Colemak user here. It didn’t magically improve my typing speed as I hoped, top speed is 70 wpm and used to be the same with qwerty. I’m pretty sure it’s more ergonomic to type with than qwerty, and I do have some wrist problems, so I’m going to stick with it.
I don’t think non-mainstream layouts are something people should feel obliged to adopt unless they are having wrist problems. Beyond the ergonomics, it’s mostly a weird thing to learn for fun.
Didn’t like Dvorak because it makes you type ‘ls’ with your right pinky, and I type ‘ls’ a lot on unixlike command line shells.
It occurs to me that ‘l’ is also ‘move right’ in vim. I think I find my rightmost three fingers hovering on the top row when I move about for this reason. Wonder if I should try to remap those movement keys...
The vim movement keys actually work surprisingly well in Dvorak. Up/Down are next to each other on your left hand, right/left are on the appropriate sides of your right hand.
The nice thing about keyboard layouts, now that we have reprogrammable computers, is that there’s little need to have holy wars over them. Having more people use the same layout is mostly inconsequential to a single user of the layout. It’s very different for operating systems, programming languages and programs, where a lack of users means a lack of support and a slow slide into obscurity and eventual unusability.
Colemak user here. It didn’t magically improve my typing speed as I hoped, top speed is 70 wpm and used to be the same with qwerty. I’m pretty sure it’s more ergonomic to type with than qwerty, and I do have some wrist problems, so I’m going to stick with it.
I don’t think non-mainstream layouts are something people should feel obliged to adopt unless they are having wrist problems. Beyond the ergonomics, it’s mostly a weird thing to learn for fun.
Didn’t like Dvorak because it makes you type ‘ls’ with your right pinky, and I type ‘ls’ a lot on unixlike command line shells.
It occurs to me that ‘l’ is also ‘move right’ in vim. I think I find my rightmost three fingers hovering on the top row when I move about for this reason. Wonder if I should try to remap those movement keys...
The vim movement keys actually work surprisingly well in Dvorak. Up/Down are next to each other on your left hand, right/left are on the appropriate sides of your right hand.
that never occurred to me. I may write some bash aliases with a view to reducing long movements today.
The Wikipedia article on keyboard layouts is very interesting and informative.
The nice thing about keyboard layouts, now that we have reprogrammable computers, is that there’s little need to have holy wars over them. Having more people use the same layout is mostly inconsequential to a single user of the layout. It’s very different for operating systems, programming languages and programs, where a lack of users means a lack of support and a slow slide into obscurity and eventual unusability.