Not sure about the combo keys, though. There are already enough keys to fully occupy the area I can comfortable cover typing with both hands. My keyboard layout allows me to type a lot in “chords” – it’s optimized so that successive key presses don’t use the same fingers for the most common combinations of 2 and 3 keys (in the material that I typed, a combination of Finnish, English, and code).

Then again, it might be that using our hands is part of the process of creating the things we want to say, because of how our brains work. I’m not sure about this, but there might be something to it.

Of course total time spent typing is completely dwarfed by total time spent thinking, so in the end typing fast isn’t that important. But sometimes, when you know exactly what you want to type, it’s nice to get it out of your head as quickly as possible :)

I have to say, though, that I spend a lot more time thinking what to type than actually typing. So it’s not really such a big deal, if you’re not lightning fast w/your keyboard. But it certainly pays to be quite good. Maybe I should be a little better.

I don’t know how people can stand programming w/the Finnish keyboard where the programming keys have been put to most horrible places. I guess this is how you’d feel about my US-1 qwerty.

Having taken the first step towards the mile you’ve gone here, I also know the downside of this approach: It sucks to use computers that don’t have your layout, when that’s what you’re used to.

Then again you can learn that as well. I don’t have this layout hack at work because I only use the Finnish layout when I write email in Finnish, which isn’t that often. In the beginning I kept on hitting Caps Lock a lot, but after some time I never do that any more at work, while it’s completely automatic at home. My brains have learnt to cope w/different contexts regarding keyboard layouts.

As an afterthought I might add that typing speed really isn’t the biggest concern when you’re programming, especially so w/effectively all editors supporting auto-complete.

Kudos for jumping the qwerty ship, although I really don’t mind using dvorak for programming (most words can be autocompleted, so you end up typing symbols much of the time; there’s no good layout compromise between coding and writing :[ ).