Dvorak is only clumsy for the first few years. After that, you stop thinking about it and it feels natural.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Lol idk if there's a maybe little sarcasm there, but honestly, I love it already. I've been averaging about 15 wpm at 80% accuracy, and getting the groove to manage a few seconds at 30 wpm is so smooth.
Good work! Only a little sarcasm, but after 35 years, I can type faster than I can write, and it just feels like thinking into the computer. (Does it feel the same for QWERTY typists? I dunno)
QWERTY typist here, yes
I probably only get around 70wmp in bursts with qwerty, but I also type faster than I write. The best way I can describe the difference is my fingers feel all spider-like with qwerty, but in dvorak, I feel like I'm jookin (I was trying to think of a faster shuffle-y footwork, but this is sick). I can feel a different level of flow even at slower speeds.
What’s Emacs? Is it as good as Vim?
Emacs is a lovely operating system used by many. I think it also has a text editor.
Really wondering to myself if I should take this seriously or not, but I use doom with evil-mode fwiw. Both are holy saints.
Please don't dedicate yourself to only Dvorak, or you'll forget how to use qwerty and alienate yourself to only your keyboards. Try alternating between both, I did the same for Colemak and now I can type both with similar speeds
Why? I can touch type COLEMAK and type like I did on QWERTY years ago whenever I need, which is not often.
Lol yeah, I did then same thing but went a little overboard. I type Colemak on my split ortho tented keyboard exclusively. I also learned to properly touch type on colemak. I've trained my muscle memory to the point I cannot type colemak on anything other than my split and If I try and touch type properly on a qwerty keyboard I end up defaulting back to colemak. To me they're almost entirely different skillsets!
So you use default vim bindings with dvorak? I use neovim and type in qgmlwy but I remapped the bindings in my config.
I haven't tried it with vim in full yet, but I was surprised by how comfortable the hjkl positions are in dvorak. i like tiling window managers with win+vi keys for navigation and such, so it would be important. Dvorak L is kind of annoying at P, and I'm trying to make myself hit it with the pinky usually, but it actually feels alright for keying around in navigation.
I mostly don't want to have to end up rebinding everything, possibly for every program I use indefinitely, if I stick with the layout. So I'm just learning the new positions to start, and will probably always need a way to switch to qwerty for games.
Can you expand on your setup?
As far as the keyboard, I got a Nuphy Air60 V2 as my first. Maybe not super top, but it's comfy and I'm loving it. Emacs is a rabbithole, unless you wanna get into that too lol
Oh, and the switches are Nuphy's special moss LPs. I think they're supposed to be like slightly heavier browns?
Did you reprogram reach key until you had dvorak layout, or is there a preset or something? I'm also not sure what youre doing with emacs or really what it even is 😬
Also thought I'd mention keyd (if you use linux). It's a system-wide remapper. I considered whether to use software or the firmware, just because keyd has such a neat spec with layers, oneshots, and key overloads. It's great.
I used Via because there's a qmk version of the firmware, and yeah, I just set one of the layers to the layout. The Nuphy has a switch for Win/Mac mode that toggles between layer 1 (with 2 and 3 for modifiers) and 4 (with 5 and 6 for modifiers), so I can switch easily between qwerty. I actually did that to finish this cause I'm still slow as hell lol.
Emacs is "just" a text editor that's an operating system in disguise, waaaay too configurable and macro'd out than any software should be. Or like all software should be, maybe.