Discuss how to improve your keyboard typing.

• Learn touch typing rather than your own improvised 2-6 finger version of hunt and peck.
• Learn Dvorak.
• Vi: swap caps and esc (vi pinky). Emacs: swap caps and ctrl (emacs pinky).

Keyboard layout

Dvorak may only be good for reducing RSI / finger pain.

In the beginning it will be very slow so it's good to start doing this over a holiday. May as well learn touch typing at the same time so you don't pick up bad habits. You do not need to reorder/relabel your keys because you shall not look at the keyboard -- print out the Dvorak layout and pin it to your wall instead until you've learned.

(Warning: write down your passwords. They disappear from memory when you forget QWERTY.)

Colemak removes caps from the keyboard. Try to write a NO WARRANTY disclaimer. Also you can't swap caps <-> esc/ctrl because Colemak has already decided that caps should be backspace.

Swapping keys

X: man xmodmap:

Console: Edit the keymap file.

Keyboard repeat rate

When editing with Vi you should count keystrokes. Therefore I find it useful to slow down the keyboard repeat rate until it's so painfully slow that holding down "d" to erase a section is unbearable, forcing you to learn the shorter "d}" sequence instead.

X ($HOME/.xinitrc):

Console (/etc/rc.d/rc.local):

This teaches you The Disciprine.

It's extremely boring to erase a long line that you've typed in the shell, but most shells have vi and emacs editing modes. Even FreeBSD Bourne shell has it (set $EDITOR). Not Debian Almquist shell in Debian unless you recompile it though.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Vi spoils. I use vi command line editing in Bash. So that is vi + bash. When I post in this forum I write :wq and I am surprised nothing happens. And I press ESC all the time.
It seems that the more you use the efficient vi commands, the more mistakes you make in any other text entry environment. I am afraid there is no solution.

jlinkels

In general forcing someone to learn anything is not a good idea. In general the best way to learn something is to practice, practice and probably some more practice.
(in vi you do not need to count repetitions but you can enter a repetition number - if you find vi/whatever is inconvenient you will find a better/faster way to do the same thing - either by improving your knowledge or by choosing another tool)

Depends. Sometimes you have to. On various occasions I had to force myself to learn something. If you don't exert force (to yourself or another person) people tend to fall back into their comfort zone "like they always did it". I am sure you were forced to learn things in school as well. At least I was.

Forcing others to do something might be a different story. And of course it depends on who forces you to learn what. The student must more or less be willing to be teached.

jlinkels

If you type a lot, dvorak is a must to learn, it was actually designed for touch typing, while qwerty was designed for typewriters to prevent jamming. When I had to type of lot of essays in college that's when I switched to dvorak, I couldn't handle the hand pain caused by typing with qwerty. I'll stick to two finger typing when I absolutely must use qwerty, the way it was designed.

These heatmaps convinced me to try: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-conten...03/dvorak3.jpg

The fingers rarely leave home row, which explains this statement:

I wonder if stenography may be useful for handwriting.

I believe qwerty is a contributing factor to carpal tunnel, not the only factor, but a major one.

I wanted to learn Dvorak, but these keyboards are quite expensive.

They have software and stickers that will convert a qwerty keyboard to Dvorak. Not for me...I prefer to use real dvorak keyboard if I ever do get one.

Don't have one and probably never will, just use the software layout. You can also use stickers or swap keys until you learn it.

I am so glad I'm not alone in doing this.

I think the old fashioned typing tutorials are still the best. (Thank you Mom and Dad for making me learn.)

It's acts like a dvorak and it looks like a dvorak, but it's still a qwerty keyboard

I probably may not get one anyway. They're still expensive and I'm used to typing the qwerty way.