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Add to SafariWhen comparing Workman vs Carpalx QGMLWY, the Slant community recommends Workman for most people. In the question“What are the best keyboard layouts for programming?” Workman is ranked 4th while Carpalx QGMLWY is ranked 15th. 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
Question 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 Easier to learn than QGMLWB
Keeps the ZXCV key in the same place as the very common QWERTY keyboard layout. More familiar than even than QGMLWB.
Pro The layout is basically good for most Latin languages
As vowels and consonants are mostly divided between 2 hands and most words in Latin languages are made of 2-letter (consonant+vowel) syllables, the layout keeps it efficiency not only in English, for which it was primarily created, but in other languages too.
Pro It takes much less effort to type than classical layout
The layout effectively combines not only changing hands methods, and rolling fingers as well, that makes typing a real pleasure.
Pro About the same score on the carplax test as the QGMLWB variant
See the source here.
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 Very unpopular
Even rich on keyboard layouts variety Linux distros like Deepin, offering most of existing layouts, doesn't have this one. The situation on Android is not better, moreover if somebody get used to Swift-like keyboards, that do not have this layout, that person will be forced to have a second (e.g. qwerty) layout in mind.
Con Not always worth trying
The layout is great only if somebody uses it daily and a lot, like journalists, bloggers, writers do. In this case inconvenience to install the layout is worth use it. If you primarily use your phone/tablet to write some comments in Internet and other tiny writing tasks having such an unpopular layout on just your PC/laptop could be not justified.
