> The kbd community has all kinds of small form factor / isometric layouts like this that are totally custom and efficient but just make me think how you just train your hands to be shockingly unproductive on 99.99% of other systems

I am curious, what kind of conditions require you to be productive on "other systems"? As a programmer these days, I pretty much am never told to sit in front of a random keyboard and expected to be productive there. I have the Ctrl/Caps mod you mentioned, and it bites me on other computers — but these typically tend to be instances of me helping some friend out with a computer problem. Any time that I am going to working for an entire day or more on a computer, I tend to figure out a way to swap Caps with Ctrl on it.

I can imagine the "should be able to be productive on any system" being a problem in the days when computers were scarce, and for instance, one had to use the computers in a university lab or similar. I can even imagine it today when you're talking about servers (e.g. I need to be able to use emacs, vi, and nano on any server that I'm logged into). But for keyboard input these days, it seems like we have the luxury to use our own highly customized input devices for 99.99% of the time.

In my experience, the stranger your weird keyboard, the less it impacts your ability to use a normal keyboard. Learning the guitar doesn't make you worse at piano-- your brain is capable of understanding how to use multiple tools, and the lack of physical similarity seems to help it disambiguate.

On-site (eg in a dc), pairing, some kinds of hot desking, user support.

I've mostly given up on customising and try to find efficient ways to work within each OS's defaults.

The wildcard is when you're hands-on keyboard with a heavy customiser who has wildly different preferences than you :)

I think a more common situation for many people is having to use the laptop keyboard instead of an external keyboard, for example because you are traveling.

i ended up customizing an ortholinear keyboard, took a little while to learn, but seems like my brain keeps a separate "mental map" of it, and it doesn't interfere with my typing on a standard laptop.

Same, I regularly switch from ortho colemak (with home row mods, key expansions, symbol layers, etc) to qwerty on my laptop with no issues.

The only thing that messes me up is if I start looking at the keyboard or trying to bypass my muscle memory to type. E.g. to input a complex password with uncommon symbols.

I probably regularly use 4-5 different machines regularly (2 at home, my work laptop, work laptop plugged into it's dock at work, embedded system flashing machine).

I also help coworkers when handing off a assembled embedded machine, which regularly involves temporarily helping out on their computer for a few minutes now and then.

I can't exactly see swapping coworkers keyboards out just to help debug something.

Exactly. My main work computer is a laptop on a dock, but I'm not always at my desk. I'm not going to carry the external keyboard around.

The pros never seemed like they'd outweigh the cons. I love smaller mechanical keyboards, but I'm not going to venture off of QWERTY.

> I am curious, what kind of conditions require you to be productive on "other systems"?

For me, vnc and qemu: I haven't found an easy way to have gvncviewer use my caps-to-control-or-esc

Even just caps-to-control would make happy!

With QMK you don't have this issue since it runs on your keyboard

On other systems, I may run scripts but I can't carry my keyboard.

Maybe we understand other systems differently.

I see. From your comment it seemed to me like the other systems were remote systems from your machine.

> lest I find myself embarrassingly useless when presenting on a random work computer that doesn’t support this

I use a completely custom layout one a small keyboard you're describing, but I can still type just as well (in fact even faster) on a regular keyboard with a regular keymap.

This fear is completely overblown. As long as you sometimes use a regular keyboard, you will retain your muscle memory.

I cannot do this.

Just because you can do so easily does not mean everyone can. I am apparently unable to segment my muscle memory like you seem to be able to (I'm actually jealous you can do that!).

I don't think it's any different from, say, speaking other languages or switching back and forth from countries that drive on different sides. These things just become automatic.

But that's not universal either; I have a friend who started losing english vocabulary when they first learned french. (The collected-anecdote metaphor (not, afaik backed up by any particular cognitive science) seems to be having "slots" for language, one-vs-two-vs-many...)

I just think it comes down to practice, like being able to speak multiple languages or program in different programming languages.

And something that can help is to differentiate your layout physically. In my case an entirely different keyboard, but even something like pressing space with the other hand can help keep them separate.

Completely agree, however when I customized a standard keyboard, I DID have issues switching back. Now I've customized an ortholinear split hand keyboard, and my brain seems to keep this as a completely separate mental map and I have no issues switching to my laptop keyboard anymore.

I’ve solved this by keeping my laptop keyboard uncustomized, while using Colemak-dh and home row mods on my desktop split keyboard.

I’m proficient enough that I can work on anyone else’s machine well, and I have the comfort and speed benefits on my main workstation.

> Sun keyboards had Ctrl where Caps typically lies

The Lord intended it to be this way. No arguing with this, heathens.

Welcome to the world of being someone who uses the Dvorak Layout. I quickly learned that my brain can't hold "two layouts" and my qwerty-layout touch typing pretty much evaporated after focusing on typing exclusively Dvorak. I can touch type Dvorak at over 90wpm, and Qwerty at maybe half that at best.

The thing that you somewhat over-exaggerate is the frequency at which I'm not using "my own computer" that has been already setup with Dvorak. Its exceedingly rare that I ever type anything on someone else's machine.