Posted above: Been using Dvorak for 16 years now, but I didn't necessarily "switch" as I had been using a memorized hunt-and-peck style with QWERTY and needed to force myself out of that habit by removing my ability to fallback to that practice (so I had never properly learned to touch type before starting with Dvorak).
I'll sing its praises until the day that I die - but it does have disadvantages in that most applications design their keyboard shortcuts and other inputs around QWERTY users. On macOS I can use the Dvorak-QWERTY Command layout to deal with this in particularly annoying cases, but there's nothing comparable I've found on Windows or Linux and that doesn't help with things like Vi.
Not to mention I frequently find myself having to change layouts back in forth in games. A lot of games published even today have a nasty habit of using the character code instead of the keycode for keybindings, and I've gotten tired of redoing bindings in everything just to avoid pressing Windows+Space to change my layout. Additionally, since my keyboards still have a QWERTY layout of keycaps it makes it challenging when I get prompted to hit "Y" (which doesn't get used for important things usually as it's a stretch for the index finger from the ASDF position) and hit F by mistake since I look for the "Y" keycap on my keyboard - ditto when something prompts me to hit "F" and I hit "U" instead (basically the mappings between Q/' E/. F/U C/J V/K are easy enough as they're used often and are within natural reach, but once it goes outside these I start looking at keycaps and screw up).
Anyway, I'll always highly encourage people to give alternate layouts a try and I'm never going to stop - but I'd say there's nothing wrong with using QWERTY either.
Yup! I learned Dvorak probably in 1999 or early 2000s (and I have a coworker who also still uses Dvorak).
The kind of people (like me) who got into Dvorak at that time would today probably learn something like Colemak DH, although there are many alternatives available nowadays and a big (discord) scene of folks optimizing and designing both their keyboards and the layouts they use on them.
I expect Dvorak will die with people like me, because anyone willing to switch away from Qwerty is probably better served by other alternatives.
I disagree with your assessment that Dvorak has been obsoleted by other layouts. I used Dvorak 1998-2001, and again since 2018. Before I re-learned it in 2018 I did a bunch of research on Colemak, Workman, and the rich set of other optimized layouts people have created this century. There are compromises in every layout, and I came to the conclusion that Dvorak was within spitting distance of minimally pessimal, other named layouts less so.
The caveat to my perspective is that I don't care where hotkeys are. I minimize mouse use, and with both hands on the keyboard it just doesn't matter very much. I've used emacs and vim with both layouts. My faded recollection with respect to emacs is that it was equivocal, and Dvorak is actually a bit better for vim.
Yeah, I used it for probably 6 years! Despite becoming very fluent I eventually came to the conclusion that the hassle of was not worth it.
This was in the early 2000s and I had to use a lot of Windows and Remote Desktop, so there were at least several incidents a week in which the keyboard would start making the wrong letters and I had to figure out why. It doesn't help at all that Windows' default layout-switcher switches using Ctrl+Shift so any key combo that includes that pair (including select-by-word!) will swap your keyboard layout too.
Sometimes I'd remote into a machine and after dozens of failed password attempts realize I was being treated to Double Dvorak, a much less well known layout in which the Qwerty -> Dvorak mapping is applied twice, due to the map being loaded both locally and remotely. This is all w/o third party software, literally nothing more than Windows just not coordinating with ... itself.
And finally, despite claims that Qwerty and Dvorak could be maintained at the same time, that wasn't true for me. The faster I got at Dvorak, the more speed and accuracy I lost on every other keyboard in the world I had to type on.
So now I'm typing this on Qwerty. It ain't as comfortable, but the number of hours I spend each week trying to get the computer to show which letter I'm pressing is now zero.
I tried learning Dvorak about 9 years ago, and I got good enough for IMing and emails and whatnot, but I found it extremely difficult to context-switch between coding-editor keystrokes and conversational keystrokes. I know it has its fans, but I could never really get the hang of Vim with Dvorak, and I also didn't type any my emails any faster than I was with QWERTY, so I abandoned it and haven't tried Dvorak since.
I've been using it for 15 years or so. One of the tricks I use for getting around the problem other commenters here have is that I have bound my keycodes to be qwerty ones and (virtually) moved my key positions. This means if you set the OS to qwerty and type Dvorak the correct letters will be input.
When working in offices I'd have my company supplied keyboard still plugged in as a guest keyboard so others could work with me seamlessly.
This also came about as windows used to have the most ridiculous behaviour of setting the layout per window, so if you changed it when someone else came over you'd end up in typing hell. They thankfully fixed this to be a global setting a few years back.
I use Colemak, but I don't really buy into any of the claims of improved comfort or speed. It took me somewhere between 1-2 years to get to about the same typing speed as QWERTY (somewhere between 120-150 WPM depending on the test), and I have completely lost my ability to type QWERTY without looking at the keyboard. As others have said it is a big hassle when working on other machines or through things like remote desktop.
That being said, I don't regret anything and Colemak is way more comfortable, for me. I never typed "properly" in QWERTY, I would use every finger on my left hand, but only two on my right hand. I started to notice some pain in my right hand and so I tried to retrain myself to type properly, but it never lasted more than a day because I was typing half the speed with proper technique. The only way I could force myself to use a proper typing technique was to just completely switch the layout.
I've used Colemak primarily for the past 5 or so years. However, the benefit is primarily in typing comfort and hand strain, not quite as much in speed, although it is probably marginally faster at its limits. I'm still fluent in QWERTY (I'm typing this message with qwerty to make sure it still works :)), so I can switch if needed, or if I'm using an unfamiliar computer (or a phone, etc). Moving to Colemak completely solved the frequent wrist and hand pain I got while typing using QWERTY. Others have had the same experience.
> I switched to using copy and paste with the mouse with it since Cmd+c and Cmd+v are so hard to reach.
I don't use it myself - but on macOS there is a separate layout called "Dvorak - QWERTY Command" that shifts the layout to QWERTY when the command key is held to alleviate this issue.
