After several years with Dvorak I’m switching back to QWERTY. Actually I already have, I’m typing this text using the QWERTY keyboard layout. There are a couple of reasons why I have decided to give up on Dvorak after all these years.
- We do a lot of screen sharing at work and it just doesn’t work very well when the person currently in control of the keyboard uses a different layout than the one sharing the screen. Normal letters usually works fine but parenthesis, semicolon, brackets, etc, don’t. Since I’m the only one not using QWERTY, I always end up struggling with this.
- I write quite a lot of text in Swedish, where many words includes the letters ’å’, ’ä’, and ’ö’. Since these are not available on the standard Dvorak layout and the Swedish version of Dvorak is not available by default on Windows I have been forced to have both Dvorak and Swedish QWERTY on my work PC and switch between them every time I need to type ’å’, ’ä’, or ’ö’.
- The benefits just aren’t noticeable. I can’t say that I type faster using Dvorak than I used to do with QWERTY. Right now I do, but that’s because I have almost completely forgotten how to type using QWERTY so I need to re-train my muscle memory.
- All devices I don’t own will be set to QWERTY. From time to time I need to type something on a computer that I don’t own, for example in the library or when signing in as a visitor somewhere. These devices will not be set to Dvorak and there is a big chance it won’t be possible to switch layout either. Being used to QWERTY just makes this a lot easier.
I summary, sometimes it’s just easier to do like everybody else.