Is Dvorak typing appropriate for programming? [closed]

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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?

Return answered 3/8, 2009 at 12:37 Comment(10)

typing is still typing. anything that makes you faster is a godsend. however, unfamiliarity with dvorak makes any specialized answer to your question by me uneducated. – Balladmonger 3/8, 2009 at 12:42

I like to pair program...I hope that the OS has a hotkey that'll toggle between QWERTY and Dvorak. – Basketball 3/8, 2009 at 12:50

The time spent learning Dvorak to an efficient level would probably be better spent on productivity...Corollary: The time spent on SO... – Amy 3/8, 2009 at 12:56

@T Reddy: Windows will automatically(?) set up an alt-shift-number(?) key combo to switch between keyboard layouts. @Evan: It took me about 2-3 weeks of typing at my dorm to learn Dvorak at a speed comparable to qwerty. – Booze 3/8, 2009 at 17:20

@Amy I disagree. If I learn Dvorak at home, its not like I could use that time to be more productive. – Return 3/8, 2009 at 17:30

There is a good autohotkey script for switching into dvorak layout but keeping old hotkeys: autohotkey.com/forum/topic27474.html (Windows) – Adalia 22/9, 2010 at 23:34

Closed as not a constructive question? But ergonomics is very important! Where are we supposed to ask these types of questions? – Monacid 6/11, 2011 at 12:35

@samoz: it surprises me that someone would not deem his private time (i.e. at home) productive. I'm usually as productive at home as at work, mostly just doing other stuff (but many times involving keyboards, be it with or without ivory keys) – Primrose 9/11, 2011 at 8:8

Currently I am quite satisfied with the CPM I reach with QWERTY. The only reason for me that I am considering Dvorak is to reduce strain (RSI) and have more comfort. But before switching from QWERTY to Dvorak, I strongly advise an ergonomic keyboard, if you haven't got one already. – Tisbe 21/12, 2016 at 8:5

@TimReddy you can switch between layouts easity. On Windows you can switch between layouts with Ctrl+Shift by default, and languages with Alt+Shift – Rankle 27/7, 2017 at 2:50

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There are Dvorak layouts specifically for programming: http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/

Expander answered 3/8, 2009 at 12:49 Comment(12)

This is kind of cool. I like it. – Hillside 3/8, 2009 at 13:12

Dvorak already has the huge con that the rest of the world uses qwerty, now if we start using modifications of dvorak too.. It's even worse! :) – Pulmonary 18/12, 2009 at 20:49

@AndreasBonini: by the same token, you could say that, since users of the dvorak keyboard layout have proven themselves to be flexible enough to adopt another layout, they can probably just as easily manage adapting to a personally tuned one - and to great effect? (just playing devil's advocate here) – Primrose 9/11, 2011 at 8:10

@AndreasBonini , but QWERTY keyboards already have different punctuation keys in different countries. They are in different locations, they are different (US keyboard has no ´¨ç etc), and sometimes they even work differently! (In US keyboard there are no dead keys AFAIK, so one gets ~n instead of ñ, ^o instead of ô...) – Format 11/11, 2011 at 15:32

I've been using Programmer Dvorak for 2 years, and I'm really happy with it. Changing muscle memory for shortcuts is hard, but not that hard. I have even created a typing tutorial for Programmer Dvorak: programmer-dvorak.appspot.com – Keary 17/8, 2013 at 3:56

Is there any proof that this is actually more efficient when tested on lines of code (ie C,C#, javascript, perl, etc..) – Tenebrae 14/7, 2015 at 19:32

I've been using it for quite a while for now, maybe a year or so and ([{}]) are very comfortable, but I still can't get used to the numbers if I don't have stickers on the keyboard. Another con is that you have to install this modified layout on any system you use. – Effusion 13/10, 2015 at 21:14

The kaufmann.co layout is programmer dvorak from linux, with the author's own modifications I cannot stand. You can make your own layout matching linux's using a windows utility. – Leung 16/1, 2016 at 2:55

@AndrewSmart it seems to me to be the other way around: programmer dvorak from linux is a modification of kaufmann's layout (or maybe just an older version?). But I also can't stand the numpad inversion: because it's "common on phones" simply isn't good enough reason for me. Luckily, debian's layout doesn't have this modification. – Ammunition 25/2, 2016 at 13:41

@SameerAlibhai The research doesn't seem to have been shared, but there was one:

It was generated through reflection of the most common constructs in these languages and the rules set forward by the August Dvorak in his research, then verified by scanning through thousands of source code lines ensuring that a good fit was found.

(from kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak) – Ammunition 25/2, 2016 at 13:43

@AndrewSmart They are the same; I made them both. The Xkb (Linux) version is modular, though, you can choose whether you want the numpad or not. The keyboard layout architectures on Windows and macOS don't allow that. – Im 18/3, 2017 at 21:25

@Im They are not the same in my user experience. It must be a bug in the MS Windows executable published on your website then. On Windows 7 when using that programmer dvorak layout the q key was mapped to " (double quote), and the z key to ; (semicolon). There were many more differences, I had to make my own which matched the one on Linux. I love the one on Linux, tyvm if you indeed made it! – Leung 21/3, 2017 at 18:44

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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 reaching all over the keyboard. New tab in Firefox? You were just typing in Dvorak, so you hit ctrl-t, but the keyboard is actually in qwerty mode, so you just ctrl-k to jump to the web search bar.

One of the other low points of Dvorak is the awkward 30-60 second explanation if a coworker needs to use your computer for a moment.

So I'm very sad to say that after about 4 years of typing primarily in Dvorak, I have to type in qwerty now because it is simply unnecessarily difficult to switch back and forth between modes and retain my muscle memory of my keyboard shortcuts.

