MacBook Mods & Hacks

I wonder if just swapping the keys on the keyboard also changes the characters those keys produce when pushed down. Imagine painting some white keys on a piano black, they will still produce the same note when struck. Can somebody comment on this?

Julian, the answer to that is rather simple. Mac OS X supports it out of the box. Just go to System Preferences >> International >> Input Menu and select Dvorak.

I just got a new SR macbook and they've rotated the plastic scissors 90 degrees under the F and J keys, so this mod no longer works on new macbooks! (Unless you don't mind having four sideways keys in Dvorak - F,J,E,T.)

I don't exactly find how this is more simple, but, whatever.

Any idea's on how to turn my macbook into a half qwerty (holding space bar turns left hand keys into right hand keys so you can type one handed)

I have deciced to learn to type in Dvorakw seeing as I am already 'fluent' in qwerty. It is proving insanely hard, however I will see how I go.
This will be interesting.

I've just done this to my keyboard :) took about 10 mins :P

Does anyone have any experience with the Macbook Air keyboard?

Dvorak is cool,.. and it makes people wonder when they use iBook =]

thats dumb

I just did this to my macbook (early 2008)....the crooked f, j, u, and h look pretty cool in my opinion

id love 2 try this

interesting

dvorak is hard to get used to

its quite hard but i like it

I've been trying to get the hang of Dvorak for over a year now. It's very hard. I used to type at 42wpm on Qwerty. My speed on Dvorak is 26wpm. For the last 3 months I've been fully on Dvorak at home and at work (I write software) - not used Qwerty at all and still I'm not up to my Qwerty speeds - will I ever get to the speed I was at before the switch ?

I've used Dvorak for several years now, after randomly trying it in college with some friends just for the heck of it. I must say, after sticking with it for several years, I have more than exceeded my previous wpm typing speed, and the location of the most frequently used characters (aoeu, snth) on the home row lends itself to being extremely comfortable and efficient after the learning curve. Although I occasionally am forced to use Qwerty on other PCs/devices that aren't necessarily mine, I have learned to cope with both and prefer Dvorak. Good luck to those interested.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Qwerty keyboard. I've used it all my life, and been able to type at a reasonable speed.

If anything, forcing yourself to type faster using a Dvorak keyboard will cause RSI, NOT moving your fingers a few extra centimetres.

Is this just another case of laziness?

The qwerty format can cause stress and fatigue in many more ways that the dvorak design, simple logic denotes this. If you look at the dvorak wikipedia entry you will see what I mean

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