I use the french layout at work and the U.S one on my imported (from the U.S) laptop. It hasn't been a detriment either way. I've also typed with a french keybo

I use the french layout at work and the U.S one on my imported (from the U.S) laptop. It hasn't been a detriment either way. I've also typed with a french keyboard using the U.S layout or inversely for convenience, occasionally. Both have worked fine with vim, even though I find vim pointless (unless you're sshing into a remote machine). I have to say, the premise is wrong, you don't need to learn touch typing to be serious about programming. A good programming hour is 60 lines of code (heavy generalization, don't nitpick pointlessly), you don't need to type fast, you don't even need shortcuts or macros or whatever fancy IDEs or editors people spend endless time arguing about. Don't make the mistake of doing the things you find satisfying (buying books, nice keyboards, customizing your IDE and OS for ultimate productivity, ...) instead of the things that are actually productive and hard: Actually programming something. I'd recommend listing the things you think you have to do to be serious about programming, and plotting them on a 2D graph where the x-axis is how hard they are, and the y-axis is how much better they'll make you at programming. That will make it clear what you must do.