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Comment by rhn_mk1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed that this article is no different from all the other articles on keyboard layouts that I've ever encountered and ignores non-English uses.

Obviously, a post written in English has no good reason describing a Norwegian-specific alternative to QWERTY, but it still manages to ignore half of the population of English-speaking people by not taking into account using multiple languages on the same keyboard.

I'm slowly losing hope that someone will mention whether there are any accommodations in Dvorak for French accents, how it affects writing German or whether it is worth the effort to learn and switch to Dvorak for English while using the Estonian layout for other purposes.

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My experience isn't much, but as a Dvorak user I can say that I haven't had any issues with Icelandic. I'm on linux which has great compose-key combinations. I haven't used anything but default Dvorak on an American layout or ortholinear keyboard. Hope that helps a bit.

Why did you decide to switch? Are you typing much more of English than Icelandic? Are the two languages similar enough that what works for one is likely to work for another? Or was there an unrelated reason?

Do you think it made your life better? Would you recommend it to others, not necessarily using Icelandic? Are you using compose combinations to enter non-English letters (there's 8 [0], a significant number)?

Thank you for speaking up, your experience is so rare I consider it invaluable.

[0] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Icelandic/Alphabet_and_Pronunc...

The situation is worse for non-latin-alphabet based languages, especially if the alphabet is not ~20-30 letters.

Some selected examples:

https://www.branah.com/korean https://www.branah.com/japanese https://www.branah.com/greek https://www.branah.com/hindi https://www.branah.com/tagalog https://www.branah.com/tamazight https://www.branah.com/sundanese https://www.branah.com/tibetan

I am not a speaker of many of the languages above. Thus, I think it would be great if native speakers share their input on the issues and what the optimal keyboard would look like in their mind.

In general, we are trying to shoehorn a language to an existing keyboard design and layout, that was designed for a totally different purpose and times. Perhaps, it is time we redesign the whole concept.

How can you claim it's worse, if you don't speak any of these languages?

My understanding is that Japanese is usually typed with an IME, and not a kana keyboard. I press exactly the same keys on my keyboard to get "taiko" or "太鼓" -- and I find Dvorak easier. (Japanese is even better about alternating vowels and consonants than English!) Kotoeri supports Dvorak just fine, and I assume other IMEs do, too.

The Deskthority list linked in sibling thread lists Norwegian, French, and German alternative layouts:

https://deskthority.net/wiki/Alternative_keyboard_layouts

For German, there's Neo 2: https://neo-layout.org/, which is optimised towards German, English, Programming, and Mathematics (in that order). Its third layer, accessed using the caps lock key on the left or the key above right shift, contains all the symbols used by (non-esoteric) programming languages. I've been using it for well over five years now and wouldn't go back to QWERT[YZ] for any reason.

I think it depends largely on what OS you're sing. On macOS it's really a non-issue because it handles alt + whatever key remarkably well. Windows can be a huge pain however.

As a Dvorak user who regularly writes other languages, this little gem is my normal layout: `setxkbmap -layout us -variant dvorak-alt-intl -option compose:caps`. Now AltGr + characters around a, o and e in combination with just a couple compose keys (Compose, a, e for æ, for example) serve most of my Norwegian, German and very occasional French needs. Most compose keys are also really easy to remember, since they resemble the building blocks of the characters they result in.

There is bépo [1] for french users, I'm currently learning it (it's been 5 days and i'm still soooo slow). What's nice with it is that the special chars are on alt-grad + left hand which is nice for coding (thumb vs pinky)

[1] bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil

I now use Dvorak German Type II for more than 12 years.

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