Alternate Keyboard Layouts

[siob]

i myself switched from qwertz (german) to the 'US alt international' layout.

The Clonk series actually brought to my attention the fact that Y and Z are swapped on the German keyboards (or they are swapped on the American keyboards, depending on how you look at it). Any idea why that is?

Because z is more common in german than y. But that doesn't explain why they moved around .,][*((.. most symbols, really. That was much harder to re-learn than the y-z switch.

[loom_weaver]

I have noticed that there is a Dvorak variant called Programmer Dvorak. Have you been using it? I think it is supposed to not have this problem.

No I didn't.  At the time I was doing a sys admin role and I often had to work on other computers and only if I was lucky would I be able to switch the layout momentarily.  This made it infeasible to reconfigure VIM to be qwerty in command-mode.  I just learned to navigate in dvorak. It was odd but possible.

I was switching around on several OS flavours too and so I stuck with the standard dvorak.