Dotan Cohen, Comment #105:
> Other than VI (which I use in qwerty) other programs do as I described: they
> map accelerators to the same physical keys, no matter what layout is selected
> (EN, HEB, or Dvorak). I bothered to use Dvorak on a windows machine lately, and
> it also has this behavior.

hmmm... this is getting weird. Other than windows what is the environment on which you're having the above experience? Also can you confirm the windows behavior again? The reasons I'm asking is that I've tried in Gedit and OOo under ubuntu 6.06 and then I've gone through the first 14 links of a Google search for "Dvorak Ctrl-C" and I've also searched OOo site for just "Dvorak". To summarize both my tests, all Google links[1] and the OOo links, suggest that ctrl-C and the likes change physical locations when you change from qwerty to Dvorak. Some of the links specifically mention Windows environments and some of them Linux. Most of them really emphasize on this matter because they cite it as one of the confusion-points when changing from qwerty to Dvorak - they don't just rush through the point. Many of the links are from strong proponents of Dvorak with many years of experience. Among those links it's the Wikipedia article regarding Dvorak keyboard[3] [7].

Here is the relevant snip from Wikipedia:

"""Keyboard shortcuts in GUIs for undo, cut, copy and paste operations are Ctrl (or Command) + Z, X, C, and V respectively; conveniently located in the same row in the QWERTY layout, but not on a Dvorak layout. [...]"""

Now regarding OpenOffice[5] I found the following bug report[6] which was both confirmed as a bug and was later fixed about two years ago:
"""I speak English, and use the Dvorak keyboard layout. When using OOo 2.0 [...] the keyboard shortcuts all are mapped to the QWERTY layout. i.e. If I press the CTRL + Dvorak "X", OOo interprets this as being
CTRL + "B" (note: the key representing "X" on the Dvorak keyboard represents "B" on the QWERTY keyboard). [...]
Also note, this problem does not occur in Windows XP on the same hardware with the same layouts."""
As you can see this user really expects to press Ctrl+ [Dvorak-"X"] in order to activate cut-to-clipboard. He doesn't expect to press Ctrl + [QWERTY-"X"]. And he says this is what happens in Windows. And the developers agree with him and fix the code in order for this behavior to occur. And it's been 2 years since then.

Now let's return to the Wikipedia article. There (and in one of the 14 Google links) the behavior you describe is *indeed* mentioned. But it's mentioned as a special feature that can be selectively enabled only in Macs:
"""The Mac OS offers an elegant solution: two Dvorak keyboard layouts are available on the Keyboard menu. The first, called simply Dvorak, remaps all the characters produced by a key (with and without modifier keys) from the old QWERTY key to the new Dvorak key. The second, called Dvorak QWERTY-Command remaps all the characters produced by the key-and-modifier combinations--except those in which the Command key is pressed] to the new Dvorak key; the Command-key variants are left the same as in the QWERTY layout."""[4]

Nick Demou
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P.S.
1. @Dotan, don't get me wrong. I didn't research this so much just to contradict you. I really want to clear the landscape of this bug and the expected behavior when using non-Qwerty layouts -and Dvorak in particular- seems to be the only thing that needs to be clarified before going to the devs and saying "here is the spec you should follow - it *is* The-Right-Thing-To-Do"

2. Things are getting... nasty[2] but I believe we can sort it out

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[1] to be precise, 2 or 3 of them don't really have anything to do
with the subject so I ignored them
[2] "Tech support, help! It's becoming a nightmare!" - Vanilla Sky - the movie
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
[4] In fact this is one interesting idea for a way to handle our problem. Let's research and clear the landscape a little.
[5] There are only two bugs in OOo that have the word Dvorak in them. In one of them the reference is incidental. The other is the one I mention here. There is also no other mention of Dvorak keyboards except from one side-topic discussion in the mailing lists regarding the typing speed in Dvorak vs Qwerty. It seems that OOo users that type in Dvorak keyboards are happy with OOo's behavior
[6] http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=57297
[7] to be frank it was not the English Wikipedia page but I went on to read the English one