Self-improvement, dvorak-style

Saturday, August 12th, 2006

I haven’t learned anything new about typing since high-school, so I decided it was about time I switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout. I was in a coast-to-coast flight when I was bored enough that practicing typing in a new layout seemed like a good idea. Since then, I’ve put about 4 hours of practice time into it. The typing tutor I’m using (ktouch) has taught me the home row so far. I’m somewhat worried about the transition. What if I forget how to do qwerty? Will I have to have a few months of hunt-and-peck, index finger typing during the transition?

I have to say that already it feels a lot more comfortable.

As I type this (in qwerty fashion), I have my dvorak layout taped to my monitor. I have my keyboard set to switch between the two layouts by pressing both ctrl keys at the same time. And I’m alerted to the fact that I’m in dvorak mode by the scroll lock LED, which is otherwise useless to me. Someday, I’ll find a use for the numlock LED…

Rday 10:37, 7 January 2008 (PST)

It appears that in January 2007, I was doing about 11 wpm in Dvorak. I've had big stretches of time without practicing, but now that I've found an easier way to practice, (http://www.keybr.com/) I hope to pick it up again. I'm currently doing about 25 wpm. But my knowledge of punctuation is woefully inadequate.

Now if I want to spend a few minutes practicing, I just click the widget in my tool bar that toggles my keyboard layout and go the www.keybr.com website. That's good because the linux app that I was using (ktouch) had some package conflicts and had to be removed in the upgrade to Redhat ELW5.1.

Rday 15:45, 26 February 2008 (PST)

As of now, I'm averaging 28 wpm in Dvorak. I guess I just have to practice a lot more if I want to boost my speed. Maybe I need to find a long document to transcribe for practice.

But I hit a top speed of 37 wpm, which is very close to my goal of 40 wpm.