Dvorak is way more comfortable and is very fast for me, but its emphasis on alternating hands causes me to frequently invert pairs of letters when typing fast, probably because my left and right brain isn't perfectly coordinated.
I have considered switching to Colemak, which is supposed to have less of that, but as a 100+ wpm typer of Dvorak it really is diminishing returns.
Colemak has flaws of its own, bandaged over with "Mod-DH", but I'd say just skip it and go to Workman. It aims for 50/50 hand usage unlike other layouts, but it does not encourage the constant alteration like Dvorak. Common bigrams like "th" and "en" are easy to type with one hand, encouraging smooth finger-roll motions. It doesn't have Dvorak's `ls -l` problem.
I personally went QWERTY -> Dvorak -> Workman. While I spent under 2 years with Dvorak, I have been using Workman for over 3 years now and think I'll likely stick with it. There are other crazy layouts like QGMLWB and Halmak, but I think their higher on-paper efficiency comes at the cost of other things, and Workman seemed like it struck the best balance to me. I had comfort/ergonomics in mind and was trying to get away from some hand pain which seemed to only switch hands going from QWERTY to Dvorak, but is now gone with Workman.
> think we're I to adopt my split columnar ergonomic keyboard now I would just stick with qwerty. I think the keyboard helped me more than the layout.
Doing just this is actually why I changed layouts again. I built a Pinky4 split columnar stagger keyboard. A few months later I was used to it, but still had hand pain using Dvorak. The layout really is what made a difference for me. I still use that keyboard, but with Workman now.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Hearing that you went from being proficient at Dvorak to Workman and in the end prefer Workman motivates me to try it.
Dvorak is awful for the shell, but actually not bad for vi. Do you have any experience with Workman and vi?
Yes, I do use neovim as my main editor, as well as applications like ranger that use similar binds. While the hjkl placement is a bit nonsensical like in most non-qwerty layouts, in the end you're just pressing letters to do actions, and you get used to it the same way you get used to typing in the new layout in general. I don't do any special rebinding with the layout in mind. I also tend to argue that if you're advanced in vim, you won't use hjkl as much anyway since you'll be moving by words or paragraphs or using the search instead.
I have considered switching to Colemak, which is supposed to have less of that, but as a 100+ wpm typer of Dvorak it really is diminishing returns.