Does anyone do this and type in multiple languages regularly?
I could see myself getting into it if I only had to bother with a single layout, but since I deal with three different layouts on a daily basis, no way.
I use Dvorak and regularly type in both English and Chinese (Pinyin).
On Linux and Mac it's no issue to input both using Dvorak.
On Android, however, none of the Chinese input methods support Dvorak so I had to decompile and modify Google Pinyin's APK and rearrange the XML layout files to Dvorak.
I recently switched to Dvorak for iOS, which I was delighted to find as an option.
While I can still function on a full-size QWERTY keyboard on account of using them regularly, I almost never pick up someone else's phone, so my thumbs have forgotten it entirely.
Yes. I'm also using my own layout on ErgoDox EZ, my languages are Czech (příšerně žlouťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy) and English. I'm also a (neo)vim user.
I found it hard to switch layouts, I'm using only one with layers. On first layer there are english letters, second layer there are accents (a → á) and some symbols where accent is missing (m → +). On third layer there are arrows on home row and functional keys. Shift without other key is `(`, on second layer `{`. There are some additional keys at the bottom and middle, they cover the rest of symbols. Outliers are mapped to start editor, browser, ctrl+c, ctrl+z, volume, mute, …
I really like having a single layout. I don't like that I'm no longer able to type on QWERTY without looking at keys. On my desktop, I'm 10 % faster, on any other computer I'm 90 % slower. Would I do it again? Probably yes.
I'm a native English speaker (with a lot of study of Frènch) and I am deeply grateful that English, while we have many dire critics, does not have diacritic accents. But it makes me curious. Could Czech (and the Scandi languages) do away with their diacritics and just stop using them? DONT INTERRUPT LET ME FINISH the question. I understand that you're used to it, and it's "nice", but is all that decoration absolutely necessary? SHUSH I'm not done. Let's look at Hebrew and Arabic: they don't indicate any vowels. Sounds crazy, sounds intolerable, but they get along just fine.
Because English and simple ASCII made such a nice team, just wondering, not trying to say anything diabolically odious or even ďábelské ódy
(I was making a macaronic joke, didn't look up the translation of that till after, but it was perfect! "devilish odes")
- Diacritics, for example in German, make writing and reading easier than English and you cannot have ghoti[1]
- Diacritics, is an easy way to avoid di-grams and tri-grams: English has "sh", Czech has "š" (it's not a decoration, it has a true meaning)
- ASCII seems to make a nice team with English because it's an American creation. Should English had some accents that ASCII would have included them, like dollar sign (this is an "S" with a stroke…)[2]
- Languages that could go with out vowels are those where words forms have no ambiguity. In English, "bt" for example is ambiguous because there's "bit", "bat", "but", "boat", etc.
So you are just having a ethnocentric point of view, that's human.
The difference between `s` and `š` is similar to `s` and `sh`. Can you omit `h` in Englis? Well, tecnically yes, but you canged the language. Same on you!
yes, I agree, that's the point I'm making: it's doable like abjads and their vowels. And by coincidence, only does Hebrew not have vowels, it also does not distinguish between s and sh, they are both that W-looking character! That's the spirit in which I was asking the question, they don't distinguish, but they still have no trouble reading and writing.
Unlike English, it's possible to read Czech without knowing the words (no tricks like "tomb"). If you omit accents, one would either have to know correct pronunciation or he will read it differently.
What you could do is to replace an accent with an ASCII character. Compare the name of town Český Těšín with its Polish equivalent Czeski Cieszyn (Č → Cz, ě → ie, š → sz). Actually, this is how we got here, 600 years ago Jan Hus (John the Goose) added diacritics to shorten a few diagrams in written language.
It is annoying that Windows keeps Qwerty for it while Mac uses Dvorak. If it was just consistent (I constantly switch machines) it would be easy to handle and entirely subconscious by now...
But I start typing the wrong layout every time and lose a few seconds mentally reorienting myself.
I don't use Windows so I don't have an definitive answer for you but it seems possible to have Dvorak+Pinyin. This is 6 years old so I don't know if the latest versions of Windows work the same way
Yes, I type in Dutch, English and sometimes German. You have to check if the distance advantage also goes for the three languages, for me they all are more efficient and more comfortable in Dvorak with the I and U reversed.
It's not that much more comfortable, but definitely noticeable.
When you have had RSI anything that makes typing more comfortable helps.
Of course if you want the most efficient (you first have to decide on the factors, and the most efficient combination) layout for each language of the most efficient for the average of each language you can have a nice hobby for a year. I was afraid I'd end up with an esoteric layout and then after a few years find out that there was a better layout and I would learn that one all over again. Instead I decided to stick with DVORAK with an improvement tweak so it would be also more or less be usable on Android en iOS.
AZERTY (french) keyboards made some unimportant choices which just turned out horribly over time. I can't remember exactly but in the age of MSWindows and the internet, characters like \\ and @ (I think) were just buried away so deeply. I have a number of French friends who can't deal, they just use QWERTY keyboards.
It has one clever design choice that nobody followed though: the fact that numbers are not wasting a full row of your keyboard without modifiers. Like, if I want to type a number I can start by pressing shift then typing the number, while all the braces I want to use are separated, and on a lot of layouts this implies using Shift which is annoying. (Or use the numpad, one more reason to not give them that much importance on the keyboard)
I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.
Why would anyone switch layouts, unless they're more than bilingual in non-English and layouts somehow comes with mutually offending differences? ASCII is subset to everything. Your national keyboard should be able to handle it.
I could see myself getting into it if I only had to bother with a single layout, but since I deal with three different layouts on a daily basis, no way.