Comment by eimrine
4 days ago
Any QWERTY or QWERTY-inspired keyboard (layout) is silly.
Switching to orto without solving a real bottleneck is like changing Opel to Porshe but keep using a set of square wheels. Of course the car will run better, but...
This opinion is so quaint that it makes me smile.
For me, the #1 feature of the Advantage2 is ortho. Everything else is a distant second. I don't understand how anyone can use anything but ortho.
Yes, another layout would make your fingers travel even less, but ortho lets you reduce a lot of seeking/travel without learning anything new.
My experience switching layout is poor. I touch typed Qwerty at around 75 WPM. I switched to Colemak, and after a month or so of Monkeytype I am back at around 75 WPM but didn't gain significant speed. I never had serious wrist pain, so I can't say Colemak helped with that.
After sharing this with some people, it turns out that a lot of speed gains, and maybe wrist pain improvement, comes from people that switch from Qwerty + peeking (and sometimes avoiding pinky) to Other layout + touch typing.
My only gain with Colemak is that typing feels smoother than Qwerty, but I can't honestly recommend anyone the switch. Using other computers, which are all in Qwerty, is now unconfortable.
I largely agree. Split, ortho/columnar, and tenting is 90% of the strain benefits. The biggest benefit from layout change (for programmers at least) is moving symbols and numbers to a layer where they share positions with alpha keys so you don’t have to extend to type them. Any benefit I could imagine from switching alpha layouts (more even utilization between left and right hand for typing prose) is mitigated by the switching cost when trying to use a normal computer.
Just ask the normal computer owner to set the proper layout for that 5 minutes you will be tinkering with the normal computer, it does not need root or any complicated setup.
Interesting. My experience is almost the same. But I wouldn't call the experience is poor at all. The biggest advantage is that typing feels smoother with Colemak.
The fact that just learning to touch type in any layout is what contributes to the speed is probably right. But then again, my experience is that speed is primarily a function of practice and much less of technique. I remember reading some AMAs by someone who types at 200+WPM and they mentioned that they use QWERTY and they don't touch type.
I switched to colemak, but I paired this switch with split keyboards. So qwerty is still easy to use on regular keyboards, but I'm sure I'd get super tripped up if I used qwerty on a split kb.
You have read my comment inattentively, I consider QWERTY-inspired ones exactly as weak as QWERTY.
Speed is not important in typing goals at all. What maters is ability to delegate a typing routine out of your consciousness. No peeking, no misusing pinkies, no caring about WPM, no mismatching keys from different layouts. You should always prefer to put all of your 10 fingers on the keyboard even if all you need is to type one letter, even being interrupted from sleep, because you should understand that touchtyping is faster than hunt-and-peck even in one-button case.
You either can input your password using touchtyping or not. If you have achieved touchtyping on any layout, no switching helps you to decrease cognitive hardness. Touchtyping should be done in youth, so if you are not cosplaying some idiots you should devote your brain cells to the proper layout at once.
> the proper layout
which is?
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