I’m typing this with my new ergo keeb right now. Holy fuck it is hard. I cannot seem to be able to hack my brain, I’ve spent 2 WEEKS desperately trying to learn the first SIX MOST FUCKIN COMMON LETTERS and I’m still completely unable to use them even remotely quickly or reliably. I am completely unable to even break the 70% confidence line on keybr on I,E,S and R despite hours of efforts. Worse, now my accuracy goes steadily down the toilet even if I slow down to a grind in an attempt to improve it.
I fuckin suck at this. It is despair and rage inducing. How the fuck do you manage to even learn new layouts?
I spent almost an hour typing this fuckin message.
But hey at least my keyboard looks awesome.
Edit: it seems using keybr is actually damaging my progress instead of helping. I’m switching to another tool.
Edit2: after a few days on monkeytype I’m up to 17 WPM and 91% accuracy in french, up from 4 WPM and almost negative accuracy. Not great BUT it’s still a big win for me. I mostly know my layout now, except for the dev layer. I can only progress from now.
I didn’t use any training tools, I just forced myself to do the work that I normally do, using the ortholinear layout. I didn’t try to type fast or brute force things, I went slow as hell and backspaced when I screwed up. I had to apologize to several coworkers and clients that were waiting on me to finish typing something, I just told them I was using a weird ergonomic keyboard and still getting the hang of it.
But after a couple weeks I was just as fast on ortholinear as QWERTY.
One thing that surprised me is that I don’t really have a problem switching back to QWERTY, and then right back to ortholinear. I was expecting that to be a problem, but I’m happy that it’s not.
Ortholinear doesn’t necessarily mean not QWERTY though. I’m running an ortho QWERTY layout. I don’t really understand the appeal of breaking your brain for an entirely new layout tbh, but ortholinear just makes sense ergonomically.
Oh yeah, to be clear I’m using Ortholinear QWERTY. I just call it ortho because I’m lazy.