After my second full day of Dvorak, I can tell that my fingers are doing much less traveling around the keyboard. It almost makes the keys feel small and squished together while typing because my fingers leave their respective positions so infrequently. I have managed to commit a few commonly used home-row words to muscle memory already — the & has.
Taking the time to learn Dvorak has come with an interesting observation: I do not know which key represents what letter – I only know that moving my fingers in a certain way yields a positive (or negative) result.
If you sat me down and told me to draw a qwerty keyboard, I would have came to the same conclusion, but still it’s quite an epiphany – I use a keyboard for 10 hours a day, but can’t draw one without pretending to type on one.
It’s a reminder that typing was once something I didn’t do.
I’ve gotten a dvorak rhythm down, and while not a very fast one (about 15 wpm) I think focusing on accuracy now will help improve my speed later. I’m able to reliably touch type without looking at the keyboard, and can tell immediately when I’ve hit an incorrect key. I’m picking up some new typing habits though, which seem to be mostly positive:
- Left thumbing the spacebar
- Using the right shift key appropriately
- Thinking before I type – This sounds weird, but I pick my words more carefully now that they take longer to type
- Brevity – I can tell I’m using fewer crutch words, staying more focused on what I’m typing, and typing with the intent of maximizing the return of my efforts.