My brother Jan became hooked on the Dvorak keyboard layout years ago and has praised it sky-high. It seems smarter than the regular Qwerty keyboard layout, but it’s not being used for reasons of tradition: Qwerty has been the industry for a hundred years, who cares if it’s really impractical? The users will learn to deal with it. Besides, Qwerty is the default on every device out there, and the whole world has already struggled to learn ten-finger typing on it.
So why switch? One has to learn something first, but it might as well be something smart. That’s why.
So while I was between jobs, I decided to give Dvorak a try. It takes a lot of practice to un-learn a lifetime of typing, but I’m beginning to get enough speed and accuracy now that I feel confident that I can bring this to my workplace (I hope they will let me). But as I started out, I found that Windows has Qwerty built-in for any country you care to mention, but for Dvorak there’s only the US layout. What’s more, there wasn’t a Danish version anywhere that Google could find. There is a Norwegian version, but the installation instructions sound like a Russian rocket manual.
I have now created a simple installer for international Dvorak, at least for the Danish layout. It was so simple even I could do it, and I’m surprised no-one ever did this before! I just downloaded the free Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator which even generates a real Windows installer file that makes it really easy to distribute.