[vox-tech] mutt, email, usb mini storage, dvorak...

[Jonathan McPherson]

Bryan,

> You'll notice my use of the past tense when referring to these fixes.
> :-P Dvorak really makes a difference; I could feel it. However, I got
> frustrated dealing with the various keybindings that are chosen on the
> basis of position, rather than the ascii value (such as h,j,k,l for vi
> movement).

It's certainly true that Dvorak is not the ideal keymap for use in vi...
but after a bit of tweaking, I've found it very comfortable.  For
instance, I remapped my vim keys so that htns replaced hjkl.  (t, n, and
s all have other functions in vim, so I remapped j, l, and k,
respectively, to do those jobs).  This has an added benefit; you can move
the cursor while keeping your right in home position rather than shifting
it a column to the left.

The biggest annoyance from my point of view (aside from keeping the
keymap loaded, switching layouts for others, etc) is that most Unix
commands are designed (accidentally or intentionally?) to be ergonomic
on Qwerty.  For instance, the key sequence 'ls' can be typed on the home
row with your two ring fingers on Qwerty, but on Dvorak your right pinky
has to type both the 'l' and 's' keys.  Ugh.  Also, the braces are
harder to get at, and for people like me who do a lot of LaTeX and C++,
that's a problem.

Ideally you could generate a key mapping that is optimized for the way
you work, but sadly there's no decently portable way apply it.  It's
easy to switch almost any Linux, Mac, or Windows system to Dvorak in
under a minute (they all generally come with Dvorak drivers!); the same
cannot be said for a home-brewed layout.

Jonathan.