5 Months After Switching to Colemak

> 1. remap `caps lock` to `ESC`: goes without saying for vim, but extremely useful in other situations too (like playing starcraft and de-selecting units)

Or to Control, if you're an Emacs user. I've even seen some people remap a tap on it to ESC, and holding it down to Control, to cater to both needs.

> from what I've read (and heard from friends on Colemak), switching back to QWERTY is painful

That hasn't been my experience on Dvorak, QWERTY comes back almost instantly. It was harder when I had just learned Dvorak but since I, like you, have to use QWERTY keyboards often the situation quickly improved (in much less time than it took to learn Dvorak).

> The primary argument for Colemak is that it reduces finger travel distance from the home row. But my fingers don't naturally fall precisely in a line

Travel distance looks more like E[||key1 position - key2 position||] not E[||key position - resting position||] when you're writing a big chunk of text, so the resting position of your fingers is not very important for the purposes of minimizing wrist strain. Anecdotally, the difference in wrist strain isn't remotely subtle between the two layouts. Of course, I don't usually type enough to get sore, but I can certainly feel the tendons move through my wrist, and they move a great deal more when I'm using QWERTY.

"This is a test sentence" leaves the home row once on Dvorak and 13 times on QWERTY, but the Dvorak advantage for this sentence would be just as good if you permuted the key rows so that 18/19 of the keypresses landed on, say, the top row.

I prefer mapping caps lock to ctrl since it makes both vim and emacs easy (I use ctrl-C in place of esc in vim, so for it has worked for everything but block replacement).

Anecdotally, Android 4.2 and up comes with a Colemak layout that works with all of the bells & whistles, including swiping and autocorrect.

> But my fingers don't naturally fall precisely in a line

Switching to a Kinesis solved this one for me. All the columns are perfectly vertical.

I have been typing in Colemak for several years now and I don't really have any issues going back to QWERTY, with the caveat that, like the author, I have to look at the keyboard to do so reasonably well. It's a little bit hard to compare speed with online tests because of this, as it is necessarily slower than touch typing when reading canned text off the screen (but not a real penalty if you are typing things you are thinking), but I just did an online test and was 69 WPM in Colemak vs. 44 WPM in QWERTY. Obviously I'm much slower than you in either case (assuming the tests are comparable), but the penalty doesn't seem to be as large as you are suggesting, and this is with only extremely rarely needing to use QWERTY and never actually practicing. I also find in my life that when I need to type on other people's computers or on my HTPC, that I'm not often drafting large blocks of text, but your mileage may vary.

I also don't have any problems with keybindings in vim or emacs. Most keybindings are semantic rather than locational, with the major exception being hjkl in vim. The inconvenience of applications ignoring the input has only affected me for games, so I have to remember which games I need to switch to QWERTY before playing (on Mac you can switch layouts with a key command, so it's very easy for me). Technically with games you usually DO want to have the keyboard layout ignored, and the vast majority do, but probably 1 out of 10 or 15 doesn't in my experience. I would say that the annoyance of using Colemak comes up less than 1/100th as frequently as the annoyance of using NoScript, which I also use.

With respect to the iPhone, I just leave it on QWERTY and it isn't an issue. Using your thumbs to type is sufficiently different that I don't think it affects your ability with the keyboard. Mac and Ubuntu at least come with Colemak pre-installed, but Windows requires an installation, I guess.

I'm intrigued by the possibility of remapping my number keys though. I may consider doing that.

In my experience switching back to QWERTY is not terrible, it's actually quite simple if I can look at the keyboard (can't really do touch typing on it). My speed is much faster than 30 though, I'm guessing I'm around 70-80.

Colemak made me more disciplined in applying technique to my typing, on QWERTY I developed my own style, but when switching to Colemak I learned 'the right way'.

You should give it a try!

I would dare to say no, if you already know Dvorak then switching to Colemak doesn't offer a lot of advantage.

There are some reports that say that Colemak is marginally better but IMHO they where not conclusive.

Bottom line, both are well designed layouts (Dvorak by a human and Colemak by a computer) and substantially better than QWERTY.