On the other hand, there is some Vim work-around support for Dvorak, so maybe today would be a good day for me to get back on the Dvorak wagon. And I suppose if somebody were feeling particularly ambitious, he could set up an AHK script to remap normal/shifted keys from qwerty to Dvorak, but just pass through the qwerty keys when ctrl/alt were held. Seems like it would be a lot of work for very little payoff, though.

To recap:

Dvorak is great for RSI
Switching between qwerty and Dvorak is easy for typing, horrible for keyboard shortcuts and other muscle memory
Dvorak can be a large hassle to use at work, depending on your work environment

I sincerely hope this gives you some more direction on the decision of whether to go Dvorak.

Booze answered 3/8, 2009 at 16:58 Comment(10)

definitely write down and test passwords before switching if you are relying on the muscle memory to type them. – Unilateral 4/12, 2010 at 21:33

I use dvorak and have been for years. Would not go back to Qwerty for nothing. It's painful to use Qwerty on other peoples VMs. Yuk! – Demantoid 18/5, 2011 at 12:46

Thanks for a very helpful post. I could relate to what you were saying, even though I have never tried dvorak yet, and the amount of detail shows that you've really given this thought. On the other hand, without dvorak, I already have these awkward 30-60 second explanation moments while I switch Visual Studio out of ViEmu mode... :) – Primrose 9/11, 2011 at 8:17

When it comes to shortcuts, Mac supports Dvorak with QWERTY shortcuts. So I use QUERTY shortcuts in Dvorak. The only advantage for QWERTY is that c and v are in better locations :) – Joappa 23/11, 2011 at 2:32

This will let you use dvorak in insert mode and qwerty in normal mode so you don't have to relearn anything. However, it doesn't work for ex commands or searches. – Voiceless 3/11, 2013 at 23:14

I switched to Emacs with Evil and now have a flawless Vim + Dvorak experience. How to do that is off-topic here, but you can email me or ask a separate question if you're curious. – Voiceless 3/11, 2013 at 23:19

+1 it can be a large hassle to use at work. Especially at shared workstations, or trying to demostrate something on a peer's computer. Windows has terrible support for it: -Every window can have its own keyboard layout setting! A nightmare when ever allowing more than one layout on the system settings. – Leung 16/1, 2016 at 2:56

-The Windows login screen layout can be a nightmare for typing passwords. With lengthy difficult passwords, you have no idea what the layout is currently (no visual feedback), no way to easily determine the layout, and at my last work the system locked you out for an hour if you mistype the password a few times. Huge issue! Countless times off hours I'd get locked out. – Leung 16/1, 2016 at 2:59

-Windows does not include programmer dvorak like linux does; the programmer dvorak layout readily available by kaufmann.co has his own weird tweaks that I cannot stand (all numbers and symbols are moved around). So I had to make my own to match linux's and even then there are annoying unfixable little differences between the layouts such as caps lock. – Leung 16/1, 2016 at 2:59

Thank you for sharing this.. It feels like it's a nightmare for vim users.. I'll stick with querty i guess.. – Ichabod 23/5, 2018 at 21:31

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Believe it or not the amount of special characters (such as [], {}, etc) in source code is negligible compared to normal english text.

I wrote a small program that counted the occurrences of every character in the source code of a fairly big project I'm working on (50k lines), these are the results. The language is C++.

Pulmonary answered 2/10, 2009 at 3:50 Comment(14)

strange numbers for all the braces and brackets... Nevertheless those are as hard to reach on both on qwerty and dvorak. Hardest thing for me on the dvorak is typing 'qwerty'. – Ensheathe 17/1, 2014 at 13:17

( = 21407 ) = 21391 { = 7648 } = 7639 [ = 2597 ] = 2586 Why don't those match? – Pinkham 6/5, 2014 at 16:24

@LeoJweda comments can distort it. – Compatriot 24/7, 2014 at 0:50

@Compatriot Unless he's using smilies in his comments they should still match. – Pinkham 4/8, 2014 at 18:27

@LeoJweda haha! I mean it's not necessarily required to match in comments. I'm sure every code will poorly formatted comments. – Compatriot 5/8, 2014 at 6:28

@LeoJweda I strongly suspect things like commented-out function declarations. – Martainn 12/8, 2015 at 17:22

@LeoJweda: 99.92% are matched.. If the code base is large enough, it's normal that for one reason or another a small minority don't. Hopefully it's not because of smiles, since :( would be much more common than :) in that case :P – Pulmonary 6/9, 2015 at 7:30

I'm late to this, but this is assuming that you type out every single character. In practice, I'm often autocompleting and instead of typing out, for example, FooBar.SomeProperty, it would just be fb.sp, which greatly skews the ratio of keystrokes for alphabetical to non-alphabetical. – Importunity 12/11, 2015 at 18:59

Less than 6 * in big C++ code? No multiplications or dereference operators? Sounds weird. – Ammunition 25/2, 2016 at 13:50

@GabrielF: I removed it from the list because it was too high as I use a lot /********/ as a separator. See stackoverflow.com/posts/1507668/revisions – Pulmonary 26/2, 2016 at 20:17

Measuring key strokes may be more accurate as modern IDEs generally offer intellisense / autocomplete – Spinelli 18/1, 2018 at 16:3

@AndreasBonini but instead of :( it can be (:! – Loggins 15/7, 2018 at 10:6

@ThomasBonini You could write a script to scan for unmatched { ( [ and see what's going on. Just count up the { ( [ in each file and find the files with a mismatch. – Proselytize 15/9, 2021 at 20:9

@LeoJweda Maybe someone though of creating a code block or a conditional test but later on changed his mind. That's why you see the opening braces appearing more often than the closing braces. – Hippopotamus 26/12, 2021 at 11:7