So is there anyone here who uses the dvorak keyboard layout? I have been using it for about 6 mounths now and the pros way outweigh the cons.

I've always been tempted to, but I do a lot of work on the school computers, so I'd be switching back and forth a lot. Have you had to deal with that, and has it been a problem at all for you?

I've had the same concerns as well about Dvorak. Could you post some pros/cons you have personally experienced since the big change? I'm more curious to hear about it from someone that isn't a so-called "internet talking head".

I started 2 years ago when I was on vacation on summer, so I did not have to do the big switch when I had a lot of work to do. It took me about 2 months to start to be any good, and a bit longer to overtake my qwerty speed.
I always have a laptop on me, so school computers are not really an issue. But I have done a lot of work on the linux computers at my school and I use qwerty there.

The pros:
- my wrists don't hurt anymore.
- I can type without looking
- I can type faster than I could in qwerty (about 110WPM)
Cons:
- somewhat of a PITA on other computers, but after I became pretty good at dvorak I slowly relearned qwerty, and now I can type qwerty at about 60WPM.
- You have to have an easy way to switch your computer if you want other people to use it. Although thats not really a problem on my iBook or my linux laptop.

Overall I though there would be more inconvenience to the switch. It has been really smooth and the combination of dvorak and my ergonomic keyboard my wrists are better. And since I am 17 saving my wrists is a good thing

I've been typing in Dvorak since the summer of 2006, and it took me about 2-3 months to get to the point where I didn't have to look at the keys, and then a couple more months to surpass my qwerty speed. For the first 6 months, I didn't do any typing on qwerty, so that I was forced to learn, but then past that point I started using other computers with qwerty. I found that I had not lost any speed in my qwerty ability, or at least not enough to be noticeable. Sometimes when I switch, I accidentally use the opposite keyboard layout before I realize my mistake, but it's not annoying. It's kind of like a mental switch, like switching between languages.

I haven't thought of it that way, but it is true. When I lived in Norway I could go from Norwegian no English with no problem. Thats a good way to think of the KB layout. What is annoying for me is that I have a custom dvorak layout on my linux box, with the 0 key where it should be, before the 1, and a bunch of other stuff. But then when I am on a regular dvorak layout on my iBook I mess things up. On that note, how can you customize the key layout in leopard? I have useful alt keys such as æø?þð for Norwegian and Icelandic.

Because I did not know what the dvorak layout looked like or principle behind it, I looked it up on wikipedia. Here is a small section of the article if anyone is interested:

Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles:

* Letters should be typed by alternating between hands.
* For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
* The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
* The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
* Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers.
* Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.[4]