QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, or: Standard, and More Intelligent Keyboard Layouts
To make a long story short: The position of letters on a “standard” keyboard has historic reasons.
From a modern, scientific point of view, several aspects of a typical QWERTY (also QWERTZ and similar) layout are not optimal:
- Frequently used letters such as E, R, and T require moving the fingers from the home row.
- QWERTY often requires same hand/finger movements and row jumping.
Rather than wondering why some of the most frequently used letters need moving your fingers from the home row, we can choose better keyboard layouts.
To make a long story short: I found the Colemak layout being the best instant alternative for QWERTY. There is a lot of information about its installation, learning, etc. on the webpage colemak.com. The community is active in a forum and on Discord. Colemak uses optimized positions of letters for Western languages, is easy to learn, and ideal for multilingual typing.
I personally use the Colemak Mod-DH for matrix keyboards on all my keyboards.
Hack: Install and learn Colemak. Yes, this will cost you some weeks to get used to, but the benefit is eternal.