Comment by ninjakeyboard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninjakeyboard | Hacker News Reader

Learn Colemak instead IMO - I've been using it for about 7-8 years. Here are my remarks to address your gripes from a long time alt-layout typist.

FWIW your ability to type on QWERTY returns after a while - you just need to keep using both. It's like a switch changes although it helps to have visual queues to get back into gear with qwerty I find. Otherwise my keyboards are all blank now including a blank kinesis advantage. If I use qwerty I need to look at the keys to start typing usually.

And my typing speed is probably slower than it was when I was using qwerty. I was reaching 120wpm peak on qwerty, maybe could do 100wpm with colemak (haven't checked) but I type much better as I learned the new layout with discipline - eg no cheating with wrong finger on keys - and I move my hands much less so my RSI is better. You can visibly see wear on my home row - a sheen that's on those keys from pressing them more than the other keys. My co-worker says it looks like I'm hacking on the matrix because my fingers don't appear to move when I'm typing.

As someone else who learned and still uses Colemak... it's just not worth it in the long-term unless you're using it to address something specific like chronic RSI.

QWERTY does return to you, sort of, but only if you still actively use it in some other contexts. If you don't use it regularly, you'll lose proficiency in it and not really be able to easily switch between the two (though in my own experience I did retain some of the muscle memory, it was just much more error-prone). I'm at the point now where I can somewhat easily switch between the two, but it's very context-specific. My fingers recognize my laptop keyboard and gaming machine keyboard and instinctively use Colemak and QWERTY for them, respectively. But there are still times where my brain gets into an "undefined state" where I can't figure out which layout a machine is using or which layout my fingers are attempting to type, and as far as I can tell I end up typing something like a nonsensical hybrid mashup between them which is surprisingly sticky and difficult to recover from.

In the end, I believe my typing speed is something like 10%–15% faster than what it used to be with QWERTY, but I don't feel there's many contexts where I'm genuinely limited by typing speed. On the other hand until I become semi-fluent in QWERTY again, it was maddeningly difficult to use other people's computers.

I sort of agree, but I think it's better to prevent RSI than to manage it.

yeah my goal is to live a long and happy life of hacking and coding. My health is more important than being able to type a search into bob's computer without looking at the keyboard. But I was having a LOT of wrist pain.

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