As a kid,  I was always fascinated by Hollywood hackers deftly typing out insane amounts of stuff in what seemed to be no time!
I always wanted to emulate them, but  touch-typing seemed to be something beyond me.  My short and relatively stubby fingers would just refuse to perform the complex acrobatics across the keyboard.  Just when I’d all but resigned to remain a two-finger hunt-and-peck typist for life,  I read about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout.   It intrigued me,  to say the least,  and before long,  I was practicing with Dvorak. 

The start was slow,  but I believed that this was not beyond me,  unlike querty was.  I was able to quickly learn up and before long,  I got to a speed which was roughly the same as that of my two-fingered technique with querty.   I decided to make the plunge and switch layouts for good.  I set up my home pc with Dvorak as the default layout.  I did evaluate the ramifications of using a non-standard keyboard,  but then,  found that the Dvorak layout has support is just about every operating system.  All I would need to do was to change the layout before I used a system.  Not very convenient,  it may seem,   but the happy fingers beckoned! 

With a little practice,  I started gaining in speed and accuracy and started leaving my classmates trailing in my wake (the same guys who used to show off their fancy typing skills on the Querty layout).  By the time I went to NCST for my PG Diploma,  I was a seasoned Dvorak user and man, at NCST, it really paid to have a good typing speed as we had to often type out long programs within very limited timeframes as part of what were called ‘Machine Graded Programming Tests’.  I’ve now been a Dvorak user for well over six years now and I can tell you that it’s great.  My fingers need to move a lot lesser than it would have to with Querty and I’m told that dangers of repetitive stress injury are also lessened somewhat,  with the Dvorak layout.  So,  how fast am I, really ?  I decided to check for myself,  and below are the results!



In case you are interested in finding out how fast you can type,  you can use check it out by visiting http://speedtest.aoeu.nl