Comment by christiangenco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christiangenco | Hacker News Reader

I've tried switching to Colemak three times, and I just can't do it. Here's why:

I can currently type 110-125 WPM on QWERTY, which I've projected would take upwards of a year to re-achieve on Colemak, which is a total no-brainer if I could reasonably expect positive long-term gains.

However, from what I've read (and heard from friends on Colemak), switching back to QWERTY is painful, so my typing speed on anyone else's computer (which I realized, after trying to switch, I do fairly frequently) would go down to 30 at best.

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: my left middle finger naturally drifts between the space of E and D, my middle and ring finger on my right hand drift up closer to I and O.

Culturally, being on Colemak means the world is suddenly against you. It's like choosing to be a left-handed person in a right-handed world: vim keybindings don't make sense, applications and flash pages ignore your custom keyboard layout and switch you back to QWERTY, and every single keyboard|laptop|smartphone you buy for the rest of your life will require a certain amount of tweaking before it's maximally usable (think iPhone autocorrect).

Keyboard layout hacking in general, however, is fantastic. Here's a few tweaks I've accumulated that have immediate benefits for little of the above downsides:

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)

2. remap 1234567890 to !@#$%^&*(): as a programmer, I use these symbols far more often than I use the numbers. Switching to shift to numbers with symbols as default makes all the sense in the world. It no longer takes finger gymnastics to surround something in () or negate a term with !.

3. (optional) shift doubletap for caps lock: I missed caps lock after a while, so I brought it back with a double-tap of shift.

> 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).

Fair point on travel distance. I suppose I need to be experiencing some kind of tendinitis for the switch to become worthwhile.

Forgot part 4 of my keyboard remapping: caps lock + another key is interpreted as control, but just tapping caps lock is escape.

All I really need now is a shorter space bar so I can more comfortably hit ctrl/cmd with my thumbs and I'll be in keyboard nirvana. Total missed opportunity by Atwood with his CODE keyboard.

In my case, I was experiencing pre-tendinitis symptoms (know them well as a piano player). All of those where gone after switching to Colemak. My advice, is to switch before you start experiencing those symptoms.

Cheers!

> 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.

vim user here. I map mine to Control because ESC is a simple C-] away and Ctrl is so much more useful outside of just vim.

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.

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

Yes, this is right (on 4.3 at least). You can choose between QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.

Wow, so it does! (Along with the other more common keyboard layouts.) You have to dig under the "advanced" settings but it's there. Neat!

That's really cool, I should file a radar (not that it matters) in Apple's radar so that they make Colemak available on iOS.

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!

> 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.

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