Do you use an alternate (non-qwerty) keyboard layout?

I use dvorak. I tried it on a whim… had a lot of free time at my job at that point, and I had always been curious to try it. I had a number of friends from college with RSI, and my main motivation was to prevent myself from getting that. Also, I was a pretty poor qwerty typist, so I felt like this could be a good way to improve my skill and make a clean start.

At the time, dvorak was the only reputable non-qwerty layout I knew of. Now it sounds like there’s also Colemak, which could be good, though it’s even more fringe. One nice thing about Dvorak is that it’s built into all modern OSes by default.

Yeah, the transition’s pretty painful. You have to commit whole-hog while you’re learning, which means your productivity grinds down a lot. Expect a week of lots of a pain, and a month of working slower. Now I’m probably faster than I was, but it’s not noticeable. It certainly feels more ergonomic, though.

I don’t recommend qwerty to most people, just because it’s challenging, and you can get many RSI benefits just by getting a better keyboard (like the Kinesis). But I’m glad I did it, and when I have kids, I’d be tempted to teach it to them.

I tried Dvorak for a while, and liked it, and it seemed pretty east to make the transitions from QWERTY. But I didn’t stick with it because at the time I was doing on-site support and moving from desk to desk, which made me constantly switch back and forth between layouts. I don’t do that as much now; I could probably DVORAK. But then, I’m a reasonably fast QWERTY typist, so the motivation isn’t really there for me anymore.

I don’t use dvorak much, but I think it’s more intuitive.

I don’t, but my dad has a Cyrillic (Russian) keyboard that I’ve used sometimes and I’m getting better at using it.