Your experience with alternative keyboard layouts?

Question

I was thinking about switching to one of these alternative keyboard layouts, like Dvorak, or in my case, Neo 2.

The letters are organized in a more convenient way than 'qwerty' and you have better access to special symbols, so you can write more quickly and without risking overuse health issues as much.

I see two problems:

1.) Your speed on regular keyboards declines, you become somewhat 'incompatible' when you're forced to work with them;

2.) I have heard that sometimes, operating systems or software like IDEs don't support these layouts fully, and there are issues.

Has anybody of you tried this, and how did it work out for you?

Or how can you make it work?

Answer 1

I don't know about the keyboards you mentioned but once I tried to use a keyboard that had letters in alphabetical order like a, b, c, d.... z . I found that inconvinient 🤷‍♂.

Usually whenever anyone starts using keyboards they think why it is arranged in so weird manner.(QWERTY)Why not alphabetically?
But after some months of practice we get used to this style.. it becomes more natural.
I'll say querty is best ...
In most of the fields eg. College,offices etc. We use querty so using other keyboards may cause confusion I think.

And shifting from one to another keyboard will take some time 🤔 so why to change?

And at last I found this article :
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.howtogeek.com/189270/alternative-keyboard-layouts-explained-dvorak-colemak-and-whether-you-should-care/amp/

Answer 2

🇮🇳Omkar🕉, the layout we use today was designed to prevent the jamming of the hammers of mechanical typewriters.

But the order of the letters is not optimal: You have to move around your hands more to reach the most common letters, while rarely occurring letters take up some of the best spots.

Alternative layouts arrange the letters in a way that the most common letters are also the most easy ones to reach.

So from that standpoint I think it totally makes sense to switch.

My question is about how well operating systems and programs like IDEs or editors support these layouts!

Because the best layout isn't worth a lot if you can't use it anywhere.

And also I'd like to hear from people who DID switch, how it worked out for them, how they get along in environments where everybody still uses 'qwerty'.