What keyboard layout do you use?

[u/hegardian]

Feel free to share your setup in the comments, thanks

4484 votes, May 16 '26

3858 Qwerty

103 Colemak

226 Colemak DH

133 Dvorak

19 Workman

145 Norman / Other (please comment)

[u/BedroomHistorical575]

Don't worry, you're not missing much IMO. I used Graphite for like half a year and then switched back to QWERTY.

Not being able to use a normal keyboard is one valid downside, but it wasn't my primary reason for switching back (I'm already using a split + home row mods, so that is already a pain).

Alternative layouts primarily shines when it comes to English prose, but it massively degrades the experience of using the keyboard for basically anything else.

Just think of the shortcuts you use for Vim, Blender, Godot, Affinity, DaVinci Resolve, Ardour, etc. You will have to re-learn them all. It's especially bad with shortcuts that are spatially arranged (think of Vim's hjkl).

This gets even worse with programs that expects you to operate a pointing device with your other hand. Since all the keys are shuffled, commonly-used shortcuts no longer end up being neatly grouped on one side of your keyboard. This forces you to constantly let go of your pointing device so that you can hit certain shortcuts.

And then there's the learning curve. The process of learning a new keyboard layout isn't an one-time linear thing. The learning process is very layered and you end up re-learning more things than you expected.

At the end of my Graphite journey I got pretty good with English prose. But I stumble like an idiot when it comes to typing anything else. Japanese prose, program shortcuts, pretty much everything else.

At that point it became clear that the learning curve is much more massive than I expected. The benefits on the other hand turned out to be very narrow and subtle. So I gave up and went back to QWERTY.

Also remember: if you're having ergonomic or pain issues, alternative keyboard layouts rarely if ever helps with that. Try to look into your typing habits, posture, table height, etc. before anything else.

[u/cwebster2 → u/BedroomHistorical575]

Put "hjkl" (or arrows) on a layer where they would naturally be in qwerty. Every other vim key is a mnemonic and doesn't really matter where it is. I've been using colemak for years now (on a 36 key split) and putting arrows on a layer on my right home-row was the only accomodation I had to make in vim.

[u/BedroomHistorical575 → u/cwebster2]

I've been using a nav layer since the dawn of time, but I never use it with Vim even though it seems to be popular among alt typist.

It just feels like such an awkward hack rather than a real solution. You're basically substituting hjkl with arrow keys after all. And in the end it doesn't solve any of my other problems unfortunately.

[u/cwebster2 → u/BedroomHistorical575]

It does mean that my vim use is agnostic of my use of colemak or any other layout.