> Would it be a major job moving to Dvorak and can you expect big improvements?
Not necessarily, it depends on the reasons you are still bad at touch typing on QWERTY. In some cases learning touch typing in QWERTY after years of hunt and peck bad habits simply shifts some of those bad habits directly into your touch typing behaviors. Maybe you still glance at the keyboard too often? Maybe you still rely on muscle memory from hunt and peck days to type a couple specific words and don't realize it?
A clean break to an entirely different keyboard layout and relearning touch typing on it can sometimes be exactly the hurdle you need to really learn touch typing, especially if you can do it during an opportunity for a full "cold turkey" switch on every keyboard you use daily. Don't rearrange the letters on the keys. If anything, do something drastic like remove the labels entirely.
Maybe not for everyone, and certainly there are a lot of comments in this thread with opinions on the matter that it is too much work and maybe not worth it. Anecdotally, I know that I had to cold turkey relearn touch typing on something that wasn't QWERTY to see most of the benefits of touch typing, and I'm glad that I did.
> Also is it better for the keys programmers use that others don't use so much like += etc
That's one of the criticisms that Colemak (and Workman/Norman) make of Dvorak that it moves too many punctuation keys. It's clear we are in a world where QWERTY won, and its punctuation keys are mostly fine where they are, with one very obvious exception (;/: should not be in the home row).
> If I try to speed up i commonly get the letter order wrong of two successive letters.
Touch typing doesn't make you "perfect" (and never will). Mistakes happen and shouldn't be seen as a failure in touch typing. One suggestion that Colemak makes and applies to all touch typing even if you stick to QWERTY (and others in threads here have suggested the same thing) is to rebind your Caps Lock key to Backspace. Mistakes happen, and are common enough. The Caps Lock is a much friendlier and easy to reach location than the usual Backspace location. Make mistakes quickly, but fix them just as quickly.
Not necessarily, it depends on the reasons you are still bad at touch typing on QWERTY. In some cases learning touch typing in QWERTY after years of hunt and peck bad habits simply shifts some of those bad habits directly into your touch typing behaviors. Maybe you still glance at the keyboard too often? Maybe you still rely on muscle memory from hunt and peck days to type a couple specific words and don't realize it?
A clean break to an entirely different keyboard layout and relearning touch typing on it can sometimes be exactly the hurdle you need to really learn touch typing, especially if you can do it during an opportunity for a full "cold turkey" switch on every keyboard you use daily. Don't rearrange the letters on the keys. If anything, do something drastic like remove the labels entirely.
Maybe not for everyone, and certainly there are a lot of comments in this thread with opinions on the matter that it is too much work and maybe not worth it. Anecdotally, I know that I had to cold turkey relearn touch typing on something that wasn't QWERTY to see most of the benefits of touch typing, and I'm glad that I did.
> Also is it better for the keys programmers use that others don't use so much like += etc
That's one of the criticisms that Colemak (and Workman/Norman) make of Dvorak that it moves too many punctuation keys. It's clear we are in a world where QWERTY won, and its punctuation keys are mostly fine where they are, with one very obvious exception (;/: should not be in the home row).
> If I try to speed up i commonly get the letter order wrong of two successive letters.
Touch typing doesn't make you "perfect" (and never will). Mistakes happen and shouldn't be seen as a failure in touch typing. One suggestion that Colemak makes and applies to all touch typing even if you stick to QWERTY (and others in threads here have suggested the same thing) is to rebind your Caps Lock key to Backspace. Mistakes happen, and are common enough. The Caps Lock is a much friendlier and easy to reach location than the usual Backspace location. Make mistakes quickly, but fix them just as quickly.