I’ve decided to jump back into learning a new layout, specifically semimak JQ, from Dvorak. I’ve heard that as long as I practice both I should be able to maintain Dvorak while I learn semimak.

I was wondering if people here had any experience learning new layouts could share some insight for that?

Any other tips would be very appreciated. I’m sitting at somewhere around 26wpm on semimak atm, and 130-140 on Dvorak

  • Corr@lemm.eeOP
    2·
    1 year ago

    Wow that’s very good news for me lol. I appreciate your feedback. I’ve been doing a bit of practice daily and I’ve gotten up to 30wpm semimak while roughly maintaining Dvorak. I can see how the vowel cluster could feel a bit bad to use but I’m liking it so far. Too early to tell for sure though whether I will want to stick with it indefinitely.

    Are you still using Dvorak now? If not what layout are you using that you like? Semimak seemed appealing for the extremely low movement but there are of course a bunch of layouts out there so I would love to hear what you’re using as a former (present?) Dvorak user

    • galilette@mander.xyz
      3·
      1 year ago

      Nowadays I’m mostly using a layout that I made based on the original Maltron layout as designed by Lillian Malt (where you put ‘e’ on a thumb key, and ‘s’ on the vowel hand index home position) and only fall back to dvorak as a last resort (travel on a laptop etc.) It’s more about reducing the use of bottom row mid/ring/pinkies than speed or other related statistics (the theory is that by restricting them to the top two rows, they stay longer in their more natural curvature, thereby reducing tendon stress). With ‘e’ on a thumb, you avoid the double stacking of the vowel cluster of most modern layouts, but still have the vowel hand index finger freed up for consonants, which then makes it easier to only have infrequent letters on non-index bottom row.

      • Corr@lemm.eeOP
        2·
        1 year ago

        Oh interesting. I’ve seen some layouts with keys on thumbs but I’m not really super into the idea for portability reasons, even though realistically it’s not like I’ll be able to use semimak on someone else’s computer anyway.

        Maybe it’s something I’ll give a shot later down the road, but I’ll do semimak for now at least