I did not realize this was a thing until I just switched to AZERTY which… despite being marketed as being “similar” to QWERTY, is still tripping me up
Edit: since this came up twice: I’m switching since I’m relocating to the French-speaking part of the world & I just happened to want to learn the language/culture, so yeah
Plover. I’m still not any good at it.
I know that feeling.
QWERTZ with Slovene/Croatian letters
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…
I use Dvorak on a 36 key Corne.
I started developing Ulnar Tunnel due to having really bad typing form from never learning the correct way to type. I was never going to unlearn the horrible (but fast) typing form that I had been using for years, so I decided to completely relearn how to type from the ground up using a different key layout on a completely different keyboard layout. It was a long and arduous process, but now my wrist pain is completely gone, and my typing speed has recovered.
I’ve been using Dvorak for maybe like 5 years now. There’s like a 2 or 3 day period whenever you’re learning a new keyboard layout in which you can’t type at all lmao. QWERTY or Dvorak or whatever. Just takes a bit for your brain to adjust.
The interesting thing is tho, if I sit down at a computer I don’t use every day and start typing, I can type QWERTY no problem, but if I ever have to type QWERTY on my personal computer (lookin at you RDP), its really hard.
I’ve been meaning to try out a Colemak layout, since it tries to keep a lot of the common computer shortcuts in the same place. (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V on Dvorak are in kind of an odd place and its a pain if you ever need to use them 1 handed, like if you’re holding a tablet pen)
How long did it take you to get back up to your old speed? It took me 1-3 mo. after switching. I think it helped that I used to look at the keys and when I converted I learned 100% touch typing.
about 1 month maybe to get back to full speed? I never really measured my typing speed before or right after switching so I don’t really know. I think nowadays i can type faster in Dvorak than I ever could in QWERTY, but thats probably just from using it a lot and generally needing to type more nowadays lol.
I went from 40-45wpm on Qwerty to 65-75wpm on Dvorak, but after I stopped practicing, I settled somewhere in the high 50s low 60s. I specifically measured because I wanted to be able to quantify the changes. Speed wasn’t my only concern, but it’s the biggest change. There’s no need to learn an alternative layout, but even people who don’t may benefit from a small adjustment like making caps lock a left backspace and learning to touch type. In retrospect, I would consider more of the alternative layouts before jumping to Dvorak, but I don’t regret it at all, even at work or with games.
Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.
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
Dvorak. My fourth year of college I found myself with some time and decided to finally learn to touch-type. No regrets, I love it.
I have a fully custom keyboard layout on my split ergo keyboard, makes it really hard to work on somebody else’s machine!
Moved from AZERTY to QWERTY last year
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.
Settled on it after 2 years of Dvorak, 1 year of Colemak, and 1 month of Workman.
Though, I mainly use Plover stenography when I’m working, Norman for gaming, and Qwerty on mobile or as-needed (e.g. other people’s computers or while taking notes on my iPad for D&D)
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.
QWERTZ, which is just the standard layout for Germany. It switches out Y and Z, adds Umlauts and changes the positions of various special characters.
I’m curious, what made you switch to AZERTY?
Also QWERTZ, but the Swiss version that has these guys on the umlauts with shift äöü -> àéè
What do you do when you want them capitalized?
There are two methods:
- You can use caps lock for the capitalized umlauts and caps lock and shift for the capitalized French accented vowels
- You can use the accent buttons and combine with a normal capitalized vowel. For example, the button between ü and enter is the two dots button ¨, so you press two dots, then shift-o and get a capital Ö. Same for the French accented vowels the two buttons on the left of backspace have ´ and ` (with alt-gr and shift respectively) and you can combine those with shift-e for É È.
The second method sounds convoluted, but you get used to combining keys anyway. For example for the circumflex ^ because â ê î ô û don’t exist pre-combined on this keyboard layout. The same goes for some rarer combinations like ï, which despite the dots isn’t a German umlaut, it’s an i with trema for use in French for example in haïr, to hate.
German only really introduced capitalized umlauts for printing around 1900, so people used to use the combinations of the vowel with e for capitalized umlauts in print. Then the first mechanical typewriters again didn’t all have umlauts, or sometimes had only small umlauts. The combinations with e is also used for systems that have technical limitations. If they are ASCII based for example. Therefore even today people are somewhat used to it, so if you were to write Oeffnungszeit instead of Öffnungszeit nobody would bat an eye.
Moving to Belgium for a new job so…
Belgian AZERTY has the @ on a different key than the French one. No, don’t ask.
Yup… I had a suspicion that the Belgian system will somehow be different, so thankfully I didn’t find this out the hard way. I could have almost bricked my laptop login password that way…
Also it’s the first time I had to use my right hand to type the Alt key which is so trippy
Well, when you aren’t shackled to your new keyboard, be sure to enjoy our beers, french fries and chocolates, they are truly unmatched anywhere!
I retrained myself in Dvorak many years back, and really enjoyed using it much better than QWERTY. I had to revert back to qwerty because of commercial standardizations/limitations at different workplaces, unfortunately.
All that to say that workman layout seems even better after reading that article. I don’t really see myself making the effort to switch again, but I enjoyed reading about it. Thanks for sharing.
Small warning about workman. It has issues with lateral movements and single finger n-grams. “ly” and “ct” being notable examples.
A piece of advice I heard that served me well was to look mostly at post covid designs. A lot of work was done on layout optimization around that time and the results show.
My recommendations in no particular order are:
Colemak-DH if you want to focus on a well supported layout.
Graphite or Engram or one of the hands down layouts are modern well optimized layouts I would consider if I was to learn something today.
Some people like MTGAP but in my book it was designed with too much of an emphasis on minimizing key spacing without a strong enough emphasis on how human hands work.
I personally use engram but it only works for me because I have strong pinkies. If you don’t it’s probably a bad choice.
