I’ve been suprised at the interest in the Dvorak article. So, just for the fun of it, I installed gtypist to run through a few exercises and see what my current typing speed is. I was expecting to see slower speeds than I was typing before the switch to the Dvorak layout.
It turns out that I’m typing faster than before. On the sentence exercises, my word-per-minute speeds were about evenly split between the high 90’s and the 100’s. That’s about 10 words per minute faster than I used to type with QWERTY, though I do recall occasionally flirting with the 100-wpm mark on a good day. In the word variation exercises using the Dvorak keyboard this morning, I registered in high 70’s, approaching 80 wpm. Of course, I’m also listening to Sunday’s Issues Etc. at the same time, and it’s a bit distracting from the concentration needed to do those exercises right.
But again, I don’t count typing speed as a major benefit of switching to the Dvorak layout. For me, it’s the ergonomics.