I want to improve my touch typing skills on Linux. I’m curious:
- What tool or program would you recommend for learning touch typing on Linux?
- For someone whose native language isn’t English, would you recommend learning on their native keyboard layout or switching to the US QWERTY layout for programming purposes?
Honestly, I believe that, except for Russians or anyone whose language isn’t derived from Latin, using a US keyboard for programming is best, because you won’t be missing many keys. Maybe the French will miss the
ç, but you can learn the Unicode just like I did with the em dash and quotation marks:U+2014U+2013Quotation marks:
U+201CU+201DU+2018U+2019anyone using unicode quotes is insane, honestly any form of unicode character that is a duplicate of an ascii character should be avoided as it just adds uneeded complexity
use compose key and alt gr for rare, one of characters and you will never look back, stuff like diacritics/accents
You are the second person who mentions it but I don’t know what you mean. Got any links for compose key?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key the wikipedia page for it
in short, with it you can press Compose then some diacritic/accent then the letter
something like this <Compose> ` a -> à
unfortunaely it is a Linux and BSD thing only that stems from Xorg’s compatibility with many legacy system some of which had a dedicated compose key thus it was added to xkdb (which still used by Wayland compositors and thus the compose key works fine there) and to Xorg
In Plasma (formely KDE) there is a setting in the keyboard layout section that allows you to bind compose key to something like left control, GNOME as always doesnt has this by default you will need an extension, which one? idk, havent used gnome in years, you could also just figure out how to use xkdb directly but it is a mess and a complete pain to understand how to, I myself have no idea and would want to stay away from it, as for other DEs I am unaware if they provide a GUI for changing this or not
For something easier to remember, consider enabling a compose key:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
I miss the Compose key so much on windows for my work computer
I am a European who grew up with the German layout. For programming, its a disaster. Even back in 2006ish or so when I learned about AutoHotkey, I started using the US keyboard layout. After some time I switched entirely to the US layout. But recently, just a few years ago I found out there is a hybrid layout which is basically US, but with additional shortcuts to use my German characters (it shows up as this in KDE):
German (US)Luckily I learned programming when I was already using the NEO layout. I couldn’t imagine typing parentheses and the like in German…