Since 16th of May, I’m user of the Neo Keyboard Layout. The main reason for this major change is ergonomics and typing speed. Neo seems to be nice due to it’s strong geek community (wiki, mailinglist, development and releases like an Open Source project), it’s good support for math symbols and nice collection of drivers. Nordtast-Layout seems to be nice too, but lacks in support of all the features mentioned before. Dvorak is not intended to be for programmers. Other keyboards layouts did not create a good first impression or included some terms like copyright, patent or property.
First positive experiences:
- The first impression is very positive. Feeling good.
- (it’s true) a lot things have to be typed using the baseline
- Using Windows’ (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, …) keyboard shortcuts is not that bad like in other alternate layouts
- the letter J is less difficult to find than expected
First negative experiences:
- Try to make a happy smiley
- the letter L typed using the right hand would be more comfortable
- less rhyme when typing personal frequent strings like my domain or unix commands
- html is going to be terrible difficult to code
- vim usage is much more complicated, because it’s optimized for QWERTY (thinking about using :map)
- Linux sucks. Since Neo, qwertz’s superkeys are no longer available. I cannot even type inequality signs for HTML
But all in all, zsh tab completion and google auto completion is making me lazy ^^
The first main problem was my habit to note every small thought. Because I was too slow to note it, I forgot a lot of things. And it seems to be I’m the only one person alive having no on-the-fly-switch to other keyboard layouts (I have to reboot for that). Whenever I had to do productive stuff (= programming), I had to fall back to qwerty. Actually every fourth day, I was using Neo. But now I begin to make real exercises (of course, starting with the baseline) to learn Neo. neo-layout.org provides lot of nice learning tips. So let’s check out the learning progress:
Day 1:
You type 86 characters per minute
You have 15 correct words and
you have 0 wrong words
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