Hi!

"Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> writes:

> On Wed, 05 Oct 2005 18:31:19 -0400, suzmccarth <suzmccarth@...>
> wrote:
>
> > My two closest colleagues, responsable for producing more and longer
> > documents than I do, both use hunt and peck.
>
> I won't belabor the point, but the persistence of the qwerty/qwertz/azerty
> letter layout is unfortunate, and seems like a good topic for a thesis on
> sociology.
>
> Several years ago, I had been reading Dvorak Dvelopments (sic) as well as
> other related docs., and decided to switch. After being the equivalent of
> tongue-tied for two or three weeks, (and sending really-concise e-mail
> messages!) I developed a strong sense that Dvorak layout "felt right". At
> that time, I had installed the quite-nice (really!) Microsoft remapping
> utility for DOS.
>
> Along the way, I have encountered passionate zealots of almost religious
> faith who defend the commonplace lettter layouts. I don't want to enliven
> yet another controversy; there has been lots of discussion, and this
> layout "floats my boat".
>...

Indeed. No intention for controversy either, just a report: I
switched to Dvorak around a year ago (or maybe two) due to
overexposure and beginning pain. I also got a new keyboard (Kinesis
Ergo Elan) at the same time and it was a very curing time when I was
'finger-tied', since it was simply impossible to get overexposure,
because my typing was so slow. Anyway, as I'm fluent with both
layouts now (Quertz and Dvorak), I would not say that any one is
better. Using the ergonomic keyboard is the best thing I did, that's
for sure. But Dvorak lets me mix up the vowels a lot, probably since
they are arraged in a row. Those are annoying mistakes in emails
since existing words often come out. :-/ OTOH, it's not bad at all, I
like it and I'm still using it. I just don't feel it's better per se.
I arraged the special characters for programming and using LaTeX in a
way perfect for my needs -- a thing I would never have done with the
Quertz keyboard because it was imprinted in my brain and fixed. So
starting with no abilities at all enabled personal optimisations. :-)

Keyboard layout is probably a matter of personal taste.

**Henrik