When comparing Workman vs qwpr, the Slant community recommends Workman for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” Workman is ranked 4th while qwpr is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Workman is:
Colemak's focus on the home row is flawed. Due to differing finger lengths and the natural range of human hand motion, the center columns (even on the home row) take more effort to reach than the top row with the longer middle fingers. Workman takes this into account.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Less lateral motion than Colemak
Colemak's focus on the home row is flawed. Due to differing finger lengths and the natural range of human hand motion, the center columns (even on the home row) take more effort to reach than the top row with the longer middle fingers. Workman takes this into account.
Pro Common English bigrams are optimized
This is an emphasis shared with Colemak, but Workman focuses on the easiest keys instead of the home row.
Pro Finger travel is very low overall
This is good for preventing RSI.
Pro Very comfortable for Vim
Works so well out of the box that I can only think the creator thought about it beforehand.
Pro Good for programming
Common characters {} [] <> () / ' " are easily accessible by the right hand on the right of the keyboard.
Combinations ( { + } for example) are placed side by side on the keyboard which is useful as well.
Pro Works on any keyboard, but additional benefits from Matrix style keyboards
Someone mentioned a CON because it was designed for Matrix style keyboards, but it was designed on a standard keyboard. However, matrix style keyboards adds additional benefits on top of this key layout. For those who don't know matrix keyboards are those where the key rows are not offset, but are directly above one another.
Pro Ctrl- AZXCV shortcuts are still accessible with one hand
AZX are in the QWERTY positions, and CV have only shifted one key right. This lets you use the mouse with the right hand and the shortcuts with the left, unlike Dvorak.
Pro Mac version has Dead Keys version
The macOS version of Workman has the comma (,) key as a dead key, which allows you to access harder keys on a secondary layer.
Pro Most symbols and shortcuts are the same as QWERTY
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 Certain Keybindings don't work in certain applications
In certain apps (like kitty terminal emulator), keyboard shortcuts like Control+C do not work.
Con Designed to be used on a matrix style keyboard
This keyboard layout wan't designed to be used on a normal keyboard.
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.
