I noticed this odd post on SimpleBits, Dan Cederholm’s website. It is a list of words that he can easily type with his left hand. One has to ask for what reason he is keeping his right hand free? But I, being a man of good taste, won’t go there.

For me, this list is quite different. Several years ago I was suffering from a lot of wrist pain due to typing. I started looking into all sorts of remedies. One remedy I tried was taking some time to learn the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout. My coworker at the time (and now business partner) Micah also did the same.

We simply full on took the plunge at work. It was a slow period so we downloaded a little practice app, switched our regional settings to Dvorak, and started practicing. When I had to respond to emails or write code, it was quite laughable how slow and clumsy I was…at first.

Soon enough I picked up speed and probably type faster in Dvorak than I ever did in QWERTY. Since I never got around to buying a Dvorak keyboard, I was forced to really learn touch typing. If you watch me type slowly on a keyboard, it would confuse the heck out of you as I am hitting all the wrong keys to produce the right letters.

In any case, here are a few words that I can type with my left hand using the Dvorak layout.

  • puke
  • pee
  • keep
  • peak
  • quake
  • pique
  • oak
  • quux (metasyntactic variable such as foo, bar, baz)

That is quite a limited vocabulary.