Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

I spent a lot of time on this, back in my bored 20's. A super-optimized keyboard layout, which I used for a year. I measured my typing speed on qwerty before the change, and on the optimized keyboard after using it for a year.

Yep, you do type faster. In my case, it was 10%. Honestly, it wasn't worth it. There are way too many disadvantages, not least of which is the fact that that only your computer has your weird keyboard. Also, typing 10% faster is pretty irrelevant: how much of your time are you typing flat-out?

If you need an ergonomic keyboard, that's a different thing. There are lots of those. Get one that uses qwerty.

View on HN

I'm probably much older than you, and I found the reduced travel or the alternative layouts much more important than speed. Your hands will thank you one day.

I went down that path 10 plus years ago. When I was writing my first book, my fingers got really sore.

I built (two) ErgoDox(en) and ended up using the Norman layout with various attempts at layers over the years. I'm now using a Lily58 with low-profile choc switches that I'm generally happy with.

I'm fine switching back to Qwerty keyboards, but if I were to go down the path again, I would advise myself to stick with Qwerty. I still have a pretty crazy keyboard layout and appreciate the ergonomic features.

Also, I've realized that everyone is different, and what works for one might not work for someone else.

Advice that I think works for everyone is to listen to your body. If your body is telling you that something isn't right, take steps to address them.

> not least of which is the fact that that only your computer has your weird keyboard.

Fair, but how often are most people typing on someone else's computer? (Outside of developers who do pairing.)

For me, it somehow happens all the time. Helping out co-workers, friends or family. Using a different workstation than usual (we no longer have assigned desks). Sure, you can mentally "switch" layouts, but it's a pain.

Then there's the reverse: My PC at home - wife wants to check something quickly without turning on her PC.

Finally: I regularly use both a PC and a laptop. Depending on how weird you want the layout to get, there may not be a way to use it on the laptop. Schlepping an external keyboard around - nope, not practical.

The reverse is solved with a single button activating the default qwerty layout?

The direct with family is similar - you can have an extra layout installed

So the leaves even fewer cases where you really have to switch (but unfortunately not 0, no easy mechanisms to just easily switch to a some downloadable layout named after you on the fly at any computer)

at home I have a number of laptops. Any of them may become a shared laptop at any point in time with zero notice :) ( I already get enough grief for having the black original Das keyboard on my main desktop.)

At work there's less sharing but back when we were in the office, it happened. I also have two work provided laptops (one from my employer and one from client) which are heavily locked down.

Finally there's all the other keyboard manifestations in my life - on my work iphone and my personal android phone and the tablets and all the tv apps that pop up a keyboard to sign in etc.

Qwerty may be suboptimal but it's freaking everywhere.

Similarly I switched to Colemak, and I agree, it's not worth it for most people.

I switched because I never typed with proper technique in QWERTY. I would only use ~2 fingers on my right hand. I tried multiple times to retrain myself but there was just too much muscle memory. The only way for me to switch to proper technique was to switch layouts.

> There are way too many disadvantages, not least of which is the fact that that only your computer has your weird keyboard.

Meh. I can type fine on both my weird layout and on a regular one (either Swedish or English layout).

Your point about speed I agree with, but I'll say that the point of an alternative layout shouldn't be speed, it's about comfort.

I've been typing in both qwerty and colemak around the same speed (>=100 WPM) for almost a decade. I ultimately ended up deciding to use qwerty at work and colemak at home. At least for me the comfort difference between layouts is marginal.

This problem can be largely avoided, for those of us who use a laptop frequently (most of us, I imagine): just leave the laptop layout standard, or lightly modified. I've remapped all of three keys, as a result I can use a stock keyboard with a smallish amount of mental adjustment.

The split key ortho plugged into my monitor, therefore, can be as weird as I want. It's heavily customized and I can do more with it, faster, easier. I do type about 15% faster flat-out with it, but more importantly, I can send λ with little more effort than `l`. But since the laptop has the default layout, I remain "bilingual", two independent muscle memories can be maintained pretty easily if one regularly uses both.

The ortho does have a QWERTY layout for the alphabetic keys, since I don't see the point in changing that, but I don't expect it would make a difference if it didn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com