After you have decided how to deal with the key labels, you need to deal with the fact that most computers you will encounter will be in QWERTY rather than your layout of choice. First, you must determine whether you can be bi-layout and how your productivity will be impacted by being on a computer that is set to something other than your favorite layout. Second, you must think about how often you will be on a computer that you cannot temporarily remap. If you spend 99.9% of your time on your own computer and you do not share a computer with anyone else, then this may be a minor issue. But this may not be the case for everyone.

For example, in college, I competed in programming competitions called ACM : International Collegiate Programming Contests. In those contests, three students share one computer and solve six programming problems in a five- to six-hour time period. Because my team took turns typing on the computer, we had to run a command to change the keyboard layout, which added some time and frustration. In the end, it did not make that much difference.

The bottom line is that changing your keyboard layout leads to large productivity gains but is extremely challenging. I know of only about 20 people who use non-QWERTY layouts, and the number of Dvorak and Colemak users is less than 1% of the total number of keyboard users. At the same time, I believe that non-QWERTY keyboard layouts will gain more support over time. As well as myself, other people—like Barbara Blackburn, the world typing speed record holder; Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent; and Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress—use Dvorak.

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