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by V-2 4630 days ago
Okay, as I wrote in another comment, I once learned Colemak (I didn't like it very much) and subsequently, CarpalX (QGMLWY) which I liked and I soon reached a reasonable speed of about 80-90 wpm on it (which is about 2/3 of my QWERTY speed).

What were my reasons of trying new keyboard layout?

- "The hipster thing" (so that one doesn't count).

- Curiosity. I wanted to find out what the fuss is about - whether the talk behind it isn't just that, a hipster thing itself

- I like to learn and I love the feel of improving, of being better than the day before

- It's very comfortable once you get used to it.

Adressing your objections:

"- I think it would take me a while to be as fast as on my current layout QWERT[ZY]."

1. The time will pass anyway.

2. I never typed faster than on QWERTY, but I'm not really a typist. I'm not a court reporter. My productivity is not directly proportional to my typing speed. It's the thinking that takes most of the time anyway. So I can sacrifice some of the speed for the sake of comfort.

"None of my friends and coworkers ever complained about keyboard layout and the urge to change

This I believe, but as Henry Ford remarked: "if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." :)

"You may not have your new keyboard layout available at different workplaces."

That's obvious, but I, for one, don't change workplaces that often. And I only use two computers: one at home, one at work. Installing a preconfigured keyboard layout on a new machine takes a minute.

I mainly returned to QWERTY (I'm repeating myself again, but so be it) because English isn't my native language. All these alternative keyboard layouts are optimized for English. I use a QWERTZ mutation (PN-87 - rare and somewhat forgotten even in Poland) for typing in Polish. So sticking to QGLWMY could only ever make like 1/3 of my typing life better :) If I used no other language than English, I probably wouldn't have looked back.