Multilingual (cyrillic) and dvorak

General
1

So, I went ahead and changed my keymap on the UHK level from Qwerty to Dvorak, and I switched my English keyboard layout on OS level from Dvorak to Qwerty, cause I thought it’d be cool to have keyboard work with any Qwerty PC and have all macroses all the text readable / easily writable.

However, one issue instantly arose: I’m using a second Cyrillic keyboard layout. And as soon as I switched to my Cyrillic layout - I noticed all the letters are jumbled and I’m typing nonsense. Obviously.

How do you guys tackle this problem?

I see couple of options:

  1. Revert back to having OS declare Dvorak, and send Qwerty codes from UHK. Simplest choice, I did not delete old keymaps. However I’d really like to try make it work
  2. Create a macro that will both switch layout between Qwerty and Dvorak, and use a key combo that will switch the language in the OS between layouts. This option has two drawbacks:
  • it has a chance of getting out of sync, for example if you switch keymap when OS doesn’t register the shortcut for some reason
  • all the keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+c, etc) will be on the wrong place while using Cyrillic layout, cause, well, they will be on their qwerty places instead of dvorak places
  1. Create a separate cyrillic keymap on the keyboard itself and delete cyrillic layout from the OS altogether, but I’m not sure whether this is doable at all given UHK just sends key codes to the OS

So far unfortunately I don’t see any good options and am thinking of rolling back for now. I’d be happy to hear any (even hacky) solutions that might make it work.

p.s. for everyone who read my configuration post, I guess this is why I went with OS layout initially and not with the UHK one. I already forgot about this :slight_smile:

2

You can fix the 2 sync problem by binding each host keymap to a different key combination ;-).

3

yep but it still doesn’t solve shortcuts problem. for example vimium/cvim/surfingkeys in chrome starts to behave completely unpredictable when I’m using qwerty layout and press keys assuming they are dvorak keys

4

I have no advice there. I never managed to transition to dvorak because of this discrepancy (of some shortcuts being mapped according to meaning while others because of their qwerty position).

5

I did manage, after successfully typing 100 wpm on qwerty, it’s not so bad, ctrl+c & ctrl+v are kinda bad tho haha but I’m having my both hands on the keyboard anyway and for the rare case when I need them single handed I bound them to their qwerty places on a different uhk layer (with a mod key).

Now, relearning vim again from scratch was definitely an adventure :sweat_smile: completely new muscle memory needed to be developed. But vim keybinds aren’t too bad on dvorak either once you get used to them.

Now after a long time I can successfully say that you just need a meager 4 years of time and you’ll be up to your previous qwerty speed on the dvorak :smiley: and in 5 I just about managed to increase it further.

2 Likes
6

so.. no going back for me :sweat_smile:

7

That’s one of the reasons why I picked Colemak over Dvorak. It keeps the most important shortcuts (Ctrl+z/x/c/v/a/q/w) in the same positions as Qwerty.