Ask Lemmy

i've used dvorak but I plan to switch to a charachorder

Standard US Dvorak, but with the modification of using Caps Lock as Compose key so that I can type øæåØÆÅ when I need to.

I made the switch in 2011, but I never bought into the typing-speed claim. Typing speed be damned, it's just so much more comfortable this way.

Background:
I grew up with scandinavian keyboard layout in the 90s, but then two things happened almost at the same time:

• I fucked up my msdos config, resulting in me having to use the default US layout
• I became interested in coding.
  It didn't take long to notice how much better US layout is once you need access to {, }, and @, so I became familiar with it. For a long time I swapped bac and forth depending on what I was doing. Then one day around the time when Walter White blew up Gustavo Fring it dawned on me out of the blue that qwerty was somewhat cumbersome, and I would most likely be using a keyboard recreationally and professionally for the rest of my life, so I might as well try to see if I could get used to something more comfortable.

Downside: Took me a while to get used to it. 6 months or so. A little more than that and my typing speed was up to what it used to be.
Upsides: More comfortable, Nobody wants to borrow my computer, and shoulder surfers have NFI what my password is based on what I'm typing.

QWERTZ because I've been living my whole life in Austria and this was always the default. Every time something is set to QWERTY (and my keyboard is still physically QWERTZ), I have no idea where most of the special characters are and have to mash the keyboard in order to find them. I know @ is shift-2 and / is to the left of the right shift key, but most of the others, uh...

Workman

Colemak. Fingers move around less than QWERTY.

Dvorak with caps lock as a dead key here. No programmer's Dvorak despite being a programmer... Never quite made the leap

Qwertz.

I teu tried neo couple of years ago but did not use it long enough to get proficient.

AZERTY Belgian, Flemish style

Ortholinear Dvorak.

I use EurKey, it's neat when you occasionally need special umlauts. https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

QWERTZ. Like QWERTY, but Y and Z exchanged, and some extra letters. Biggest difference to an English keyboard are the non alphabethical, non numerical characters. In comparison, they are all in different places.

I don't use it, but Slovak QWERTZ is the standard in my country. But using it feels like a pain in the ass (for me). Some characters need ctrl+alt rather than just shift, others may only be written with alt codes, at least on Windows...

Part of my graduation exam was literally to just type \ % @ & on a computer. Thankfully for me, settings wasn't blocked, so I just added US layout.

If I need some slovak characters I do either one of the following:

1. Say "fuck it" and write it without diacritics ("like SMS")
2. If needed in forms, use KCharSelect
3. Smartphone virtual keyboard
4. Like 1 but printed on paper with diacritics added using a pen
5. Write it in English even if I am not supposed to and wait for the outcome
6. Write it in English, pipe it to Google Translate (I find writing in English mostly easier anyway - doesn't mean I am good at it)
7. Write it in English, (attempt to) translate it myself
8. Good ol' pen 'n paper all the way (I mean, I've got a fountain pen too)

For Chinese (10 key) and Japanese (kana)I use a 3x3 on my phone. Very common for Japanese but difficult to learn, maybe less common in Chinese over standard qwerty.

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.

I have a fully custom keyboard layout on my split ergo keyboard, makes it really hard to work on somebody else's machine!

I've been slowly, and I mean slowly, trying to pick up steno. I get the occasional moment where I go super quick, but mostly it's just 1-10wpm at the moment. When I actually want to get stuff done I switch to QWERTY

Moved from AZERTY to QWERTY last year

Now I'm wondering if other typing layouts are better or worse for people who use swype, swiftkey etc. Maybe those need character separation to function best?

I am moving from AZERTY to bépo with futo keyboard but i want to try ergo-l

Non-qwerty trips me up too x3.. I considered using ąžerty before cause certain symbols can be annoying with qwerty in my language, since you need to hit 3 buttons

There's a variant of AZERTY devised by the AFNOR ( french standardisation agency) that improves on a lot of ways on the legacy AZERTY, by grouping accents, parentheses, quote marks, etc. and making keys combinations a lot less common. It would be quite easier to learn than standard AZERTY, and it's quite easy to learn for regular AZERTY users too. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to find a keyboard or even keycaps with the corresponding markings. Drivers are available by following the link if you want to try it for yourself.

It looks like this :

As for myself, I touch type in French on a QWERTY keyboard with an AZERTY letters layout, because even legacy AZERTY keycaps are not that common, and neither are ISO enthusiast segment keyboards.

Some cursed variant of dvorak with both common programming symbols and the local extra letters on accessible keys.

I switched because I got tired of the {}[] being on alt+gr combinations on the Nordic qwerty

Since I'm German I used to exclusively use qwertz, but now I use both qwertz and qwerty with qwerty being my main when docked.