Dvorarkk - Dvorak for programmers

The Dvorak keyboard layout has been around for long, reducing the friction of typing, over Qwerty and the like. Without kickstarting the Dvorak/Qwerty flame war, I'll just note that I've been a happy Dvorak customer for more than a decade.

Dvorak and Qwerty were designed for typists, entering large amounts of natural language data having high frequency of alphanumerics (a-Z, 0-9) over symbols (#$^*, etc). Thus, the numeric top row (1-0) provides numerics first, and symbols second, if the user presses Shift.

Programmers vs. typists

But I'm a programmer, not a typist. I enter large amounts of programming language data, with a significantly higher symbol frequency, as mandated by the programming language syntax. PHP is probably the worst case for this, as variables are prefixed with "$", statements end with ";" , functions need parenthesis pairs both in definition and usage. The Unix terminal is just as bad, and don't get me started on Lisp.

In the end, I spend more time with my Shift key than with my kids.

Improvements

• Provide symbols rather than numerics on the number row
• Make Vi and shell-friendly symbols such as : and | on accessible keys, e.g near Tab and Enter
• Support national characters such as æ, ø and ð on the second level using Alt
• Remap right Shift to Alt, to accommodate second level characters

For true UNIX legacy, remap CapsLock to Control,

setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps

Please note that setxkbmap resets the layout to default US, so run xmodmap after setxkbmap. For Mac OS X, there's something clickable somewhere in System Preferences.

Supported platforms

Layout files are provided for Mac OS X and X11 (Linux, *BSD, etc).
In Mac OS X, the layout was created using Ukelele. On X11, a standard US Dvorak xmodmap mapping file was updated.
Dvorarkk is tested on the following,

• Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.10
• Ubuntu Linux 10.04 to 17.04
• OpenBSD 6.2

A note on external Apple keyboards: For some reason, these work poorly in X,

• The characters ~, : and ``` are swapped
• Option and Command keys are swapped
• Function keys act as volume, brightness, etc

Luckily this can easily be fixed in Linux,

echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/iso_layout
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/swap_opt_cmd
echo 2 | sudo tee /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode

The issue of ~ and : also apply to Mac OS X, when switching between the internal Mac keyboard and an external keyboard. Switching between Dvorarkk versions helps this, e.g. using Dvorarkk v5 for internal keyboards and Dvorarkk v6 for external keyboards might resolve this.

But...

Your coworkers probably hate using your computer because you use Dvorak. They'll hate you even more if you use Dvorarkk.