Qwerty and Dvorak touch-typing.

["Michael Edwards" mje@xxxxxxxx]

                         Michael Edwards.

   Having just spoken about the kak virus, I wonder if I could ask something
else here. I'm not sure if it's too off-topic or not, but I'm sure there will
be people here who know the answer.
   For some years I've been thinking of learning to type on the Dvorak
keyboard, because I've heard it can enable touch-typing up to 30% faster than
does the qwerty one. There's been one thing that's made me hesitate though, and
I seem to have been unable to find out about it, even over quite a few years.
It's to do with the fact that I already touch-type on the qwerty keyboard, and I
wonder whether, if I learn the Dvorak keyboard, I would lose the ability to
touch-type on the qwerty one (or at least become less accurate or slower on it),
because my mind would tend to get the two systems confused. I would really like
to know if this is a real possibility before I try learning a second system,
only then to find out the hard way.
   If this is a known danger of trying to learn to touch-type on two different
types of keyboard, I would give up the idea, because I don't want to lose the
ability to touch-type on the qwerty keyboard - being able to do it only on the
Dvorak keyboard would effectively limit my ability to efficiently use only one
keyboard in the world - my own. I think this limitation would (for me) outweigh
the advantages of typing a little faster on a Dvorak keyboard.
   If anyone knows about this, I would be very interested to hear from them.
Does anyone touch-type on both keyboards? - or has anyone tried to learn both
and found out the hard way that it doesn't work?

   Does XY-Write allow you to configure a Dvorak keyboard? (I will be very
surprised if I hear that it doesn't allow this.)

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.