LAYOUT

There used to be an alternative keyboard layout thread but now there ain't and I even searched! Huh. Anyway, has anopony Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! here tried using an alternative to the dreaded QWERTY? Personally I'd tried to use colemak for like almost two years now and while it is relatively efficient I'd found two issues with it 1. if you're used to QWERTY and are "leoquent" in QWERTY then switching to a drastically alternative layout such as colemak will ABSOLUTELY. WRECK. YOUR. cognitive abilities. You WILL feel slow and stupid and words will not come to you because in this day and age we're all typing away at keyboards to communicate with each other so your primary thought process is linked with how you communicate your ... stuff. So you won't be able chain words together so to speak because you're not that used to chaining them in said layout. Think of it as intro/extro-version. You'll be less inclined to say/type anything because you're both slower now as well as less capable of finding the right words. 2. low but very very length learning curve, you can get proficient in a manner of weeks but it will take you AGES to become fast enough to eliminate above mentioned brain<->keyboard latency Perhaps it's just me because as a kid I spent a compressed but large amount of time playing MMOs and I'd gotten used to trolling trade chat so anything under like ~60WPM or so feels slow and colemak takes too long to get good at. What are/were your experiences with alternative keyboard layouts?

I don't suffer from monolingual anglo braindamage and use typographic layout for Cyrillic languages from Ilya Birman for 70% of my daily typing. ЙЦУКЕН layout despite being invented in time of mechanical lever typewriters seems to have better letter distribution than QWERTY. It just needed a few characters to be considered for anyone who writes anything more than twitter messages. https://ilyabirman.ru/projects/typography-layout/ QWERTY is enough for the rest of my text input done with latin letters and MS-style shortcuts. Typing pleasure improves more from ortholinear and split ergonomically tilted keyboards, you don't have to force yourself into re-learning, and typing speed also improves accordingly. Also, don't forget about remapping cursor keys to IJKL+modifier and using trackpoint for mouse cursor. https://tonsky.me/blog/cursor-keys/

I think I'll be giving the Workman layout a try when I'm finally ready to try something.

Can't recommend colemak enough. It's also great for a lot of other languages, even Japanese.

>>54848 I've been used Dvorak almost 1 year ago. But I'm back to Qwerty.

>1. if you're used to QWERTY and are "leoquent" in QWERTY then switching to a drastically alternative layout such as colemak will ABSOLUTELY. WRECK. YOUR. cognitive abilities. I do most of my real thinking with pen & paper anyway. But I suspect this would be true, as I'm typing this I realize that the qwerty layout just seems natural to me. >>54656 >I don't suffer from monolingual anglo braindamage tfw u have the brain disease :( I really should learn French or possibly Russian, to read some scientific papers, getting to be that point when some papers I want to read don't have good translations.

Don't use workman under any circumstances, it's objectively bad. If you want that kind of thing, use colemak-DH. Though honestly I should really be advocating sertain. x l d k v z w o u ; s r t n f g y e i a / q j m h b p c ' , . Overall it's probably not worth changing keyboard layout. If you want to, you can. Also look into https://dreymar.colemak.org/

I agree with Dvorak/Colmak are better than Qwerty. But I don't think should people using Qwerty since their youth don't need to learn other layouts even though they have enough typing speed and accuracy with Qwerty. But If somebody have to start learning keyboard typing, then learn Dvorak/Colmak will be better choice. I'm patient for using Colmak instead of Qwerty. Moving keyboard layout will be much unfamiliar which cause such slow typing speed which can feel am I back to young who don't know how to type well. I guess most people won't try to change layout or can't keep learning it cause it's kinda weird experience before they become familiar with it.

>>57304 Wonder what would happen if you introduced a child to computers using dvorak or colmak. not sure which is 'best'

>>57146 >Don't use workman under any circumstances, it's objectively bad. What's your argument?

FL LY PO RM DS single finger bigrams aren't great. But the main thing is that with DS and PO particularly you end up with frequent SFBs, on a pretty weak and slow finger, that you can't really violate "standard style" to use two fingers to press, like you can for KN or PT on colemak. If you want to do something like that, with low hand movement, you have to distribute effort between the pinky and the ring finger, by having two letters of similar middling frequency, rather than put Q and ; on the top row pinky slots, which are obviously very rare. f l h v z q w u o y s r n t k c d e a i ; x ' b m j p g , . / This, for example, is what you get when you decide that pinky usage is fine, and sertain is what you get when you want less of it, and still want to minimise SFBs. Workman was made as a repsonse to colmak, before colemak-dh was made. The main problem about colemak is the HE bigram, which colemak-dh improves, and workman makes worse tradeoffs to fix this problem. Norman etc can be lumped in with this too.

I use colemack-dh wide so that i have all my accents/dead keys in the middle since i have to use them a lot for writing in my native language, i also use the extend layer stuff from EPKL and I'm never going back desu

I haven't had the chutzpah to try out colemack or anything, but I did rearrange my keyboard's other layers recently to make special characters easier for programming. Up until now I only really used the numpad for keying things into excel or wolframalpha, and for extra bindings for vidya. Any other lainons have a QMK keeb, or any other programmable format? What does your layout look like, and what do you use it for? Added in anything special, like a music player or rotary encoder?

I'm multilingual and so far qwerty is the only universal layout. Alternative layouts absolutely mess with German and Russian at least, where in qwerty the same letter stays at the same place (like 'c'), in colemak it will have three different locations based on the language you use.

