I thought about trying Dvorak over 30 years ago but quickly discovered it is a wasted effort since everywhere I go there are QWERTY keyboards. What am I suppose to do, carry a Dvorak keyboard around with me (with the right adapters as well)?
For quick things (<5 min) I can still type decently on QWERTY.
For longer I just set the OS to Colemak and then back again when I’m done. Win/Mac has Colemak and Dvorak built in. I hope most linux distros do as well.
I’m still confused. The letters being in the wrong location doesn’t affect me in the slightest. My laptop is printed with QWERTY keys, and I type on it with DVORAK. What’s the issue?
And if I need to use someone else’s computer I just type in QWERTY. It’s not like I forgot how.
If you wanted to do this, you could use a programmable keyboard like QMK. Physically toggle the switch and the keyboard would send to the QWERTY physical layout equivalent to the one you typed. This would enable fast switching and no faffing about with software configuration.
>"What am I suppose to do, carry a Dvorak keyboard around with me (with the right adapters as well)?"
point of the original post. Which is genuinely the only real answer if you have to interact with machines you can't customize to your liking, and is a bad answer.
Laptops often force you to, given there's no real standard among them. Much as I love mine, the placement of FN and other special keys in a reduced area trips up my touch typing when I switch among them, especially when coding (when I use ctrl sequences more).
I’ve typed Dvorak about 15 years. I just switch the keyboard layout on the other person’s computer if I’m going to do any significant typing and can’t use my laptop. (A rare need anymore.)
When you were considering learning in the 90s, this would’ve been harder to do, but that changed. It’s too bad you didn’t reconsider learning every decade or so!
The biggest problem can be booting to single user/safe mode or entering disk encryption passphrase before the full OS is loaded. Or your keymap doesn't translate to running VMs inside your OS. I type in Dvorak, I've been meaning to try the workman layout. The solution is to have a keyboard you can program. Then the above minor inconveniences don't matter.
This is what I've done on every PC I've used professionally since 2002. Tweak OS setting, start typing.
Mixing keyboard layouts works well on Windows 10+ or macOS. Remote Desktop problems were a thing with WIndows XP, but I can't remember having problems more recently.
