Some people are asking for advice on switching to Dvorak.
Here is my life story:<p>I grew up typing Qwerty using only four fingers for typing letters, and my right-hand thumb for pressing the space bar. I could type pretty fast, which was especially useful for having heated discussions on irc. My typing speed also got me a job offer during the first dot com bubble.<p>At around 20, I switched to Dvorak, because I learned about the silly history of the Qwerty layout, and how Dvorak would result in more typing in less time. Over a period of two weeks, I worked my way up from the Beavis and Butthead lessons (uuuu hhhh ...) up to using all ten fingers (apart from the thumb on my left-hand, which isn't doing much apart from the occasional Alt or Super here and there.)<p>In this training period I suffered from terrible headaches. In retrospect, I think the main pathways in my brain connected my thoughts directly to the Qwerty layout, and this needed a complete rewiring. Also, during this period I could not respond quickly to people on irc who were obviously wrong about something. The frustration was enormous.<p>Eventually, my typing speed on TypeRacer plateaued somewhere at around 100 wpm. That's a lot less than Sean Wrona, but still requires you to perform a test to check if you didn't cheat.<p>Switching from Qwerty to Dvorak was really hard, especially in the beginning. It took about five years before I could work on somebody else's machine. I'm also hardwired to Emacs key bindings, so that's a limiting factor as well. Also, I can't seem to type Dvorak with only one finger, when I'm eating a snack for instance. This is still possible with Qwerty! And I can recite the entire Qwerty layout in a pub at night, but I require a keyboard to say aoeui.<p>In my early days of Dvorak, I wrote some utilities that calculated the travel distance that my fingers would make if I were to retype the entire bible. Depending on how you looked at it, Dvorak required about 5 to 30% less finger movement. Unfortunately, when you put in the Linux source tree, with numbers, curly braces, and other symbols, the advantage isn't so big.<p>What I do notice though, after ~20 years of Dvorak, is that it feels much more fluent than what I observe at my Qwerty typing coworkers. I guess what _really_ helped for lowering the risk of wrist problems, though, is to remap Caps Lock to an additional Control, and using C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f for keyboard navigation and C-h for backspace. Switching from keyboard to mouse and back really annoys me.