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Comment by Rabidmonkey1 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm... Colemak looks interesting. I've always had a hard time learning to use Dvorak, especially since everywhere else you work it's going to be Qwerty by default. Colemak is also public domain, according to Wikipedia. I might have to give it a try.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colemak#Colemak

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I actually installed Colemak on my computer yesterday. I played with it for a couple hours before uninstalling it. Most of what I type is programing code, not prose. It dawned on my that most my typing delays come from all of the parens and brackets and other programming symbols. Since all these fancy keyboard layouts have been computationally optimized for prose language, they don't address the primary cause issue. I decided that if I'm going to take the time to learn a new keyboard layout, then it will need to be one that has been optimized for programming.

Fix this, please. It's making this thread just about unreadable.

My apologies. I didn't notice until the edit link disappeared. And I have no clue why the site decided to add <code> brackets to my comment.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I fixed it.

My experience has been different. After playing with the Colemak keyboard on-and-off for about a week, It's still growing on me. My fingers move a lot less from the home row, even when switching to Spanish.

Since I also write code, it's clear to me how it isn't that great for certain languages, because it moves the semicolon to a rather inaccessible position. But for languages that do not rely on that character to end statements, it works quite well as other symbols remain in the QWERTY standard position.

Overall I find it a lot easier to learn than I thought it would be.

I made myself inline typing macros for all the common stuff I write when coding and it has done wonders for me both in reducing RSI and increasing speed. Some of the macros I use are:

,i = int ,f = float ,9i = (int) ,9f = (float) ,r = return ,f = for (;;) {} ,, = { (newline) } (up)(newline) etc...

Basically, I virtually never have to use shift+ to get either a ()'s or {}'s which I just love. The macro program I use is called Perfect Keyboard and I've registered 3 different versions over the years, FWIW.

Qwerty is by default, but on any computer you can simply activate Dvorak from the control panel in your computer.

The problem with Colemak is that you need to download and install software to use it. It isn't an standard yet.

But yeah there are much better options than Qwerty.

PS FYI: to activate dvorak on windows: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsxp/keyboardl...

to activate dvorak on Mac http://www.chimoosoft.com/articles/dvorak.php

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