mazer

Y'know, I really feel bad for the folks at ActiveState. They put so much into Komodo. Really drank the Mozilla koolaid, I guess. And it's a great product, ... except for the speed. And they're a smart bunch. If there were a way to speed it up, you'd think they'd have found it.

I hate to say this, but you know what I'd really like to see happen? For them to cut their losses. Just take everything in Komodo that's not tied to the XUL (or whatever Mozilla pieces they're using), and redo their GUI in ... well, there's more discussion on that in this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423119

I went whole hog and switched to the Kinesis Contoured and to the Dvorak layout. I'm an Emacs user, and had been one since before the switch. I'd also touch typed qwerty before the switch.

A few comments:

* The first week or two is almost completely unproductive. You spend most of your time screaming at your fingers to just shut up and get used to the new arrangement.

* Once you make the adjustment, although your typing speed goes up, it doesn't go up by a large amount. The real benefit of Dvorak is typing comfort. Also, your accuracy will probably increase a bit.

* Switching to dvorak while using Emacs was not a problem at all. Not sure if it would be more difficult for Vim users.

* Switching to the Kinesis Contoured is a vast improvement over those "regular" keyboards most people use.

* After the switch, I rapidly and completely lost all my ability to touch type in qwerty. It just vanished in that first week or so. Nowadays, if I'm stuck on a machine without dvorak, I'm reduced to ridiculously slow hunting-and-pecking. If I were to open Emacs or Vim on such a machine (and I know the basics of Vim), I would scarcely be able to quit either program without damaging something.

* Things are a bit of a pain on Macs, since they have that extra "Command" key, and the Contoured only really makes Ctrl and Alt readily available (2 Ctrl keys and 2 Alt keys). You can remap Command to one key of one of those, but you don't want to lose any of them if you're an Emacs user.