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alpaca128 a day ago

The part about hand movement confuses me. On qwerty you can reach all letters without moving the hands. On both qwerty and dvorak you still need to move or stretch the hands to reach backspace, arrow keys, escape etc. So how does dvorak reduce hand movement?

> the things to write come in bursts

In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me.

> transcribing what someone is saying, needs high speed

That's a very specific use-case and I wouldn't type fast enough for that no matter what layout. At that point I'd probably learn stenography instead.

knorker a day ago | parent [-]

The physical keys are the same ones no matter if it's qwerty or dvorak, of course, so yes you can reach the keys without shifting your wrists over.

But some movement is there, and once I reached even 10 wpm or something, it was immediately noticeable that this is more comfortable because so much of what I now type is on the home row. Fingers need to stretch less, wrists wiggle less.

> In short bursts I can reach higher speeds than what I can maintain over a period of time. It's fast enough for me.

I don't do Dvorak for the speed. I did it for the comfort and getting rid of RSI. But I'm also faster.

To me it's a bit of a separate question of "does speed matter?". I'd say yes, because sometimes you're taking notes while someone is talking, and the less time you have to type while listening, and the less you are behind on noting down what was said, the easier it is to not lose the thread.

> [transcribing what someone is saying is] a very specific use-case

Some version of this happens every single meeting I'm in.

You don't necessarily need word for word, or maybe you want word for word, but you don't need every sentence, but note taking during a meeting will be much worse if you can't type fast.