Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing QWERTY vs qwpr, the Slant community recommends QWERTY for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” QWERTY is ranked 5th while qwpr is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose QWERTY is:
You don't have to carry your own keyboard everywhere, QWERTY is pretty popular.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Popular
You don't have to carry your own keyboard everywhere, QWERTY is pretty popular.
Pro Default keyboard shortcuts
The keyboard shortcuts for most applications were designed with QWERTY in mind.
Pro Good for Vim users
Vim is most natural in QWERTY, since this is the layout it was designed on. Learning a good editor will help with your programming a lot more than learning a new layout.
Pro Easy access to important keys
Some of the most used keys in programming such as ; . / " | ' < > * are very easily accessible because they either have their own keys or are "shift options". People who grew up using alternative layouts, such as Belgian AZERTY, know from experience this shouldn't be taken for granted.
Pro Good for vim users
Qwpr is pretty close to QWERTY, and even the HJKL keys are in the same left-to-right order (though on different rows). Alternatively, the AltGr plane also has arrow keys in a sensible position under the right hand.
Pro Common shortcuts don't move
A, Z, X, C, and V are in the same positions as QWERTY and Colemak.
Pro As easy as Dvorak
It's 32% easier than QWERTY by the Carpalx metric, which is slightly better than Dvorak's 30%. This is probably within Carpalx's margin of error though.
Pro Alternate plane with CapsLock key
CapsLock is pretty useless for most people, but qwpr layout uses it to shift to another plane with easy access to punctuation and arrow keys. This is especially useful for programmers.
Pro Minimal retraining from QWERTY
11 keys move, but except for P and E, they don't change fingers.
Cons
Con Not an easy to gain speed on QWERTY
Learning to touch type using traditional touch typing methods, you would not be as fast as others on Dvorak and you would be making quite a few mistakes.
The reasons that most of record holders have placing in typing speeds is because they do not use traditional typing methods.
Con Made for typewriters, not computers
It was created before computers got popular. This layout was created for typing machines, so as to prevent collision between character hammers from slowing down the typist.
Con Very unintuitive
Why QWERTY?
Con Correct typographic letters and symbols not easily reachable
Con Puts E on the pinky
'E' is the most used English letter by far, at almost 13%. That's almost as much as the spacebar. It needs to be on a strong finger. The pinky is the weakest finger and on the right side it is already overtaxed from Ctrl, Shift, and Enter.
Con P and E change fingers from QWERTY
Which makes it harder than necessary to learn from QWERTY. (And makes no sense. 'E' was arguably better in its QWERTY position on a strong finger.) This is due to using the flawed Carpalx effort model.
