Setup - Keybinding toggle between Qwerty/Dvorak

On linux it was honestly sort of a pain in the ass to setup a system for switching between 2 different keyboard layouts. At least from the gui's. Gnome's keyboard preferences didn't have a keybinding for it and neither did xfce. Xfce has a panel plugin to display which keyboard layout is current used but on my Fedora 13 netbook this plugin crashs every time you open and close the plugin's settings. << I need to report this bug to xfce team. This plugin has a default keybinding of shift+caps-locks to shift through the list of layouts selected in the desktop environment settings. I assume there is a nice easy way to set the layout from the command line with 'setxkbmap' but I have no idea how that interacts with the desktop environments so I feel that the current setup is fine. I assume that the Gnome/KDE panel plugin equivalents are less buggy.

OS X was a dream to setup. Normal dvorak is part of OS X and programmer dvorak can be found here. For programmer dvorak place the .keylayout file in your $HOME/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ directory and it will show up in the OS X preferences. On OS X 10.6 the preferences dialog you are looking for is in System Preferences->Language & Text->Input Sources. Add a check to any other layouts you would like to use and I highly recommend setting up a hot-key to swap between the one your learning and the one you already use just incase you in get in a fix, or you need to type something out really quickly.

The most painful part of the whole process of learning a new keyboard layout is dealing with all the application's keyboard shortcuts. Oh I wish there was an OS layer that provided the bindings to Cut, Copy, Paste, Etc so that this would be easier. Until then I will just continue dealing with the Qwerty world as best I can.

I am learning Dvorak

One of my reasons for starting a blog was so I would have something that I could force myself to type in Dvorak. I recently spent 250 hours in the past 3 weeks working on a educational iPad Game, European Exploration. I have never written as much text on a keyboard before and for the first time ever I experienced typist pains in my hands. I Recently forced myself to learn Vi so taking the leap into learning a new keyboard layout doesn't seem very daunting.

So far I can almost always remember where the new key is at as I'm typing, but I can barely type 20 wpm. I setup key-bindings in my XFCE so I can toggle between Qwerty and Dvorak so I'm not locked in to either if I really need to type something out.