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

  • @[email protected]
    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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      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