I've recently moved from qwerty to dvorak for similar reasons. Even though it's not yet been 2 months of dvorak training, I score around the 60wpm in typeracer.<p>One of the reasons I decided to try it was the same 8hrs a day excuse. I now have a hard time imagining going back to qwerty like someone that touchtypes has with going back to look at the keyboard.<p>Ps. I never understood why vi navigation is done with hjkl instead of jkl; - if you touchtype the classical way, it means you navigate with 3 fingers instead of 4.<p>Edit: correcting typos. I'm typing from my iPhone :)
I first did typing at school in an IT class (c. 1990) where most felt it was useless. I didn't realise how important it was, I think the teacher did, she was very prescient.<p>At Uni in 1994 I realised how important it was going to be and taught myself to touch-type. I think it was a little easier starting as I learnt piano from when I was 11 years old.<p>I don't type a lot day-to-day. My <a href="http://play.typeracer.com/" rel="nofollow">http://play.typeracer.com/</a> unpractised score was 50wpm at 96.2% accuracy (oh yeah and that site is good example of unregistered users mentioned a couple of days ago <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910829" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910829</a>). Though I found it a little hard as normally I'll type a few paras and then use spell-check whilst I proof read so the modus was a little forced.<p>---<p><i>there are plenty of touch typing resources only a bing away</i><p>First time I've heard MS Bing referred to like that!