I'm always looking for ways to be more productive, and I've been reading a lot about typing using a Dvorak keyboard.
It looks like this would be much more productive for writing normal prose, but what about for programming?
I'm skeptical that it would be effective, since the use of semicolons, colons, brackets, and ampersands are much more common in programming than they are in every day typing.
Has anyone had any experience with this?
A couple years back when I was starting to feel some pain in my wrists, I decided to learn how to type on a Dvorak layout. (Side note: I found it extremely simple to learn the layout using a qwerty keyboard while looking at an image of a Dvorak keyboard at the bottom of my screen)
The only programming difference primarily was that the square brackets and curly braces swapped positions with the minus and plus buttons above them. Depending on what language you're using and how heavily you're using those keys, that can be annoying; but then again, maybe your IDE will automatically insert those where appropriate. Or, you could use a program like AutoHotkey to map another key combination to those symbols.
Here's the thing with typing in Dvorak: (IMHO) you need to go all Dvorak or all qwerty, particularly if you heavily rely on keyboard shortcuts throughout all of your computing sessions.
My situation is that I use Vim very frequently both at work and at home. At my last job, computers were shared between multiple idiots people, and I could not reasonably expect other users to know how to switch out of Dvorak. I had to "re-learn" the muscle memory for Vim commands.
It's extremely easy for me to switch back and forth on the fly between qwerty and Dvorak for simple text, but (and maybe it's just me) all my known keyboard shortcuts are muscle memory. So a :w in Vim on qwerty ends up as a S,, and a I# to comment a line ends up as C#, instead of replacing the whole line with just a pound symbol. And you can just forget about hjkl to navigate in Vim - instead of pressing keys on the home row, now you have to press the equivalent of jcvp. Oh, you want to copy-cut-paste with one hand? xcv has now moved to bi. instead, so have fun
Didn't see this mentioned, so I thought I'd add this: I'm using the Dvorak layout on a QWERTY keyboard, with QWERTY command key layout. Means every time I press the command button (I'm on a Mac), the QWERTY layout applies. So I'm typing completely "blindfolded" with the Dvorak layout, but I didn't have to re-learn the keyboard shortcuts. Has worked great so far for the last 4 years and I wouldn't change back to QWERTY.
The only downside of this is when using VIM, but nowadays I mostly use vim only for simple things, e.g. modifying config files over SSH.
Being used to dvorak can be a bit of a problem if you're working in a team or something like that where you type on other peoples computers.
I use a Dvorak-es layout -optimized for the frequency of letters in the Spanish language- both for programming and typing, and the special keys (){}[]<>/* etc. are the same in this and Qwerty.
If you're doing the switch to Dvorak, perhaps it would pay to design your own "Programmer's Dvorak" layout with the standard QWERTY positions for these keys. At least on Windows you could use the MS Keyboard Layout creator to do this.