Ask HN: What is your experience switching away from QWERTY keyboard?

I made my own layout years ago. I'm french and for years I typed on an azerty keyboard. When I switched to Qwerty, I found I really disliked the position of the m key. So I changed it.

Then I changed a few more keys so I could have easier access to them for programming. All the punctuation as well as putting some common unicode glyphs on altgr.

This is the end result: Drix EU Latin.

https://github.com/jleclanche/dotfiles/blob/master/X11/xkb/s...

It's an xkb file, only tested on Linux. I literally install it by replacing `/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us` with this file. (There's probably a better way nowadays, but back then the way was "submit your layout to X11 and get it merged in". I didn't want to do that.)

If you find dvorak too hard, maybe give this a shot. It should be self-evident how to move glyphs around as the file is well-commented. I find non-qwerty-like layouts to be a waste of time, to be honest, compared to studying how you yourself type and moving the keys you find problematic/out of reach.

I've been using Dvorak since ~2004, so roughly 13 years.

I don't rave about it, but I do like it. It's good on my wrists and that actively makes me happy.

In terms of timeline, for me, it took about 4 months using it in a FT programming job before it just clicked and muscle memory started picking up big time. Until then, it started with hunt and peck (but I _always_ used my the "correct" finger to do so), then slowly getting it a little better. I had originally printed out a sheet showing all the keys as I had to reference it regularly.

It was fun though- I dunno, I like the challenge of it. I've been playing with the idea of switching to Colemak, but I just haven't made it a priority yet.

I also use Dvorak on Android, but obviously that was much later in life, so I already had it memorized by then.

I switched to Dvorak three years ago. Mostly out of curiosity and because I heard it was better for my wrists.

One thing that I felt was really helpful was having different keyboards for the different layouts and not just a software switch. I started with a Typematrix and a year after bought myself a Kinesis Advantage. Both those keyboard have a grid layout (as opposed to the staggered layout of most standard keyboards). My experience (sample size of 1) was that this allowed me to have one muscle memory for the Dvorak/grid keyboards and one muscle memory for the Qwerty/staggered keyboard.

At the beginning, I was only using the Dvorak on the weekends and with some typing tutors for some exercise 10-20 minutes a day. I think I made the switch to Dvorak as my main driver after two-three months. I haven't looked back since and still feel much less comfortable using Qwerty (only use it on the laptop which might play a role), although I can still touch-type on it quite easily.

I converted to Colemak on a TypeMatrix keyboard some years back. Everything was fine and I used to sing its praises until I started having to go to client sites or using other work machines. In one embarrassing incident I was leading a team at a client site and they wanted a demo of what we could do on Linux. No problem, it is my main OS, except I could barely type and looked like I didn't know what I was doing. I went straight back to qwerty on a traditional keyboard after that, it just didn't work for my situation.

I grew up on azerty. Switched to British qwerty when I lived there, haven't gone back. It's by far, for me, the best programming keyboard.

I'm in Denmark now, and I'm appalled to see how bad the Danish keyboard is for programming. I tried it for a couple of days on a loaner, and went back to British qwerty. Punctuation is a disaster.

http://smartkeyboardsolutions.com/images/Danish-10019-zoom.g...