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Comment by JelteF | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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.

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)

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