Comments on: DVORAK keyboard EPIC FAIL?

By: Randy Taylor

Randy Taylor — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:40:08 +0000

I use a dvorak keyboard on all my machines by switching at the OS level on OSX, I can’t even use qwerty anymore. I have never had a problem with remote connections to other machines with CORD, I always remote into windows machines and as long as I log out of my session there are no problems with the other devs. Sometimes when I don’t their keyboard maps seem to go wacky and switch to dvorak. As for short cut keys I have adopted an alternate hand position with my left hand on the right side for the usual short cut keys copy, paste, find, and save when I need them; I can however see how this would mess with emacs although I don’t use it. Typematrix.com has some pretty nifty hardwired dvorak keyboards for $120. They even have their own hardware switch and you can get them with blank keys which I think is cool. I love my dvorak layout but I would have to agree and recommend it to virtually no one given all the trouble it was to switch.

By: Shane Falco

Shane Falco — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 02:06:51 +0000

This is a flaw/limitation in the Mac OS RDP client(s). Under Linux, if your local keymap is set to Dvorak then rdesktop will happily pass the proper keys onto the remote Windows machine even though it’s configured for the standard US layout.

By: Francisco Castro

Francisco Castro — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:44:36 +0000

I should say I disagree with your point of view when you say that the dvorak keyboard is and will be an epic failure.

For instance, in vi, a lot of commands are not related to their relative position, but they are the initial of the action, like ‘a’ for append, ‘b’ for beginning of the word, ‘c’ for change, ‘d’ for delete, ‘e’ for end of word, …, ‘i’ for insert, ‘o’ for open a new line, ‘y’ for yank, ‘p’ for paste, ‘w’ for word, ‘t’ for unTil, ‘v’ for visual, ‘u’ for undo, ‘x’ for eXchange…

I also use ssh and it works flawlessly with dvorak, and for remote graphical access ssh -XC also works great, no need to use broken protocols like RDP or VNC. OpenNX also works great.

By: Zeb

Zeb — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:58:30 +0000

Too true I agree completely. The short cut issue is the reason I never switched…. out of interest is there any popular hard wired Dvorak keyboards in NZ?