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Comment by jessedhillon | Hacker News Reader

I like seeing someone willing to rethink base assumptions, and to follow that thinking all the way to a brand new layout. However, I'm surprised to see that, even in a layout intended for programming, parentheses and brackets are placed as inconveniently as they ever are. Programming might only be 25-40% of my typing, but it's the most painful/annoying usage of the keyboard that I have -- far out of proportion with the fraction of the day it occupies. I'd even learn two layouts if it meant that the programming layout would be much more comfortable.

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> UPDATE: Workman-P is now available. Workman-P is Workman for Programmers. In Workman-P, the top-row numbers and symbols have been switched as well as the brace and brackets. It is great for programmers as well as system administrators.

I'm a bit skeptical of that change for keyboards I don't have a numeric keypad. I think I type more numbers while programming than symbols.

Yeah, I'm not willing to give up easy access to numbers for symbols.

Maybe an an extra row above the numbers would work (Get rid of the current F1-F12 keys).

I'd also like to have ABCDEF and x keys next to the number pad, to make typing hexadecimal numbers easier. Maybe comma and space keys would be useful over there too.

Yeah, I was responding to that fact -- was that not apparent? The brackets, braces and parens are in essentially the same finger positions.

Just letting you know, learning two layouts is not doable. The muscle memory of one will always be more powerful. I cannot type querty anymore after I have switched to dvorak programmer [1].

[1]: http://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/

I've replied somewhere in in the thread, but you say that learning two layouts is not doable - it's perfectly doable, and I don't see why one would make such statement only based on own experience (unless you have some source for that, which I'd be very interested in)

It's completely doable. Took me a little bit of fumbling to use QWERTY again after learning Dvorak, but it's easy to pick back up and do both.

I switch between both every day with no problem, except I've noticed that I prefer QWERTY for programming and Dvorak for writing prose. It's been 7 years since I learned Dvorak.

If you find you have trouble remembering two layouts then I would suggest using a specialized ergonomic keyboard with a non-QWERTY layout for most of your typing and leave all the normal slab keyboards and laptops as QWERTY. For much the same reasons you don't get confused between a piano and a computer keyboard, using a keyboard which is physically significantly different helps separate the two layouts in your muscle memory.

For example, I use Colemak on a Kinesis Advantage and QWERTY on all flat keyboards. Since the physicality of they keyboards are so different I don't have any confusion while typing, though sometimes I'll mix up single character presses. That is, if I type a sentence I never have troubles, but if I want to hit just the 't' key I may mistype the first time. Other than that I can seamlessly switch between the two and my speeds are comparable across both layouts.

This is what I've done too (I use Dvorak on split keyboards and QWERTY on non-split keyboards) and it's done a good job of keeping my QWERTY speed up. I do have to look at the keys if I'm trying to type QWERTY with a split keyboard, but that doesn't happen to me very often, and it's not really much of a problem when it does.

I occasionally get a few keypresses wrong when I first start typing after I've been using the mouse, but once I'm going I'm fairly accurate.

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