Using workman layout for 1 year. Retrospective.

Using QWERTY on a regular basis was never an option to me. It has a lot of frequently used keys far from the standard position, high index of the Same Finger Utilisation, slow average speed of typing common bigrams etc¹.

However, this essay will not be about pros and cons of workman, but about the state of its ecosystem and the pitfalls I falled into for the last year.

The second most popular layout after qwerty is colemak and there're more bells and whistles and if I were choosing again I'd go with colemak, but we have what we have and workman is also a neat option.

I'm a fan of vim-keybindings and I utilize them heavily everywhere I can: editors, qutebrowser, firefox with a vim extension, etc.

hgkl is undoubtedly the most oftenly used keys, and in workman they correspond to neoi. After installing a brand new vim-driven thing, the first thing you will have to do is to substitute hgkl bindings with neoi, as the navigation without them is absolutely painful at best and map what previously was mapped to neoi to hgkl. Hence, the first big step of the adaptatoin of workman is to ensure that you've changed every hgkl binding for every environment/mode.

And the most challenging thing is to find where in this beautiful piece of software you see for the first time in your life you can change them. Believe me, looking up "n" in a 1k lines long file of default keybindings is not how you want to spend your evening.

Surprisingly, apart from hgkl other keybindings are pretty much usable and you can go with the default configuration. But I must note here that workman was my first layout when I started using vim extensively and I didn't have to re-learn much after transition to workman.

So the point is that whenever you acquire something which relies on the position of keys regarding each other, you'll have to dedicate some extra time to tune the thing up as it'll be pretty unusable at the beginning.