Switching keyboard layout

A colleague of mine recently told me

“You as a developer should consider switching to english keyboard layout - most programming languages have probably been developed by people with english keyboard-layouts - so language-specific buttons will be reachable much easier than on the german keyboard.”

Having used a german keyboard most of my life I could not deny a certain logic to it. Also - It’s been a while since I got used to switching layouts from time to time (default keyboard on a newly installed linux is english - and it helps to be able to get out of vi without googling “where is : on the UK keyboard”).

As I’m almost never writing in german anyway it should not matter much to loose the “Umlaute” - but help me in the long run to type faster. With this background I decided this morning to switch to the UK keyboard layout (the layout is identical to german - but most programming-specific keys are reachable without 3-button combos). So far it’s working mostly fine - just y/z are sometimes swapped - I guess i can get used to this layout within another day or 2. I still keep the layout-table open in a browser tab (i only swapped the layout - not the physical keyboard) so i can have a quick look if i can’t find a key.

I’ll try and post an update later on if I could successfully stick with it or if i reverted back to my comfort zone.