6 ms·

> when people try to reinvent something, they instead end up learning why the existing thing is so great As someone who has actively tried to switch to Dvorak

> when people try to reinvent something, they instead end up learning why the existing thing is so great As someone who has actively tried to switch to Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts and failed, I'd argue it's less because that Qwerty is so "great" and more that it's just so entrenched everywhere, that unlearning it for keeps is difficult. Like I'd have to set up Colemak everywhere I go, if I sat at someone else's computer or a public computer it would be back to Qwerty, if you ever look down at your keys for reference (something you want to do a lot when you're learning a new layout) they're telling you Qwerty, etc. Also the unlearning process can be slower than I'd like, and my typing speed plummets while I'm learning these things, so I'm less useful at work or school or working on personal projects. I've been using Qwerty for over 20 years at this point, whereas my Colemak experiment was only a few months. It did seem like I was straining my fingers less when I was using Colemak, though, and could potentially type faster eventually if I could ever fully commit to it.

WorldMaker 5y ago
> Like I'd have to set up Colemak everywhere I go, if I sat at someone else's computer or a public computer it would be back to Qwerty When I switched to Colemak (in Grad School) I bought a cheap laptop so I could make a clean break and never need to use a "public" computer again. (That was just before my first iPhone, and I actually imagine that should be even easier now that so much of what the need for borrowing "public" computers as a student in those days has moved to our phones. The rest was already mostly replaced at that point with tools like SSH and RDP remoting. One useful discovery at the time was that if I was RDPing into my desktop machine back in my dorm on a "public" computer in a school lab, I'd need to hunt and peck my address and password in in Qwerty, but as soon as I connected to my own machine, I could touch type in Colemak because it was my machine and set to use Colemak as default.) I also made peace with looking like a slow idiot and hunting and pecking out QWERTY when trying to help someone on someone else's computer. When I need typing speed I use a computer I control. I learned to stop worrying about my typing speed on other people's computers. > if you ever look down at your keys for reference (something you want to do a lot when you're learning a new layout) This was a feature for me rather than a bug. Proper touch typing is "never glance at the keyboard" (and I was taught that over and over from childhood with Qwerty lessons, though I was bad at it with Qwerty; including teachers that insisted lessons needed to be done with a cover over your hands and the keyboard so that you couldn't look) and if you can't trust the key caps you have more reason to never look. > Also the unlearning process can be slower than I'd like, and my typing speed plummets while I'm learning these things, so I'm less useful at work or school or working on personal projects. For what it is worth, what worked well for me was taking a long holiday weekend where I didn't have work or school or personal project deadlines to do just about nothing but Colemak typing lessons. Going entirely cold turkey on not using anything but Colemak when touch typing from that point onward. (I also make a distinction between touch typing and "swipe typing" as entirely separate skills despite both involving "a keyboard" and don't have a problem touch typing in Colemak and swipe typing in Qwerty.) That long holiday weekend was enough that I felt comfortably fast with Colemak for work/school/personal projects as I started to get back into them that I never felt like falling back on my old bad Qwerty habits, even if it was still maybe a small bit slower than where I had felt like I'd been before the switch, and as with anything once committed to it and using it every day speed only improved from there until I didn't feel any speed difference at all (and presumably am faster than I ever was with Qwerty though I never trusted speed metrics enough to say for sure). I was highly motivated though to unlearn Qwerty, so obviously your mileage will vary. My Qwerty touch typing form was wrong from years of self-taught programming (my left hand was shifted off the home row left by a key to spend more time on the accelerator keys and my right hand had to move a lot more to compensate). Late in grad school with a mountain of assignments both school and otherwise I was dealing with an immense amount of hand pain that I was sure likely meant I was deep into the early stages of carpal tunnel and buying a cheap laptop and switching to Colemak seemed like a great cost savings over surgery. More than a decade later, almost closer to a decade and a half now, it still seems like a great deal and I'm very glad that I did it.
codetrotter 5y ago
> Like I'd have to set up Colemak everywhere I go, if I sat at someone else's computer or a public computer it would be back to Qwerty, if you ever look down at your keys for reference (something you want to do a lot when you're learning a new layout) they're telling you Qwerty, etc. I use Dvorak. One of the first things I did when switching to Dvorak was buying a keyboard with hardware Dvorak layout and a black skin. The hardware layout meant that to use it on any computer all I had to do was set the computer I wanted to use to US English. The black skin meant I couldn’t cheat and look – it was painful for a short while and it was extremely effective in forcing me to learn the layout. The fact that other computers are in QWERTY don’t matter. In fact on my laptop I use QWERTY when using the builtin keyboard. On my phone I use QWERTY. But with my keyboard I use Dvorak. You don’t need to unlearn QWERTY to learn Dvorak. In fact it’s better to keep using QWERTY on the side like I do, because you still reap the benefits of Dvorak when you use Dvorak, without becoming incapable of using “normal” computers and devices. The original keyboard I bought when learning Dvorak was the TypeMatrix 2030 USB ortholinear keyboard with an all black skin. My current keyboard, that I’ve been using for the past few years, is the programmable mechanical ortholinear keyboard ErgoDox EZ Shine. All black. For my ErgoDox EZ Shine I created a custom Dvorak-based layout that I use: https://github.com/ctsrc/ergodox-ez-shine-dvorak https://github.com/ctsrc/ergodox-ez-shine-dvorak
