Learning to Touch Type Again

Absolutely! This was a huge factor in my decision to switch. I learned to type quickly on QWERTY mostly from FPS shooters - which meant that I would start typing while moving my hand from my mouse to my keyboard, which meant that I would type much more with my left hand than my right. I probably used my left hand for 60 to 70% of the keyboard, rather than 50/50 for each hand. I really wanted to learn to type properly, but breaking old habits on such a familiar layout was hard.

There was a time when this test was a primary factor in certain job interviews.

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Calculation of test results

17. Gross Strokes. Strokes are counted correctly by considering the entire copy as having been typed in one continuous line. Each character or space in such a line counts as one stroke.

18. Gross Words. The total gross words are the total gross strokes typed, divided by 5. Do not add strokes in repeated matter or subtract strokes in omitted matter. NOTE: The count given with most test copy is the cumulative gross word count (strokes/5).

19. Penalty. For each error charged under these rules, 10 words must be deducted from the gross words.

20. Net Words. After deducting the penalty from the gross words, the remainder represents the total net words. The typist’s net rate (words a minute— wam ) is computed by dividing his total net words by the number of minutes he typed. Fractions of .500 or less are discarded; fractions over .500 are credited to the next whole number.

  EXAMPLE: A typist writes 5,808 gross strokes with 8 errors in 15 minutes —
  5,808/5=1,161.6 or 1,162 gross words 
  8(errors)X10=80 (penalty)
  1,162 - 80=1,082 net words
  1,082/15 (minutes) =72.1 net words a minute

I grew up typing Qwerty using only four fingers for typing letters, and my right-hand thumb for pressing the space bar. I could type pretty fast, which was especially useful for having heated discussions on irc. My typing speed also got me a job offer during the first dot com bubble.

At around 20, I switched to Dvorak, because I learned about the silly history of the Qwerty layout, and how Dvorak would result in more typing in less time. Over a period of two weeks, I worked my way up from the Beavis and Butthead lessons (uuuu hhhh ...) up to using all ten fingers (apart from the thumb on my left-hand, which isn't doing much apart from the occasional Alt or Super here and there.)

In this training period I suffered from terrible headaches. In retrospect, I think the main pathways in my brain connected my thoughts directly to the Qwerty layout, and this needed a complete rewiring. Also, during this period I could not respond quickly to people on irc who were obviously wrong about something. The frustration was enormous.

Eventually, my typing speed on TypeRacer plateaued somewhere at around 100 wpm. That's a lot less than Sean Wrona, but still requires you to perform a test to check if you didn't cheat.

Switching from Qwerty to Dvorak was really hard, especially in the beginning. It took about five years before I could work on somebody else's machine. I'm also hardwired to Emacs key bindings, so that's a limiting factor as well. Also, I can't seem to type Dvorak with only one finger, when I'm eating a snack for instance. This is still possible with Qwerty! And I can recite the entire Qwerty layout in a pub at night, but I require a keyboard to say aoeui.

In my early days of Dvorak, I wrote some utilities that calculated the travel distance that my fingers would make if I were to retype the entire bible. Depending on how you looked at it, Dvorak required about 5 to 30% less finger movement. Unfortunately, when you put in the Linux source tree, with numbers, curly braces, and other symbols, the advantage isn't so big.

What I do notice though, after ~20 years of Dvorak, is that it feels much more fluent than what I observe at my Qwerty typing coworkers. I guess what _really_ helped for lowering the risk of wrist problems, though, is to remap Caps Lock to an additional Control, and using C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f for keyboard navigation and C-h for backspace. Switching from keyboard to mouse and back really annoys me.

I don't get any wrist pain at all when sitting at my desk and typing on my keyboard, but if I try to type on a laptop while lying down for more than about half an hour, my wrists start hurting. Part of me wants to carry on, but I know it's just going to make the wrists hurt more, so I just stop if they start hurting, and the problem doesn't seem to be getting any worse.