Do you use an alternate layout besides QWERTY? If so, what's your history?
Do you use an alternate layout besides QWERTY? If so, what's your history?
Like everyone I started with qwerty for ~ 10 years, then in college a friend introduced me to dvorak. I didn't pick it up at first, but after I started working and realized all my time was spent at the keyboard, I learned it in earnest and got back up to my original speed.
Around 2017 I learned about halmak, which was the first AI designed (genetic algorithm, not gen AI) layout, designed to minimize hand movement, and I learned it quickly and loved it for several years.
About a year ago I decided to try out a new one, since halmak has so many same finger bigrams. So I bounced around between a few, but now settled on graphite, as a lot of ppl on the reddit keyboardlayouts community recommended it. I've been on it for ~3 months now, and like it a lot.
I first used Dvorak about 4 years ago, starting when I watched a video on youtube about the QWERTY key order, which also presented the Dvorak layout as a (curious) alternative. I stuck with it for about 6 months. I had never touch-typed before that.
I've tried Colemak once, but it just didn't feel right. Well, most keyboard layouts you find are for English speakers, but I mostly type in Portuguese. Since the most used letters and bigrams among roman script languages are pretty similar, sometimes using an English layout for another languages will be fine (like it was for me with Dvorak), but sometimes it won't (like with Colemak).
It's kinda luck-based to find an English layout compatible with your native language, but I found out that making small modifications (like changing the position of some letters) can improve the layout a lot. So I started testing out some layouts and tried moding them a bit with the help of some tools.
After leaving Dvorak, I tried Semimak and started moding it (and moded it a lot). It was pretty fine, and I stuck with it for like 6 months or a year. Since then, I've been using Canary (which, in my experience, is GREAT for Portuguese) and I've done a simple mod of swapping the positions of 'y' and 'm', making the highly used 'm' (in Portuguese) on a very sweet spot.
Now, here's a tip: there are some other mods you can do besides changing letter positions. I've been using the Extend layer mod for a long time now, and I absolutely LOVE IT. It gives you text editing controls somewhat similar to Vim in normal mode, not as powerful, but it works in every program (libreoffice, firefox, etc). Another simple mod you can do is to map backspace on one of the Alt keys, so you can press it with your thumb and don't need to move your hand out of place.
After these years, sometimes I feel tired of using non-standard layouts (like, you need to set it up, you can't use it on public computers...), but whenever I try to learn to touchtype on QWERTY it's painfully weird. I just can't. I can learn other alt layouts, but not QWERTY :(