Warning: some mechanical keyboard nerdtalk might be appearing
Well, since I could resist the urge to buy a CODE with greens and instead went for a CM QuickFire rapid with greens (mainly due to the CODE having features I won't use), I will have my first ANSI keyboard soon. Since I have to switch layouts now anyway, I was thinking about trying out an alternative keyboard layout, too.
So far I'm using the standard German QWERTZ layout, but once in a while I already used neo2 layout. Sadly, this layout doesn't seem to work anymore with ANSI, at least I couldn't find a version for ANSI. (Although, what ANSI users might check out for me: Is simply the MOD4 button above the Enter key? I doubt that, but if that's the case, it could still work.
Due to that, I tend to switch to eurKEY. It makes the switch to an ANSI keyboard (almost) perfect, with the only downside being the switched Y and Z. I wouldn't have to change much (maybe I can even remap Y and Z) while having all my old keys and the benefit of the ANSI layout regarding special characters like brackets or slashes.
I even thought about using Dvorak for a moment, but I don't think it would work for me and then I scraped the idea, probably rather sticking to eurKEY.
So since there are at least 5 times the amount of custom layouts: what are you using? Would you recommend it? Is typing much smoother for you or did you get much faster? What might also be interesting for me: any ex-ISO typers that switched to ANSI? If yes, what layout are you using and what were your biggest challenges?
PS: I'm typing pretty fast, reaching easily 580-600 keys per minute on the typera.tk word speed test. With that in mind, I can't imagine switching to anything but eurKEY would make me type faster.