>no mention of Dvorak or Colemak? Let's have that eternal discussion again!

I prefer Workman. Used to use Dvorak. Did not see much point to Colemak or its Mod DH variant by the time I was open to switching again, Workman set out to solve those issues in its original design. To anyone coming from Qwerty these days (Workman only came out in 2010), I would just recommend skipping over Dvorak and Colemak. You can find even more esoteric layouts, but Workman is in a bit of a goldilocks zone where it's available in some OSes/keyboards by default and isn't impossible to find keycaps for (often the "colevrak" kits cover it).

>Swap Caps and Ctrl

I never liked binding caps to Ctrl or Esc, but I do bind it to Compose in my OS these days. What I'd instead recommend is getting an ergonomic keyboard with a thumb cluster, like the Pinky4 or Iris, and putting your modifiers there. My Ctrl, Alt, and Super keys are all thumb keys now and even the leftmost of them is offset a similar amount to where Alt is on a traditional keyboard, so all very comfortable to press. I also have backspace, space, and enter on thumb keys.

>use Emacs or vi keybindings,

Strongly agreed, this is huge. Vi especially as you can avoid most chords, a bit like Sticky Keys in Windows, except not awful and not something you activated by accident. I spent considerable time with Spacemacs as well as evil-mode in my own config at one point. Back to (neo)vim now, but all great choices, all better than using nano or a CUA binds editor.

I use Colemak DH for many years and Dvorak before that and I am of an opinion that alternative layouts are way overrated. I even somewhat regret inventing so much time in learning them. QWERTY is just fine!

The matter I want to preach about tho are split ortolinear keyboards. I believe absolutely every typist should use them. Conventional keyboards are just bad from ergonomics perspective and eventually it’d have a toll on your wrists health. And many of these keyboards stores key mappings directly on the chip so no need to mess with weird mapping software.

Having said that, my split keyboard is one of the best investments I did in my life.

Thank you for creating the containment thread.

If you swap caps for left control, do you swap return for right control? I've been taught not to type modifier + key with one hand.

Dvorak + Emacs user here, by the way. In my opinion mouse use is okay, but I think a drawing tablet is better than a mouse.

I could never see the need to rebind Ctrl to Caps Lock (and I do use Emacs). Whenever it's time to press Ctrl, I curl my pinky and press that key with my pinky's distal joint. I did, however, swap Fn and the Global key on my Mac.