I did not realize this was a thing until I just switched to AZERTY which… despite being marketed as being “similar” to QWERTY, is still tripping me up

Edit: since this came up twice: I’m switching since I’m relocating to the French-speaking part of the world & I just happened to want to learn the language/culture, so yeah

  • technomad@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    I retrained myself in Dvorak many years back, and really enjoyed using it much better than QWERTY. I had to revert back to qwerty because of commercial standardizations/limitations at different workplaces, unfortunately.

    All that to say that workman layout seems even better after reading that article. I don’t really see myself making the effort to switch again, but I enjoyed reading about it. Thanks for sharing.

    • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I retrained myself in Dvorak many years back […]

      It’s been a while since I’ve tried Dvorak, so I’m not very confident in my memory, but, iirc, I remmeber Dvorak causing some discomfort in my wrists. Not as bad as QWERTY, mind you, but I found that Workman was much more comfortable for me. Plus, I found that the general proximity of Workman to QWERTY, when compared with the proximity of Dvorak to QWERTY, made it much more convenient to use. For example, on Workman, copy and paste (ie Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) are each just moved over one key to the right [1], whereas Dvorak puts them on the opposite end of the keyboard [2], that is, when comparing them with QWERTY [3].

      References
      1. Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Website. Title: “Workman Keyboard Layout”. URI: https://workmanlayout.org/.]. Accessed: 2025-07-11T23:48Z. URI: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kdeloach/workman/gh-pages/images/workman_layout.png.

        • Workman's keyboard layout

          • C is 4 to the right on the bottom row. V is 5 to the right on the bottom row.
      2. Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Article. Title: “Dvorak keyboard layout”. Publisher: “Wikipedia”. Published: 2025-05-29T22:38Z. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout.]. Published: 2025-02-08. URI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/KB_United_States_Dvorak.svg/1920px-KB_United_States_Dvorak.svg.png.

        • Dvorak's keyboard layout

          • C is 8 to the right on the top row. V is 9 to the right on the bottom row.
      3. Type: Image. Publisher: [Type: Article. Title: “QWERTY”. Publisher: “Wikipedia”. Published: “2025-06-18T19:29Z”. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY.]. Created: 2006-01-12. Published: 2018-11-22. Accessed: 2025-07-11T16:57Z. URI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/KB_United_States.svg/1920px-KB_United_States.svg.png.

        • QWERTY's keyboard layout

          • C is 3 to the right on the bottom row. V is 4 to the right on the bottom row.
    • mholiv@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 months ago

      Small warning about workman. It has issues with lateral movements and single finger n-grams. “ly” and “ct” being notable examples.

      A piece of advice I heard that served me well was to look mostly at post covid designs. A lot of work was done on layout optimization around that time and the results show.

      My recommendations in no particular order are:

      Colemak-DH if you want to focus on a well supported layout.

      Graphite or Engram or one of the hands down layouts are modern well optimized layouts I would consider if I was to learn something today.

      Some people like MTGAP but in my book it was designed with too much of an emphasis on minimizing key spacing without a strong enough emphasis on how human hands work.

      I personally use engram but it only works for me because I have strong pinkies. If you don’t it’s probably a bad choice.