My Workman Ergodox layout

After I finished my work on my Ergodox keyboard a couple of months ago I also decided to change my layout. I knew very little about the whole keyboard layout madness out there, only that there are some and all of them claim to be better than QWERT. So I changed to DVORAK because this was the first layout which poped up in my mind. But after some typing sessions my right pinky was really stressed out after a couple of "ls -ltra". I had to give up on DVORAK, so much was clear, because this "ls -ltra" issue was a change to the worse compared to QWERT. I've researched a lot, even calculating a unique  layout based on the regular stuff I'm typing. The result looked so alien that I didn't dare to try it.

I then found Workman and after reading his thoughts about it I thought that this is quite familiar with the situation I'm in and his approach of how a modern keyboard layout should look like, convinced my to use it.
I can only recommend it to give it a try. I practiced enough to do my daily job with it with only a small speed impact compared of QWERT.

So here is my layout for Ergodox keyboards.

There is one big thing that you can't avoid if you try learning a new keyboard layout. You will mess up your old one. The only advice I can give you is that you should use a different physical  keyboard. Like having a black one  for QWERT and a white one for WORKMAN. This will trick your mind and will anchor your brain to "oooh, that's the white keyboard. I need to type differently here".

Update:
Workman Firmware for Ergodox. Here is my firmware file

Get a hyper key on your ergo dox

Hi

Time passes quickly and I'm not really the blogger as it seems. Anyway!
I build my own ergo dox keyboard and wanted to have a "Hyper" modifier key for my emacs.
Since I couldn't figure out if there is a native key code for this I came up with following solutions.

Create a ~/.xmodmap with following content.

remove Control = Control_R
keysym Control_R = Hyper_R
clear Mod3
add Mod3 = Hyper_R

This will transform your right control key into a Hyper key which you can bind in emacs with H a.g. "(kbd "H-c")" is Hyper-c

Of course that isn't every ones preferred way. The xmodmap commands are pretty self explaining for this simple task

The "remove" removes the control_R key from the control modifiers. Then I link/overwrite Control_R with Hyper_R. Mod3 modifieres were empty on my Debian default xmodmap layout. Check yours with just running xmodmap without any argument. And finally add it the the modifiers list. There is no particular reason why I chose Mod3. As said it was empty and I didn't want to make a mess on my keyboard config.
'keysym' is the most important command. If you need the right control as it is you might choose any other key you want. F12 or Home for instance. I also chose Hyper_R because I had an already configured Hyper_L but I don't know where this should be on my keyboard.

Little side note. xev helps a lot to find out what a key does if you press it.