I’ve recently started trying to improve my typing speed, which has probably been held back by my somewhat unconventional typing style. Formal touch typing was never a part of my education, and while years of computer use eventually led to me being able to type without looking, I’m probably not as efficient as I could be.
Can you touch type - and with proper form? QWERTY, DVORAK or other layout?


I don’t recall much of my process learning touch typing on qwerty but the process was frustrating at first learning dvorak because the qwerty muscle memory kept getting in the way. But I made myself use it in IRC and kept a diagram of the layout on my 2nd monitor. I also played some typing games. Then, over time, I got better and better with it and started moving other programs over until it was my main layout. Now the first thing I do on a new to me PC is go looking for keyboard layout options (and holy fuck MS has moved that shit all over the place).
Wayland (or something in KDE) has the best handling I’ve seen yet. Gaming was always kinda annoying as different games have different levels of support for alternate layouts.
On windows, some would just work, remapping the default keybinds to the layout (because moving isn’t about hitting wasd specifically, but the keys in those places) and text types as expected. Some I’d go into options and remap to dvorak. Some I’d just switch the layout and be annoyed any time I had to type text instead of hitting keybinds.
On Linux, Fedora Cinnamon, it was just random whether the layout would work like I wanted or do something else, like reverse (where even switching layouts keeps the incorrect dvorak layout), or sometimes it just ignored the system layout entirely. I had to remap and reset to defaults a lot.
But then I switched to Fedora KDE and it’s perfect. Only “issue” is I had to set the default to qwerty, but then it uses that layout to remap the bindings for other layouts and both bidings and typing just works all the time now.