user for almost a year now, and I must say I really like it. With alternative layouts like Dvorak or the easier to learn Colemak on the rise discussion about them is rightly increasing. However with such an hard to test concept as a new keyboard layout and with uptake still too low to have any real data anyway, I see a lot of polarised personal opinion driving this discussion. Whilst I cannot change the lack of data, in this post I hope to present my experience and opinion in a way that provides some context to those who are contemplating making the change themselves.
I will maintain and update this thread, so please add your own comments and help make a comprehensive guide!

The Dvorak layout.

OK so first, what's involved in changing your keyboard layout, to dvorak or anything else? For most of us, especially here, typing is largely muscle memory. Even if you cannot touch type, you have learned what to expect from a keyboard. Most likely this will be QWERTY or the regional equivalent. I couldn't touch type a year ago, but even trying to type on a German QWERTZ keyboard was odd. I kept getting z and y wrong! I know the difference between qwertz and qwerty, but I couldn't help defaulting to what I knew. Change almost every key on the keyboard and this is naturally disorientating. But there is hope! The human mind is an incredible thing and you can reprogram it almost infinitely. I highly recommend this Smarter Every Day video, in which he learns to ride a bike with the handlebar turns the wheel the opposite way.^[1]

A keyboard layout is not quite as mechanically complicated as riding a bike, but it shows the same principle in action. So basically, it's going to be hard, but it is possible! The key is...

Practice
Keyboards aren't bikes, and there are methods of practice that will make learning a layout faster. For example, one thing I recommend if possible is to switch at the same time as learning to touch typing. I couldn't touch type before I learned Dvorak, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity. This is purely conjecture on my part, but I think this helps because it changes the feeling of typing. I wasn't looking for keys in the wrong places, because I wasn't looking for them, I had to remember them. I also wasn't hitting the wrong keys out of habbit, because my hands didn't have that muscle memory to begin with. I wasn't overwriting existing muscle memory, I was learning new movements. This was a huge benefit to me. If you go this route, I suggest you DON'T CHANGE YOUR KEYCAPS to Dvorak! A wrong layout is fine, but a blank set is better. Don't let yourself cheat and navigate with your eyes!

Maybe you already know how to touch type QWERTY (or other) and that's not possible. There are still some tricks you can use to speed up learning a new layout. A chapter of The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufmann goes through his experience learning Colemak. Essentially, learning a skill like this can be broken into two types of practice: deliberate and passive. Passive practice is just using the skill to execute the task; here that means using Dvorak/Colemak to type in your day-to-day. Deliberate practice is using the skill in an abstract situation with the sole purpose of getting better at it. That means typing speed tests and (software) tutors. Kaufmann's method essentially was to use a tutor for 20 minutes a day before bed^[2] and use the layout as much as possible to do his job. He only saw improvement in his typing speed if he included the deliberate practice! However my experience was the opposite. I started only using a tutor and falling back to QWERTY if I needed the speed for a meeting or something. Using the tutor was great for memorising the locations of the keys, but I hit a plateau at that point and I only advanced again when I dropped the tutor tool and used my 10wpm(!) Dvorak for everything. It then only took me about a week to get comfortable with the layout and another week to be back up to my old speed (and I'm still slowly getting faster). Do whatever works for you^[3], but both types of practice are needed to some degree.

Making the change
Most systems these days support Dvorak, so you can just change the keyboard language and you're good to go. Colemak is still not widely recognised though, so you will probably have to install it on your system. colemak.com seems to have pretty clear instructions for windows, mac and linux distros.
It can be useful to switch back to your old layout from time to time, so it's good to learn the hotkey for that. I use this all the time on my Ubuntu machine when playing games, but I will talk bout this in the next section.

Resources
Here are some resources to help you learn Dvorak. I will be expanding this, so if you think I've missed anything do comment!

