I live in Zurich and have been thinking of switching.. If you don't mind, I have a couple questions:

How did you handle learning it given so many layers? Stickers seem like trouble..

Do you find it better or worse for dealing with use of occasional accents/etc from a 3rd latin language, (i.e. French) than a more traditional compose key route?

Thanks!

Hi, I've been using Neo2 for a couple of years now, so maybe I can help you with these.

Don't use stickers! You should touch-type neo from the beginning, so avoid looking at the keyboard. I had a print-out next to me for the first couple of weeks.

You also don't need to memorize all the layers from the start. I use layers 5 and 6 very very rarely, and for the Greek letters you can mostly guess (α is on a, β on b, ε on e, σ on s, etc). I still don't know everything on layers 5 and 6 (where's the ℵ again?...). Start with the letters and punctuation (layers 1&2 plus bits of 3) and just type a lot of text for a week, maybe picking up things on layer 3 as you go. It'll be painfully slow at first and your fingers might feel strangely exhausted (I never learned touch typing with QWERTZ) but you'll get faster soon :)

It took me two to three weeks to get to a level where typing wasn't a total point and another couple of weeks to exceed my old typing speed. The most helpful thing was to jump right in and never switch back to QWERTZ -- total immersion. I was a student at the time so I could take that luxury, but if you have a job you might not have that luxury. I have no idea how to best go about learning Neo if you still need to be able to type quickly while learning.

I rarely use Layer 4, I should probably learn that, but with a TrackPoint navigation is very easy without leaving the home row.

Occasional accents are no problem at all, Neo has combining diacritics (dead keys) so it's similar to a compose approach (i.e. you press ` then e to get è, or ° a to get å). Very easy. They're all on the key left of backspace, the one below it, and the one left of 1.

Cool, thanks! I'll do a little practice and then jump in to immersion at the start of my next vacation then. I just tried a little using an onscreen keyboard as a cheat, and it doesn't really feel all that different from learning chorded keyboard.

At least for me, I the sense of physical fatigue is about the stress of dealing with the higher degrees of freedom on a regular keyboard together with the location memory task. But needing a chorded keyboard seems like a bridge to far in a work environment.

It takes time. So I started with a typing program (ktouch) and lections for neo2.

There are 6 layers, but you have to consider that uppercase and lowercase is almost the same. The layers 5 and 6 are not in my usage pattern. Layer 4 is one of the easiest to learn, because it maps the right hand to the numpad and the left one to arrows like sdfe in computer games. a for pos1 and g for end. So there is some easy logic behind this.

At the end there is just layer 3. The organisation of the braces is that they appear in pairs and are arranged in a pattern.

So in Zurich they do a little bit more french as in germany. So I didn't had to use accents a lot. So I can't say a lot about it. èéâǎȩẽ. These characters are a little bit away from the optimal position. But they do not need a Compose Button. èéâ only needs two button strokes. ǎȩẽ needs the Shift button for the first stroke. But the accents are every time on the same position just on different layers. A little bit difficult to explain. Especially if you have not used accents before.

What I would suggest is to take neo2 as a basic layout, take the good parts and addapt it to the usage pattern of the french language.

very cool, thanks! Composing the other accents actually works well for me since I use them infrequently but just frequently enough to get annoyed if there is no system in their placement.

This is a DVORAK-like layout. We have the same for French-speaking countries, namely the BÉPO.

I tried switching to it, but I couldn't after a few weeks for three reasons:

- I type slower on other's people keyboards when I have to change frequently of layout (I use a Spanish QWERTY layout so it isn't as different);

- My phone doesn't have the layout, so more switching;

- The shortcuts aren't as convenient (Ctrl+c/v/t/etc.).

I use neo and find QWERTZ annoying to type on other people's computers. I still use it on my phone though, that's a completely different kind of typing and feels completely separate. Ergonomic layouts also likely wouldn't work well with swipe typing, half the words would be dashing left and right on the home row ;)

Other people's computers are easy if they run Linux (setxkbmap de neo) and okay if they run Windows (there's a no-install no-admin tool to remap), but you can't switch a Mac temporarily without installing the keyboard layout and even then getting the layers to work is awful. So I'd say you're half-right about that.

I have no issue with the shortcuts, it takes a while to learn them anew but they're no less convenient because of it. I started using Emacs years after Neo and I have no complaints about the keymappings, so it really can't be that bad ;)

In my experience, still having azerty on the phone is not too inconvenient: while I type blind on the Bépo, I stay visual with Azerty. This is enough of a difference that I don't confuse the two.

Just to add, while Neo is optimized for German text it also works very well with English (better than QWERTY/QWERTZ at any rate). These days I type more English text than German and it's no problem at all. Though it probably wouldn't be a native English speaker's first choice.