touch typing on non-US layouts

[Ciebiada]

Hi there,

Lately I've purchased my first mechanical keyboard - the blackwidow (first edition), and despite that, sadly, I hardly find it as comfortable, as my laptop's keyboard, I find myself hooked on the idea of trying another one... I gotta say, I wouldn't believe that that keyboard hobby is so addicting.
But to the case: since I'm already here I decided to improve my touchtyping habbits, don't get me wrong, looking at, basically ALL people around, I am a very good touchtyper, correctly using all the fingers, both the shifts.
But the perfectionist I am, I want to get better.

First I decided to use both the thumbs for the spacebar, this **** is hard to get used to. I dropped from like 115 wpm to 50 wpm.
I press the spacebar with the opposite thumb to the hand that typed the last letter. Is that even correct? Is proper touchtyping technique doccumented somewhere?

Next thing, and well, the main issue of this post, is typing exotic characters.
I'm sure some of you, are not using native american layout.
For example: to type some of my native characters I gotta press the alt modifier + certain letter, pressing Alt with your thumb is awkward, but if that was not enough it has to be the right Alt, because the left one is reserved for the menu access in windows.
So what I've always been doing, and basically all the people, is using that right Alt with all desired letters, like with "a" (which is pressed with the left hand, which is okay), but also with "o" which has to be pressed with the right hand, along with the Alt (not okay).

So, to resolve that, I've remaped left alt key to the right one. Using both keys I can use the opposite one for certain letter.
It feels a lot better, but now it doesn't (well it never did) go along with the rule about pressing spacebar with the opposite thumb. Typing for ex:
"Michał",
which ends with exotic character makes me press Alt with left thumb and "l" with right ring finger, now normally I should press spacebar with the left thumb since the last letter was "l", but since the left thumb was just pressing Alt it's better to use the right one in that case, and I think Im gonna stick to that.

tl;dr

Are there any people that use non-US layout, and care to elaborate on their touchtyping experience.


OR am I just crazy?

[czarek]

I also use alt for Polish characters. Using opposite side as the letter so for example for "ś" I use right alt and s, for "ó" I use left alt and o. It can be tricky on Windows but on Mac there is no problem with that - alt and shift keys are reserved for special characters, ctrl is reserved for terminal / console and command key (sometimes combined with other modifiers) is for menu commands and keyboard shortcuts. Simple and logical.

I'm sure you can remap right alt on windows to work as left alt to make touch typing easier, but it will cut you off from using windows menu shortcuts...

BTW I'm not sure if Polish native layout is based on ISO or ANSI keyboard but I prefer ANSI over ISO due to Enter key being easier to reach with pinky finger.

[Daniel Beaver]

I use the US-International layout on an ANSI, and use prefix characters for accents and such. For example:
  ~n gives you ñ
  'e gives you é
  "u gives you ü

Spanish-language ISO keyboards are still a minority here. I find myself unable to touch-type on them efficiently. The tiny left-shift key and far-away enter key suck, and various punctuation keys are just arbitrarily rearranged. The regular letter placements are unchanged, but the other changes to the board cause me to spend a lot of time with the backspace key.

[Ciebiada]

I guess mac is better in that regard, but as I said, I've successfully remaped both Alts to be the right one, and typing now is so much better. I just gotta get used to using the right thumb for space.

[sordna]

What I've done to one of my keyboards is remap the Caps Lock as an additional AltGr (along with the right AltGr) but I leave my left Alt in place.
I've also swapped the 2 Alts in another keyboard, but never gone without a regular Alt key.

[czarek]

I just gotta get used to using the right thumb for space.

Does it really make a difference? I use thumb only for space and I'm so used to use only left thumb that I don't really care about it. I don't think it slows me down or increases fatigue of left hand.

[Ciebiada]

Do you press Alt with your middle finger then?

[czarek]

Do you press Alt with your middle finger then?

See that's the tricky one. I have Alt keys remapped as Command keys as that's where they are on normal Mac keyboard (next to space on both sides), and Ctrl keys remapped as Alts. It makes it quite obvious for me to use little pinky fingers to reach them - I can do that without moving my hands from home row so it's not a problem at all. Ah and obviously Ctrl is mapped under Ctrl - that's the most logical position for Ctrl in my opinion. Makes it super convenient for terminal Ctrl commands. And I'm used to it since childhood as that's where it was on my Amiga. On later machines I always remapped Caps Lock to Ctrl.

Ahh and I don't use Windows keys or whatever is in their place on other keyboards.