• keybr.com - A web based touch typing tutor. This is what I used at first because it can map your input without changing your system keyboard language. It will track your progress though, but I found the progression slow and strict. Supports lots of layouts.
• dvorak.nl - Another web typing tutor, specifically for Dvorak. Can also map the keyboard, but only from QWERTY, QWERTZ or AZERTY
• colemak.com - As mentioned above. Has everything to need to start with Colemak

Footnotes
1 - This shows how anything can be learned by anyone of any age, but the older you are the slower it can be. I disagree with Destin's statement about language learning though. What adults lack in plasticity, we make up for in other skills and our approach to practice.
2 - This is backed by research (that I don't have the citations for atm. I will add when I can find it again). You brain enter's a more plastic state before (and during) sleep that makes learning a manual skill quicker.
3 - This leads me to a pet peeve, but I didn't want to clutter the post. I see a lot of people report their speed not getting above ~10wpm for a long time and giving up or going to the simpler Colemak. There's nothing wrong with trying Colemak instead, but if you stop improving you need to change how you practice. There's nothing wrong with Dvorak stopping you improving, plenty of people switch successfully, and there's nothing wrong with you stopping you using Dvorak. You just need to find what works for you.

[The Mick-a-nator]

My Experience with Dvorak
The Good and the Bad

As I explained briefly above, I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone and learn to touch type while switching to Dvorak. This felt really natural and I've since started to learn qwerty touch typing for practicality I find it very bizarre, more so than Dvorak first felt. Perhaps this is some bias at work here though. I used a couple of touch typing tutor tools, but the ones I found most useful were the ones that used pseudo-words, rather than the pattern-based ones. Give me 'jjjjffff jfjfjfjf' etc to learn j and f and I find I just cheat and go back to the ol' 1 finger punch, but semi-random strings made me more inclined to use my memory of the keys for some reason. I don't really have an explanation as to why this is the case, though I suspect the pattern based method comes out of the old school idea that you just learn everything by wrote, which works but I find to be very very slow. This may not be the case for everyone and you will do well to experiment.

When it comes to speed, I personally haven't seen a great deal of improvement. I went from around 40wpm to 55-60, though that number is still growing. Even this I suspect came more out of the touch typing than the layout switch. The main thing is that I find it just more comfortable to type on the dvorak layout than I did (and do) with qwerty. It's never something I considered before switching, but I've noticed I do enjoy typing more now, even on poor quality keyboards. One quarrel I do still have is my right pinky. I tend to use keyboards with quite stiff keys (cherry mx blacks on my mechanical at home and office domes are strangely resistive) and hitting the keys to the right of my pinky is tiring.

It's not all sunshine and roses though. Unfortunately, gaming on dvorak is not always simple. I mention above that being able to switch layout with a hotkey is really handy, and gaming is the main time I do this. Valve games seem to handle it no problem; I can play CSGO and TF2 with the same hand position without changing layout (I'm running on Ubuntu with the keyboard language changed in system settings. I don't know if the same behaviour happens in Windows/Mac). The downside is that all the hotkeys listed in the settings still show as qwerty. With most other games though, QWERTY is all I'm given by the game, and a system change is the easiest (or only!) way to play the game sensibly. Remapping hotkeys game-by-game is just not feasible, and pre-defined dvorak hotkeys are rare.
Another time it is handy to switch layouts is if a friend or colleague wishes to use your keyboard, but give them a second to struggle first 

On the other hand, I have not found hotkeys to be a big issue as I had feared. Most standard hotkeys are based on letter anyway and have no ergonomic reason to their position, except for the standard zxcv. After learning a whole new keyboard layout, learning those 4 hotkeys wasn't much of a stretch. However, as people often mention, things like vim, emacs or other apps with a lot of hotkeys con get unwieldy if all the hotkeys change. I don't often run into these so I haven't had issue, but it is probably something to consider.

tl;dr dvorak feels great to me, but it's not practical for everyone to switch.

So that's that, my analysis of switching to Dvorak. Sorry for the long winded post, but if nothing else writing this has helped me think about the topic more clearly.
What are your  experiences with Dvorak/Colemak/Bepo? What would you suggest to someone planning on switching?
If you are planning to switch, I would love to hear your progress!