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I've been a colemak user for a number of years, which has similar pros and cons. I would say that it is not worth it for most people to change. You could get a
by nwah1 8y ago
I've been a colemak user for a number of years, which has similar pros and cons.
I would say that it is not worth it for most people to change. You could get a lot of the benefit of colemak, with none of the pain, by converting your caps lock key into a second backspace.
The benefits are that it is slightly more comfortable, and you'll have less people trying to use your computer. Also, prior to learning colemak, I had not been typing fully correctly, and learning it forced me to realize that I had been using the wrong fingers for certain keys.
The downsides are the pain of switching, and the likelihood that you'll actually forget how to touch type on QWERTY.
And unless you buy expensive new keyboards with native colemak support, then things like BIOS screens, virtual machines, and so on will likely switch back to QWERTY on you, without much warning.
But on the other hand, buying a quality keyboard is actually a solid investment, considering how much time people spend at the computer. Personally, I recommend a heavy mechanical tenkeyless board. Heavy so that it won't move around. Tenkeyless to save desk space and so you don't need to reach your arm far just to use the mouse. And mechanical because it is much nicer to type on.
- lstamour 8y agoI’ve spent more years of my life now typing in Colemak than I ever did typing in QWERTY: I switched in about 2004 or so when I was touch-typing full sentences in the dark playing video games and my fingers started hurting even with a natural keyboard. After the switch, the hurt went away and hasn’t returned. I can still touch-type in QWERTY, but oddly enough it depends on the keyboard make and model and my familiarity with it. I often use Mac so on a Apple keyboard my brain expects Colemak, but on touch screens and Dell/OEM keyboards I expect QWERTY. It helps that if I’m having trouble remembering the QWERTY layout I can just look at the keys to remind myself, then I can pick it up again. As FYI, Colemak is now natively supported on Mac, Linux, mobile, but... strangely has never made it to Windows almost two decades later...
- weehobbes 8y agoI love Colemak and have used it for years. Typing with it feels absolutely great compared to QWERTY (mostly with less finger travel to reach common keys) but I agree that it's not worth the switch for most people. It took me about 2-3 weeks to be able to type functionally, and then about 6 months before I was as fluent as I was with QWERTY. Hardest part was remembering that the S key was moved right by one key - I kept mistyping S for almost a year. I did try Dvorak before Colemak and really hated it. Not only was Ctrl+XCVZ a pain, I found that my left pinky got very strained because of the position of the L key which is a very common letter in the English language. After learning Colemak, I tried practicing QWERTY occasionally to be "bi-keyboard" but I just could not do it. The more I practiced QWERTY, the worse I got with Colemak. So eventually I had to drop QWERTY. Now, whenever I use someone else's computer (usually just to do a small task), I have to hunt-and-peck and it makes me sad.