around 2005-6 i considered switching over to dvorak, but trying it out, doing tutorials, etc, never had much of an effect. i would say i was a pretty fast qwerty typer, but i hadn't learned to properly touch type. instead, i was fast enough to not need to see the keys once i had started typing but it relied on a bunch of terrible hand positions.

around 2007, i broke my right thumb by hitting a pothole and that put my typing (and all my bad habits) in a weird spot. At that point i decided to try one-handed dvorak and failed, but i found that two handed dvorak was very doable, so i spent about two weeks of my convalescence doing http://web.archive.org/web/20040803054502/http://www.gigliwo... on and off and watching movies. About a week in, i swapped all my keycaps to make the transition easier, but found that i missed having the home row nubs on f/j (u/h in dvorak) because at this point i had started actually relying on them for positioning as i had finally learned to touch type.

at this point, about two weeks in, i was solidly able to to use my modded keyboard, but i still peeked at the keys occasionally so that i would re-position my hands correctly at rest. it took me about a full month of occasional typing in dvorak while i was in physical therapy to "make the switch" mentally.

this probably marks my eleventh year typing in dvorak, by far the first few months were the most awkward, especially since at the time i was using vi and some of its key commands are optimized for qwerty while others have semantic meanings. the most annoying thing in those early months is not so much the letter positions, but recalling where all the special characters live: .,'-;/=[] are all characters that you possibly associate with certain regions of the keyboard, but in dvorak they are a punctuation-diaspora, scattered across the edges of the keyboard. by around six months in, i think i was back to my regular typing speed, but i believe i exceeded my qwerty speed easily a year into dvorak simply because i had finally learned to properly touch type and had developed muscle memory for all keys.

how hard is switching back? like you, i wondered about being keymap-bilingual, but it turns out to not be all that important day-to-day. i definitely type noticeably slower when i go back to qwerty keyboard (usually because i'm using a friend's computer). in practice this happens remarkably infrequently. one of the strange things of learning dvorak but leaving your keycaps in qwerty is that i look at a `t` but i "see" a `p`. it's strange, it's the closest thing i have experienced to having a sixth sense. because ios doesn't allow you to remap its keyboard to dvorak, i use qwerty there all the time and it's not at all disorienting.

One place, however, where you do need to remain somewhat sharp is pc gaming, where games inconsistently pick up custom keymaps (i.e. in js this is the distinction b/w evt.key and evt.code). in most cases, you just end up using qwerty because it's a pain to remap (this was especially true for games like dota2, but starcraft 2's grid layout remedies much of that). again, many apps like illustrator/photoshop also have keyboard shortcuts located for physical reasons and less for logical "this letter is short for that idea" reasons, which can make the switch harder

that said, it's doable and i believe in you! at the very least, you'll become a better typer and develop better habits from your time in dvorak. good luck!