I spent a lot longer than I should have doing hunt-and-peck. I mean, I live on computers, and it made sense to learn, but it was a temporary speed hit, and it was always seductively faster to go back to hunt-and-peck. Did various typing programs in school, but it didn't stick. Years of computer use, and still did it using hunt-and-peck.

IIRC it wasn't until I was about thirteen and taking a computer science course (which was worse to touch-type in, because it heavily used symbols) that I finally said, "Okay, that does it. I'm investing the time to learn to do this right, because I'm definitely going to come out ahead in the long run touch typing" and hit the point of forcing myself not to hunt-and-peck.

It really is a damned useful skill, and I'm kinda bummed out by the fact that I think that a lot of kids these days are only using Android or iOS devices and often don't have a physical keyboard. I'd bet that touch typing skills are a lot less prevalent today than they were.

I'd be okay with touch typing going away if we had some successor technology for inputting data into computers that was generally-superior. But even if we had flawless speech recognition, the noise pollution in generates (not to mention the lack of security) means that it probably isn't going to be what one uses for general text input.

Maybe with some sort of fancy subvocalization pickup gear or something.

I think that at some point, we will ultimately get some kind of brain-computer link. But as of yet, we don't have anything like that in general use---it's still a research area.

The Magic School Bus is still fun, btw. Check the new version if you haven't seen it yet - it's got all updated science.

For folks not willing to make the full leap away from QWERTY, there's also Colemak that preserves the common key combos, such as Ctrl C and Ctrl V.

Also, a word of advice: all the keyboard formats which minimize finger reach compared to QWERTY (which essentially maximized finger reach to accommodate mechanical typewriters) will cause poor word prediction on Swype-style virtual keyboards on mobile phones. This is because optimized keyboard formats try to keep words as close to the home row as possible, so many words using Swype will just be sliding your finger left and right over the home row, which destroys accurate prediction. This is why I'm QWERTY on mobile but Colemak on desktop.

One problem with using a nonstandard layout is that it makes you depend on using a keyboard that you control.

I don't use Dvorak or another non-QWERTY layout, but I do swap Caps Lock and Left Control. I'd say that that's a preferable layout in general, since I think that virtually all users use Control more than Caps Lock, but if you're a serious emacs user, you really need the traditional Unix-style layout, because you use Control heavily.

But it also means that if I'm on another system that I haven't configured, I'm prone to making mistakes, and I'm slower.