>>>>> "Ron" == Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
Ron> Silly question: do you use vi? It seems like the "hjkl" key
Ron> pattern is tied to qwerty.
I do sometimes. I actually feel that it is no more difficult than to learn
Dvorak in the first place. After all, it is just a remap in the brain. It
definitely won't worth it to remap the vi keys through the configuration,
since there are some keys (like "d" in the original "h" position) which are
chosen to its meaning (e.g., "delete") rather than position. Doing so will
make you very uncomfortable if you somehow has to type on somebody else's
keyboard which is of course qwerty.
By the way, I don't feel Control-X Control-S in Emacs particularly
troublesome either: originally it is Control-B, which I used to press with
left little finger together with the left index finger anyway.
Ah... programming language. Somebody suggested that writing programs is
much more difficult in Dvorak than in Qwerty. I don't agree. You press [,
] and \ a little bit harder, but on the other hand you press -, + and ' a
little bit easier (and in my opinion these keys are more frequently used and
deserve a better place in the keyboard). So it is, again, just a remap. Of
course, you have to give yourselves one week to get used to it, but that's
all it requires. Programs traditionally have a more flat distribution of
keys than text, so Dvorak does not earn over Qwerty as much when typing
text. But it definitely is not worse.
For me, the only real difficulty is when it comes to playing games with
hard-coded keyboard short-cuts but the primary interface is the mouse. In
such situations, nobody touch-type, and you're actually relying on seeing
the letters on the keys. If you can rearrange the key on your keyboard so
that it does reflect what you type, consider yourselves lucky (most
keyboards have a different orientation for keys on upper rows and lower
rows. It would give you a strange keyboard with randomly oriented keys if
you rearrange the keys). Programs which hard-code "qwas" to "1234", or
"qwert" to "12345", will also cause you a lot of trouble.
Regards,
Isaac.