I'm learning Dvorak, and I need practice. Give me something to chat about.

Um, what is Dvorak?

Dvorak's a kind of keyboarding arrangement that's supposedly easier to use/faster than Qwerty.

...Most people use Qwerty. You can tell you've got a Qwerty because 'Qwerty' itself is the first six letters on the top row of letter keys.

Klingon speak for Squirrels?

Edit: erm ignore what I said.

Mine is still a qwerty board. Keeps me from looking at the keys all the time.

Ever go squirrel fishing?

Words with q are evil. No squirrels. L is also a pain.

Hrm, I never learned to type using any standard method. I type 120 wpm and I'm self taught.

Discuss the book you may (or may have not read) Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Despite the lack of quanitity at a mere 200 pages, is i's quality is fairly decent?

I learned how to type out of necessity on achaea I'm a good bit slower though... big fingers

It's not a method. It's a keyboard layout. I can type about 80-100wpm on a qwerty board, and I barely ever use my pinkies like you're supposed to. It's mainly memorizing the keyboard with your mind, then doing the same thing with your fingers so you can skip the thinking about it part.

I've memorized the dvorak layout, but my fingers keep trying to type in qwerty, which kicks my speed down to about 15wpm if I'm lucky and can think through it without just freezing up.

It's going to be tough to learn dvorak without sacrificing qwerty.

And I just typed that all on qwerty, because I don't have 15 minutes to waste on one post. I'll practice later, now is WoW time.

Also, for further information: Dvorak on Wikipedia

Type out my next essay for me (and write it)?

And here I was, thinking we were talking about Antonin Dvoark.

It is faster. The original QWERTY layout was designed to stop typists from typing too fast on the old typewriters because otherwise they would bugger them up.

Since I live in an odd country, I'm using azerty instead of qwerty. A and Q, Z and W are swapped, and M is sitting next to L instead of next to N. I've always kinda wondered if there is a relation between azerty and qwerty. I've had a teacher once who typed with a dvorak layout and I must say he did indeed write quite a bit faster than most of the students (although I'm not sure if that's because he was an experienced programmer and thus spent a lot of time typing). He also claimed it put less strain on your hand muscles, not sure if that's true though.

Anyway, I think just copying a text could help out with practicing. Since your reading you can't take the time to look at your fingers. Which isn't bad though if you do it at first because it will help with memorising the layout.

Edit: Anwered my own question here

You're not the only one.

For flavour, Sylphas, you could always type out the English translation of Song to the Moon, which is as the bottom of this page. Good luck.

I can't look at my hands even if I wanted to, since the physical keys are still labeled with qwerty.

And yeah, azerty is just qwerty for other languages. French uses it, I think, probably others.

Dvorak is less strain on your hand. It's debatable whether it's enough difference to really reduce CTS or anything, but it's really different than dancing all over the keyboard like with qwerty. Your hands don't move nearly as much.

I got tendenitis in my wrists and whenever I used qwerty to type my wrists would end up hurting after a bit. After I found dvorak and changed I never had a problem with my wrists.

Good to hear! Have you had any troubles with it? Have you forgotten qwerty? I've been toggling it over to Dvorak at work, I just have to remember to flip it back if I walk away from my spot at the desk, in case someone uses that computer and freaks out.

I can still use qwerty just not as fast as I used to not that I could go fast for long without it hurting. And changing it might freak people out but its a good way to keep qwerty users from messing with your computer.

It did take a while to start out with dvorak but after months I was back up to roughly the speed as qwerty. I'm probably up to the same speed as qwerty right now since I've been using it for a while and could probably go faster if I didn't have the tendenditis, I need to take breaks regularly because of it. I think I'm gonna end up getting blank keycaps for my keyboard so I can improve my accuracy next. Its just a little off especially when I'm tired and trying to type. I slip into qwerty sometimes.