Some­thing I dis­cov­ered to­day: DDvo­rak, a key­board lay­out loose­ly based on Dvo­rak which caters specif­i­cal­ly to de­vel­op­ers or pro­gram­mers. There’s a lay­out tester on the same site that mea­sures the over­all ef­fi­cien­cy of var­i­ous typ­ing lay­outs with any text that you choose.

DDvo­rak, on first glance, is a com­plete­ly unortho­dox typ­ing lay­out. It re­quires com­ma as a dead key for many sym­bols, and Alt­Gr as a mod­i­fier for many others. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, many things are moved to un­con­ven­tion­al lo­ca­tions (BackSpace is where ‘B’ is on QW­ER­TY key­boards, for ex­am­ple). How­ev­er, the lay­out tester con­sis­tent­ly mea­sures the ef­fi­cien­cy of DDvo­rak as sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than ei­ther Dvo­rak or Cole­mak, no mat­ter whether typ­ing English or code.

I think I’m go­ing to have to give DDvo­rak a try, soon, if on­ly I could fig­ure out how to rad­i­cal­ly change key­board lay­outs in X.org… of course, it’s easy with Win­dows. It wouldn’t be Win­dows if there weren’t a tool for ev­ery­thing.