Greetings, what keyboard layouts do you know and use regularly? What is your experience with them?

I’ve learned Colemak about a year ago, and got very familiar with it, to the point where I forget QWERTY. I was planning to learn Dvorak, but I’m kind of hesitant, given how much effort I’ve already poured into Colemak…

  • DessalinesA
    1·
    5 years ago

    I taught myself dvorak like 2 years ago, after having done qwerty for my whole life. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be to learn it. I used https://www.typing.com/ and went through all the lessons, got passable after 2 weeks, and up to full speed in ~ a month or two.

    The only mod I did to it, was to make caps lock = delete, like colemak.

    If you already know colemak I don’t think it’d be that worth it to learn a whole nother one, colemak is supposed to be good.

    • AgreeableLandscape
      1·
      5 years ago

      What are your thoughts on Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+Z being all over the keyboard in Devorak as opposed to in the bottom corner and near the control key?

      • DessalinesA
        1·
        5 years ago

        I pretty much always have both my hands on the keyboard so its not a big deal. That’s only useful when you have to take a hand off the keyboard for a mouse, but I just use my trackpad. And with vim anyway the hotkeys for copy, paste, etc are just single keys.

        • k_o_tOP
          1·
          5 years ago

          On the topic of vim: did you manually remap all the keybindings in vim or do you just type them as they were in QWERTY, but now in Dvorak?

          • DessalinesA
            1·
            5 years ago

            I didn’t remap anything, most don’t. Luckily the navigation hljk feels correct on Dvorak.

  • AgreeableLandscape
    1·
    5 years ago

    I’m Canadian, and I don’t even know if I’m currently using the American or Canadian layout or what the difference between the two is.

  • cheese
    1·
    5 years ago

    You could learn Dvorak to the point you won’t forget Colemak, even if it means you are still a little shaky at it, as long as you keep practising both, you’ll be fine!

    • k_o_tOP
      2·
      5 years ago

      My goal is not to learn Dvorak for the sake of knowing two separate non-qwerty layouts. I was curious whether hand-alternation (Dvorak) keyboard layouts are more comfortable and overall faster to type on than finger-rolling layout (Colemak), as my goal is ultimately to maximize the speed :)

      • cheese
        1·
        5 years ago

        That’s fair enough. I’ve only really dabbled in Dvorak simply to see what it was like, so I couldn’t really tell you which one was quicker. I hope you can keep perfecting Colemak!

        • k_o_tOP
          2·
          5 years ago

          that was kind of my thought process, that at some point it becomes a lot less about the actual layout and a lot more about the amount of practice… like, for example, one of the fastest typers at the moment uses QWERTY, so probably doesn’t matter that much…

          but it would interesting in any case to scientifically, or at least from experience, to find out whether finger rolling layouts are superior/inferior to hand alternation layouts

          • cheese
            1·
            5 years ago

            It’s probably down to what you find best depending on what you type and how you do it. There might be a scientific experiment which shows a majority favourite or quicker one, but at the end of the day, the best one is the one you find most comfortable.