For me it was never about speed, it’s about comfort. I always unconsciously hated having to reach for the arrow keys all the way to the right of the keyboard to select words and move around.
; is shift + , (1 step right of m)
: is shift + . (2 steps right of m)
- is where US layout has /
_ is where US layout has ?
shift + 6 = &
shift + 7 = /
shift + 8 = (
shift + 9 = )
right alt + 7 = {
right alt + 8 = [
right alt + 9 = ]
right alt + 0 = }
right alt + - = \
(on our keyboards, left shift+alt is an alternative for the right "Alt Gr" key)
The main benefit is, how much better default keyboard shortcuts in many Apps become.
Tab switching with CMD+{} and back/forward CMD+[] can be comfortably executed. There are no more inaccessible shortcuts such as Shift+CMD+? or changing playback speed on Youtube.
Specials are somewhat annoying to type with `alt+u aou` and `alt + s`, but nothing I couldn't get used to.
I've done it all my life. Maybe my pain tolerance is way higher?
Edit: I don't know what's wrong with pressing several keys at once to do something. It is like complaining that piano has no individual keys for all the possible chords. What's the alternative? Pressing a single key? What would you be doing with the rest of your fingers anyway?
On top of that, alt+7 is spectacularly awkward, as you need to curl one finger really aggressively and extend another to reach both keys.
Many of these keys are indeed accessible with a single keypress in US QWERTY. That, or a simple shift-combination. They're also much closer to the letter keys across the board.
The German and Swedish keyboards mentioned above are rather bad for programming (in the German case, even for typing ß/ss): they have AltGr combinations at the top row, the numbers 7, 8, 9, 0 for instance to get the brackets and braces {, [, ], }. In the Spanish keyboard they are right of P and Ñ (; in US-English) and those positions are much easier to reach while pressing AltGr.
In addition, in the Spanish keyboard the plain Latin letters are in the standard qwerty positions.
After having had to deal with some terrible keyboard layouts over the years I’ve come to appreciate the Spanish one very much. It’s clear that a lot of thought went into designing it.
` is a bit more ergonomic at shift + \, release, then spacebar. To get ``` you press shift + \ 6 times because ` luckily doesn't modify `.
I'm not necessarily saying it's better but it makes you think about how input design shapes the use of software.