Ask HN: Using alternative keyboard layouts?

Just as a mind exercise, I spent a couple of hours learning to type with the Dvorak keyboard layout last night. After noticing my ZXCVQW shortcuts would be all over the place and not all that practical one-handed with a mouse, I gave the Colemak layout a shot for a few hours tonight (it retains those keys, plus punctuation, in the same place as QWERTY).

What I found really quite suprised me:

- It's way easier to re-train yourself than I thought it would be (faster, at least...it still requires a massive amount of concentration)

- QWERTY is beginning to feel horribly inefficient (I'd read before that your fingers do less walking with Dvorak but I never appreciated just how much more. It feels like even less movement with Colemak.)

What are your experiences with alternative layouts?

In college I ran across a guy who used genetic algorithms to shift the keyboard around based on his own typing patterns. He took code he typed, blog posts, emails, IMs, everything and logged it and after two weeks of collecting he then ran it through as the data source for genetic algorithms, assigning numeric values determining the viability of the arrangements based on distance a hand has to travel, etc.

He found DVORAK was a very good layout, but he came up with another one which was extremely odd and unusual. I played around with it but found that I never had the time to retrain my hands, I was always in the middle of a semester and thus not really free to be less productive.

This is a good blog post but not what I specifically discovered: http://bit.ly/17e6G

It took me about two weeks to learn Dvorak well enough to type at a reasonable pace. I don't think I type any faster, but it's much more comfortable than QWERTY so I enjoy typing more.

OS X has a Dvorak keyboard map that switches back to QWERTY while you're holding down the command key. I don't know if there's an equivalent for Windows.

I've been using colemak for the last 3 months and the result has been very positive: - The wrist pains I used to have disappeared (since that was the main reason to switch, the switch is a definite succes) - It took me about 1 month and an half to regain my normal speed (my biggest problem was the inversion of 'r' and 's')

I never really managed to type in a proper way (though I did touch type with 7 fingers, I didn't have my fingers in the proper row and the proper position), since starting colemak I started having a correct finger position since it just feels more natural to keep your finger in the home row when so many letters are there.

I have used Dvorak full-time for 5-6 years now. Back in high school, a friend of mine discovered Dvorak and a few of us switched cold-turkey; everyone else switched back within a week, but I'm still going! It took about two weeks for me to be comfortable with it. If you're like me, it's the punctuation that will screw you up the most when switching.

I'm an Emacs user, but I learned Emacs after I learned Dvorak, so I don't find the keybindings to be awkward. I do some strange things, such as using Escape as the Meta key (with my left thumb on the chord letter).

Vim, however, is hard to use (e.g. "HJKL" are in the "JCVP" positions), which may be part of the reason I gravitated to Emacs. For games, I either rebind the in-game commands, or I switch to QWERTY while I'm playing (e.g. "WASD" being in the ",A;H" positions is just no good).