It does, to a Qwerty typist, or to one who switches between for whatever reason. Quite a few keys in Colemak are preserved between it and Qwerty (like zxcv), making it both easier to learn and easier to jump back and forth.

Personally, when I play the occasional video game, I'll do so in Qwerty instead of redefining every key. For typing and programming (aka daily life), I use Colemak.

The Colemak FAQ answers that:

http://colemak.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#What.27s_wrong_w...

I was thinking about covering that topic. It's not that painful, I didn't have any problems on using Vim with colemak with only one alteration:

inoremap lh <Esc>

Before I used k-j, but the position of those in Colemak is 'e-n'... so it's totally unusable.

I mean if you're typing 'entropy' it leaves insert mode, and you get mad :)

Didn't take me more than a week to get used to 'e-n'.

I'm a dvorak user, and I've never had a problem with vim navigation. I just use the regular keys for it, and it seems to work out fine.

I never felt pained on switching layouts. If this makes any sense: learning the muscle memory for Colemak almost seems to be on a lower "level" than vim (to me), so I kept hitting 'i' and 'a' and so on without even noticing.

I don't find using the Colemak-shuffled hjkl comfortable, so I have `:set langmap=li,ko,hn,je,nh,ej,ik,ol,LI,KO,JE,EJ,IK,OL` in my .vimrc to make Vim usable for me on Colemak. Besides restoring the home row navigation, it moves the keys one key right into the qwerty jkl;, which is the neutral home row position. The problem with this is that langmap is a somewhat advanced option, and isn't supported by every Vim-like product, such as the Visual Studio Vim plugin.

Shai Coleman had a really extensive Vim remapping setup, but he has since stopped using Vim: http://colemak.com/pub/vim/colemak.vim

There is some more serious research, the Colemak FAQ, refers to Carpalx (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?colemak), there you can actually take a look at the several Dvorak layouts and QWERTY.

I actually saw more discussions about this in the Colemak forum, but that was a long time ago.

I'm interested in what you consider "theoretical stuff" or "poorly designed tests." If metrics like number of words possible from the home row alone or total finger travel given some body of text do not satisfy you, then I doubt anything will.

I will say one of the biggest misconceptions is that the Dvorak layout is for speed. I've known people who type 80+ WPM with two fingers on QWERTY. You can be fast on any layout, but Dvorak is way more comfortable. Once you can type faster than you can think of what to type, it doesn't really matter.

They are definitely better, but not for the reason you might expect. The best part about having a non-qwerty keyboard layout is the frustration on peoples faces when they try to use your computer. Especially if it's a repeat performance as it is not the first time you've frustrated them with your keyboard layout!

It's likely that Colemak would be at least somewhat better for any European language if only because all of the vowels are under the home row (except U, which is under QWERTY's "I").

I see now that MrGando posted that link already, I hadn't read all the comments before making mine. I second that recommendation anyhow

I'm in the process of learning Colemak now. I'd love to use QGMLWB, but I liked that I was able to use Colemak on my Macbook, Windows box and Android devices without having to install anything extra. I figured that the few extra efficiency points I lost by sticking with Colemak would be offset by its comparatively broad availability.

I did mention Carpalx, but not your exact link in another comment.

Great question,

Dvorak is awesome, but the 'great' thing about Colemak is that the symbols and numbers are unchanged (in contrast of Dvorak). So basically the learning curve from QWERTY, should be shorter, and simpler.

Another personal thought, is that at least most of programming languages where made with QWERTY in mind, so the symbol usage ([], {}, ; etc) in programming languages is influenced by that too. A symptom of that is many foreign guys using the American QWERTY layout to code.

Cheers :D

Hey there!

I'm basically using Amphetype... it's OSS written in Python.

You can feed it with text (like your favorite public domain novels in .txt, Sherlock Holmes is one of my favorites) and then it extracts lessons based on difficulty level.

Cheers & glad you liked it!

I wasn't very clear about it because it does really vary a lot. I've read of people reaching 40-50 in a week, for me it took me about 15 days.

After that I went 'cold turkey' and dropped QWERTY, while doing that I think that in about a month and a half I reached ~70 WPM.

In my experience it took around 1-2 months to become fully "fluent" in Colemak.