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by _c3ag 1093 days ago
maybe it is more for future generations hoping the computer train?

after all, everyone starts without any skill at touch-typing, so why not teach them something better?

2 comments

Because there must be a coordinated effort to change the default or at least increase the diversity of layouts. Otherwise it's like teaching esperanto, putting them into a very small minority for little benefit.

Even as a technical user for decades I find it too burdensome to swim upstream with a niche layout, and I already have remapped copy-paste.

well, all we can do, is all we can do…

if swimming upstream is that hard (and i agree that decades of professional usage on a X layout is hard to give up); at least when teaching someone you could say something: “here is the layout you should use! i know mine is different and i can type typewriter with one row in case i want to impress someone but yours is better, like minor chances of getting a RSI and general efficiency when typing stuff…”

FWIW I did try an alt layout a while back. It was just too disruptive because it required changing so many shortcuts.

As more jobs come to benefit from shortcuts, QWERTY becomes more entrenched.

Maybe, but all that kind of assume you will only type on personal devices, or at least do 99.9% of your typing on personal devices.

When I worked in Europe for roughly 1 week of every month, I was largely flummoxed by the occassional need to use a foreign keyboard mapping (a German keyboard has y and z reversed from the English layout, as I recall). Just that and a few other differences for symbol keys meant that every time I had to use a keyboard not my own when in Germany, I went from being a fluent touch typist, to a hunt and peck typist. Same for French keyboards, which had several key re-arrangements relative to English that I no longer remember. If I taught my kids on Dvorak (which I considered, as they were home schooled), that would have been their experience on every device they encountered outside our home. I'm sure they would have loved me for it.