Pleasure to meet you. Not sure how much passion you require. I'm not exactly head-over-heels with vim, but I have been using it for about 7 years and dvorak for about 3.
Yeah. Adjusting to typing in Dvorak took me considerably more time and effort that getting used to the new shortcuts.
Luckily, Dvorak isn't that bad for this. For instance, 'j' (down arrow) and 'k' (up arrow) are still next to each other, in the same order.
'h' (left arrow) and 'l' (right arrow) are not, but when you have your right hand in the starting position, their location and distance is very similar to where they are on QWERTY.
As a side note, it's much harder to type QWERTY on Dvorak.
Now, the arrow keys no longer in the same place -- up/down is on the left side of the keyboard whilst left/right is on the right side.
But that's not as big a problem as you may think -- provided you keep both your hands on the keyboard. Interestingly, the Kinesis Contoured keyboards [1] have the arrows similarly separated.
And there are no "gotchas" where the keys' position would go against the spatial intent.
You could imagine a layout that would for instance have ctrl-f (page down) located below ctrl-b (page up) or 'h' (left arrow) on the right side of 'l' (left arrow). But that's not the case in Dvorak neither for vim nor for the emacs keybindings that I'm familiar with (c-b, c-f, c-a, c-e). Sheer dumb luck, methinks.
Both under vim and under Gnome in general, I've found that all the shortcuts I'm using aren't that much worse off. Some are actually better. It seems to pretty much balance out.
Heh, not at all related, but do you really find it harder to type qwerty? I personally find that typing a bunch of letters that are all beside each other is actually harder than typing normal words.
I remapped hjkl to htns (the keys directly under the right fingers on the home row) and it works wonderfully. 'n' then needs to be remapped, so I have 'N' set to 'j' and 'n' set to 'k' so that the two commands for repeating a search forward or backward are adjacent keys on the Dvorak keyboard.
No other changes required. I don't use vim's 't' or 's' commands, so no problem there.
If you're a little pragmatic about it like me, you can still use the arrow keys to move around, at least in vim this works out of the box.
I've been using VIM for over a decade now, and learned to make good use of many of its features, but I've never had the urge to stop using the arrow keys. Except when working remotely to some ancient Sun or HP box that only has vi, or some crappy terminal settings that mess up the arrow keys.
The idea behind hjkl is that it's supposed to be faster because you don't have to move your hands away from the letter keys, but in practice, I don't actually move around in single-character increments that much when editing anyway.
Just wondering how much dvorak gets in the way of vi/vim. Lots of wonderful answers showed up in this thread! Looks like dvorak is a small obstacle (because of hjkl) but not a show-stopper.
That's been my experience at least. But remember that this is very subjective and different people will have different habits.
It's quite possible that there are shortcuts that get crippled by the Dvorak layout -- I'm just not aware of them.
Also, muscle memory is a strong thing. Expect at least the first few days to be slow and painful. And as such, it's quite possible that all my positive experience now is due to cognitive dissonance.
Anything in particular you want to ask?