Been using dvorak for the past 10 years, I often forget I'm even using a different keyboard layout. I type about 120 WPM when sober, but I switched to see if it was indeed more comfortable than qwerty, and it is. That said I don't think I'd suggest it is a good use of one's time to learn a different layout if they're proficient in a layout already or if they're older. There's no upside to using Dvorak anywhere other than a keyboard you're touch typing at, so I use Qwerty on touch screen interfaces and everywhere else, and am able to still touch type in qwerty at ~70 wpm.

>>58812 I started learning 'colemak-dh' three days ago, typing in german aswell as english and it seems to be absolutely improving the distance of moving hands aswell as fingers. You can keep a single colemak-dh layout and still be better of than the worst possible layout like qwertz/qwerty.

>>58816 >I type about 120 WPM when sober, I demand a screenshot from monkeytype showing 120 wpm. You may pick the configuration.

>>58821 Impossible---he'd have to stay sober for long enough to do the test.

>>58822 On the other hand there are some absurdly fast entries in the top rankings on monkeytype. How would somebody even physically move that fast?! My new top score is 19 wpm learning colemak-dh on a split keyboard :D

>>54648 Qwerty is much better distributed. Colemak is a meme and your digits aren't supposed to align vertically like that. It's also much better if you type on your left hand on qwerty while your right hand is on the mouse/arrow-numpad/tablet digitizer or something else (a cup, perhaps). >1) The frequency order of letters in English is ETAOINSHRDLU... It's evenly distributed and curved like your hands on the qwerty, more on the left side though (since you're likely to use right for punctuation,etc.). Left side is also supposed to do stuff more since it's controlled by the right side of the brain (and the creative side), there's a reason stringed instruments are usually played with the left hand. The only thing that's what people are doing wrong is using raised keyboards (or using the riser). Your hands aren't supposed to curve up but curve downwards to relax. Have you tried playing a piano with keys drooping downwards? Typewriters were only designed as such (elevated and drooping) due to its physical limitations but it seems keyboard manufacturers still try to imitate the slope/droop which is bad (can cause compression syndrome and carpal tunnel / RSI).

Not related to the layout discussion, but this is the only thread about keyboards right now. How come the spacebar is so huge? Why would any sane person come up witht a design in which one particular key (which is actually a "bar") wastes so much space? For example, I find the location of Backspace really uncomfortable to use, since I have to stretch my pinky all the way there. The same goes for Esc which I already remapped to Caps Lock. A split spacebar design is far superior.

>>59119 >How come the spacebar is so huge? For the same reason we still use qwerty instead of anything else, or staggered instead of ortholinear. Because it's what the middle aged karens learned to use, and their temperament is to go back to paper forms and filing cabinets before learning something better, and never shut up about it. Do you remember how hard it was (and thereby how expensive) to get them to use computers at all? The most intransient set the market preference; anyone who wants to change it in the long term has to put up huge expenses in the short term, and that's just not a risk worth taking to most manufacturers or employers. Backspace/escape vs capslock are a great example. Caps lock, which no one *actually* uses today, occupying such prime real estate was essentially just coincidence, from just when modern consumer keyboards were in their infancy, but it's the coincidence that the stubborn among us latched on to. The stubborn now won't buy anything better, while the rest only prefer something better, but will buy the capslock layout in its absence. Thus, capslock stays through a sort of prisoner's dillema style lockout. We're probably a perfect example. I prefer backspace, but more power to you if you don't, and I'd buy a laptop with an escape substitution if no backspace were available. I suspect you'd do the inverse, but a few consumers wouldn't do either, so we go along buying laptops with ordinary capslock and maybe external keyboards as well. See also why many European atheists eat halal, and American christians drink kosher: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 What do you use your split spacebar for, anon? I've been considering making mine into left shift lately both to make typing more like chording and to make Q/A/Z not require moving my left hand off home row, but I'm still undecided as I'm on 2u space already.

>>59142 I haven't got the split keyboard yet, but I would probably use the split spacebar for Ctrl or Alt, since I really hate using my pinky or left humb for these, though I would defnitiely experiment a lot with various combinations. I plan on building my own keyboard in the future. >https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 Thanks for sharing, I found this to be quite insightful. I wonder if the minority rule could be used to achieve the prohibition of mass-production animal farms, though the losses of big business would be of such an enormous scale that I doubt it's possible... Reading this also reminded me of the fact that I sometimes view my attitudes and actions too seriously and how silly it actually is.

I've been using Dvorak for a few years; it's super comfortable and I have no intention of going back to QWERTY. Colemak or other alternative layouts haven't really appealed to me; Colemak still has copy/paste/etc in mostly the same place, which I actually find uncomfortable. Dvorak has shortcuts scattered about, but it really doesn't take much getting used to. I've also found that just using my mouse for editing can be just as quick if not quicker, once you're comfortable with it. I like that it doesn't try to be similar to QWERTY in any way; sometimes I still have to use QWERTY and in those cases, give me about 5 minutes and my typing will be at at least acceptable levels of performance due to dusted off muscle memory, and I'd rather not have that tainted by an almost-but-not-quite QWERTY-like. Dvorka very good, am a fan.

because half channers vaporware LARPers constantly post low quality content and good threads die there is nothing worth saving in this world

>>54648 >typing thread There are no girls on the internet.