Ask Lemmy

QWERTZ because I've been living my whole life in Austria and this was always the default. Every time something is set to QWERTY (and my keyboard is still physically QWERTZ), I have no idea where most of the special characters are and have to mash the keyboard in order to find them. I know @ is shift-2 and / is to the left of the right shift key, but most of the others, uh...

Workman

I use Colemak, but just learned about Colemak-DH in this thread, I might give that a try, as the hjkl keys seem to be better positioned and have been trying to get back to vim.

Dvorak for over 25 years.

AZERTY Belgian, Flemish style

Engram. It’s a great layout that focuses on pinky in rolls.

It’s a steep layout to learn even compared to thing like Colemak but I find it quite satisfying.

https://engram.dev/

It's technically a QWERTY-variant, but I use EurKey

Dvorak with caps lock as a dead key here. No programmer's Dvorak despite being a programmer... Never quite made the leap

Colemak. Fingers move around less than QWERTY.

QWERTZ

i've used dvorak but I plan to switch to a charachorder

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.

For Chinese (10 key) and Japanese (kana)I use a 3x3 on my phone. Very common for Japanese but difficult to learn, maybe less common in Chinese over standard qwerty.

I don't use it, but Slovak QWERTZ is the standard in my country. But using it feels like a pain in the ass (for me). Some characters need ctrl+alt rather than just shift, others may only be written with alt codes, at least on Windows...

Part of my graduation exam was literally to just type \ % @ & on a computer. Thankfully for me, settings wasn't blocked, so I just added US layout.

If I need some slovak characters I do either one of the following:

1. Say "fuck it" and write it without diacritics ("like SMS")
2. If needed in forms, use KCharSelect
3. Smartphone virtual keyboard
4. Like 1 but printed on paper with diacritics added using a pen
5. Write it in English even if I am not supposed to and wait for the outcome
6. Write it in English, pipe it to Google Translate (I find writing in English mostly easier anyway - doesn't mean I am good at it)
7. Write it in English, (attempt to) translate it myself
8. Good ol' pen 'n paper all the way (I mean, I've got a fountain pen too)

I have a fully custom keyboard layout on my split ergo keyboard, makes it really hard to work on somebody else's machine!

I use EurKey, it's neat when you occasionally need special umlauts. https://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/

QWERTZ. Like QWERTY, but Y and Z exchanged, and some extra letters. Biggest difference to an English keyboard are the non alphabethical, non numerical characters. In comparison, they are all in different places.

Moved from AZERTY to QWERTY last year

I've been slowly, and I mean slowly, trying to pick up steno. I get the occasional moment where I go super quick, but mostly it's just 1-10wpm at the moment. When I actually want to get stuff done I switch to QWERTY

Ortholinear Dvorak.

Now I'm wondering if other typing layouts are better or worse for people who use swype, swiftkey etc. Maybe those need character separation to function best?

Non-qwerty trips me up too x3.. I considered using ąžerty before cause certain symbols can be annoying with qwerty in my language, since you need to hit 3 buttons

I am moving from AZERTY to bépo with futo keyboard but i want to try ergo-l

Since I'm German I used to exclusively use qwertz, but now I use both qwertz and qwerty with qwerty being my main when docked.

Not quite the same thing, but I really don't like the ISO (International, what a lot of European use) QWERTY layout compared to the US one. It's not unusable or anything, but...

I wish that ISO would make some new layout that starts from the layout from US ANSI and then stuffs the European-specific symbols somewhere on the keyboard.

And while I'm dreaming, I'd like that layout to physically swap left control and Caps Lock, so that I don't have to go swapping it in software everywhere.

And to get rid of Menu and Right Windows and replace it with Compose which is, I think, by far the most-preferable way to get access to a substantial additional number of characters. AltGr or Option permits for a small number of additional characters and is harder to remember for occasional use. The Windows Alt-numpad scheme is also much harder to remember, as is the GTK Control-shift-u convention.

I also don't use right Control, but I can believe that somewhere out there, someone gets actual use out of it and needs it somewhere comfortable, so I won't complain about that.

Actually, what I really want, which would solve the above in an even better fashion, is for laptops to use modular, standardized, replaceable keyboards so that I can just buy whatever keyboard I want and slap it on the thing. With external keyboards, as on desktops, the selection is much better.

EDIT: I'd also add that I've seen numerous European users saying that they also prefer the US ANSI layout over the ISO layout, so it's not just me being US-centric, and OP has a comment even saying so themselves in this thread. But if you just use stock US ANSI, then you don't directly get access to the extended Latin set, which you want in Europe. Though Compose can do that, and OP is, like me, also wanting Compose on his keyboard...

There's a variant of AZERTY devised by the AFNOR ( french standardisation agency) that improves on a lot of ways on the legacy AZERTY, by grouping accents, parentheses, quote marks, etc. and making keys combinations a lot less common. It would be quite easier to learn than standard AZERTY, and it's quite easy to learn for regular AZERTY users too. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to find a keyboard or even keycaps with the corresponding markings. Drivers are available by following the link if you want to try it for yourself.

It looks like this :

As for myself, I touch type in French on a QWERTY keyboard with an AZERTY letters layout, because even legacy AZERTY keycaps are not that common, and neither are ISO enthusiast segment keyboards.

I use "US International with AltGr dead keys". I'm most used to the US layout, and I need to type in other languages, so this layout works perfectly. I've gotten used to it enough that I just use this layout on every keyboard regardless of what the keyboards say on their keys. The hardest was probably using this layout on on an AZERTY keyboard, I'd often forget where keys were, but it worked well enough.