It's not an issue to know both keyboard layouts. I know 3.5 layouts (QWERTY, QWERTZ, Dvorak, Bulgarian BDS.)

Colleagues have a switch. setxkbmap -option compose:ralt or whatever your DE wants you to use.

There's really no reason to disagree here.

From the person you replied to

> Never had the same problem with Vim&Dvorak, even when writing frantically day and night on my thesis

Most of the graduate students I've knew spent a lot of time working alone, and had at some point to type a lot of things already clear in their head meaning ease and speed of typing was a very important factor, keyboard sharing not so much.

And then I've observed the same things as you, it's really annoying working at the desktop of my colleagues using non standards keyboards.

So, really, it's all dependent on context, and as usual there's a right tool for a given job. Kudos to both of you for coming to correct conclusions in your given environments :-)

I originally started learning dvorak because I was getting cramps in my hands from typing. Learning dvorak solved that. I run dvorak at home and qwerty at work, and I think switching between them helps out my hands and fingers even more. The only downside is when I first start to type something I sometimes type gibberish until I realize I'm on a different layout. For example, I originally type "G " instead of "I " when I started typing this. As far as I can tell I'm equally fast in either layout. If a friend comes over and needs to use the computer I can click on an icon in the taskbar and they are good to go.

I decided to stay with qwerty at work because I want a colleague to be able to work on my system, and switching keyboard layouts multiple times per day only causes me to type gibberish more often. And as you say, there is value in standardization.

I found the sysadmin in this thread :).

If you switch machines so often you can't keep up with moving your customizations between them, by all means, learn just the defaults (but do learn them - e.g. whatever the "standard" editor IDE, learn the keyboard shortcuts). As for pair programming, switching keyboard layouts and opening a project in a different editor/IDE takes only a small fraction of the time your colleague will spend in front of your machine.