I learned en_US and tossed the other keyboard layouts that I had to learn before (German qwertz and later French azerty).

It was really worth it! It was difficult for 3 weeks. On Linux I use the US International AltGr Dead Keys layout, which I find very suitable because it allows me to write all the German, French and Turkish characters by composing accents on them. On Windows this layout does not exist (but the simple US which is backward compatible for all ASCII characters is there) so I had to find it on the net and install it manually.

The rational is, that in almost all non-English countries the US keyboard layout is available and you can really quickly change to it (on windows it is LeftShift+LeftAlt) if you have to touch the keyboards of your colleagues. The pre-requisite is to be able to type blindly.

I took this decision when I had to work in different countries. It was a life changing experience. If I knew it before I would never have learned azerty when I moved to France.

One problem though is to get computers with the US layout. In this regards Lenovo seems to be the only one that lets you chose the US layout.

I'm serious: Are you really comfortable with that layout? I mean, most programmin related symbols are hard to reach in my world.. I'm on en_US just because of that.

Which commands are you having trouble with? I'm using the Colemak keyboard layout and have no problems.

[ ] { } and / are harder to reach on de_DE than on en_US. I once learned the en_US layout, but after that I had problems with de_DE and when I visited Paris, I also had trouble with fr_FR, altouhgh I knew azerty and qwertz quite well.

I have never ever heard about Colemak. I use Gentoo with the KDE destop, btw.

Id say the layout of the keyboard doesn't matter. I've been using vim in Dvorak for years now and it hasn't been an issue. The 'hjkl' thing doesn't make sense, but once you get past that, it's just another set of keys to learn.