Right now my left hand and my right hand are at polar disagreement with my brain… I’m working on a new laptop and the keyboard setup is different than what I’m used to. Y’see, early this year I started to notice some twinges in my wrists, a possible precursor to carpal tunnel badness… So I did some poking around into improving laptop ergonomics and switched my machine over to a Dvorak keyboard. I even swapped the key caps around so that I could look down and see what it was that I was writing. It took a bit of getting used to, especially since I was switching back and forth between Dvorak and QWERTY depending on which computer I was at, but so far it seems to have done the trick… My aches and pains have receded.
But something rather odd has happened. When I’m working on a laptop, my hands are trained to type in Dvorak. When I’m at a regular keyboard, I switch back to QWERTY. It seems to be triggered by the feel of the keys. At any rate, on the new laptop the key caps are still arranged in standard QWERTY format, but the feel of the keys triggers the Dvorak output from my hands. Unless I watch what I’m doing, I can’t seem to type accurately.
On the other hand, if I switch the computer over to Dvorak input, I can touch type easily… Up to a point. If I glance down at my hands, I see them hitting the wrong keys for the letters that are appearing on the screen, and my brain tries to override my reflexes… And my typing goes all to heck…
My biggest problem is with passwords. Filling in a password field with no feedback as to what keyboard layout you’re using is a bit of an adventure. That and control keys. The “Q” and “X” keys are exchanged between the two layouts, and it’s not much fun to discover that, instead of cutting text, you’ve accidentally quit the program you were in.
I suppose it could be used as a sort of simple substitution code… It’d give an interesting mix of letters and punctuation, and if you knew what was going on it’d be relatively easy to decipher.
I’m sure I’ll adjust, eventually. But until then, please forgive any strange typos that crop up.