- cableshaft 5y ago
  I'm glad you figured out how to make it work for you. But in a way you're kind of proving my point when you're saying you use QWERTY on your laptop and your phone. You may be able to context switch fine but I was having a hell of a time. Also last time I tried was probably 15+ years ago.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    I've used Dvorak for over 15 years. I keep Qwerty on my phone, since the advantages of Dvorak are disadvantages on a phone keyboard -- I want the letters to be spread all over the place, so the swipe-to-type thing works. Jobs differ, but I very rarely type more than a word on computer keyboards other than my own. If a colleague asks me to help with something, I almost always think it's more polite to ask them to type.
godshatter 5y ago
I ran into these issues myself. I've been typing in dvorak at home and qwerty at work for about 20 years now. I was having pain in my fingers typing all day on qwerty, and sought out another way of typing hoping it would help. Switching to dvorak + qwerty permanently solved the pain problem for me. I was unaware at the time how difficult it would be. There is no incremental approach to switching keyboard layouts, at least for me. As soon as I started learning dvorak, my performance in qwerty dropped drastically. I'd blank on what key to type or I'd spend more time correcting dvorak keys in qwerty or qwerty keys in dvorak errors than I was actually typing. I was at a severely degraded typing ability on any keyboard layout for a week or two and it was a couple of months before I felt comfortable in either again. It was several months after that before I could easily context switch between them without errors. Occasionally now I'll start typing gibberish and realize that I need to switch my brain over because I'm at work now and need to type in qwerty, but once I've made that context switch I only have normal typos for the layout I'm in instead of the cross-layout problems I used to have. I don't know if I'm just terrible at learning keyboard layouts or if this is something everyone will encounter, but I wouldn't recommend switching over to anyone that doesn't have a good couple of weeks to effectively be at the hunt-and-peck typing level again and a long while until they can expect to type long documents without multiple errors. I don't use a hardware dvorak keyboard, I still use the qwerty layout keyboards with a different keyboard layout in software. This may have been part of the problem I had learning dvorak. I learned to touch type without looking at the keys in high school on IBM Selectric typewriters, so that helped a lot.
inter_netuser 5y ago
To ease into colemak, you can yous TARMAK, transitional colemak layout (2-3 keys switched at a time). fastest way to ramp up. https://forum.colemak.com/topic/1858-learn-colemak-in-steps-with-the-tarmak-layouts/ https://forum.colemak.com/topic/1858-learn-colemak-in-steps-...
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I think moving j just to move it again is annoying. I don't see how this was considered worth it. Cool to see someone trying this concept of transitional layouts.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    There are numerous versions of this. I’ve constructed my own with a generator and it was actually quite helpful to maintain speed.
birdyrooster 5y ago
You don't have to stop using qwerty. You basically stay fluent in both layouts, enjoying the advantages of Colemak on your personal machines and still typing quickly on other machines. For me, it's definitely been worth the effort in terms of managing RSI. The only complaint I have had is bindings in vim. I found there was no point in trying to have a custom vimrc since I would be using vim in all sorts of situations where I couldn't have a vimrc. My hjkl was awkward to get used to, but now I don't even realize I'm pressing random buttons for up down left right.

WorldMaker 5y ago

> Like I'd have to set up Colemak everywhere I go, if I sat at someone else's computer or a public computer it would be back to Qwerty When I switched to Colemak (in Grad School) I bought a cheap laptop so I could make a clean break and never need to use a "public" computer again. (That was just before my first iPhone, and I actually imagine that should be even easier now that so much of what the need for borrowing "public" computers as a student in those days has moved to our phones. The rest was already mostly replaced at that point with tools like SSH and RDP remoting. One useful discovery at the time was that if I was RDPing into my desktop machine back in my dorm on a "public" computer in a school lab, I'd need to hunt and peck my address and password in in Qwerty, but as soon as I connected to my own machine, I could touch type in Colemak because it was my machine and set to use Colemak as default.) I also made peace with looking like a slow idiot and hunting and pecking out QWERTY when trying to help someone on someone else's computer. When I need typing speed I use a computer I control. I learned to stop worrying about my typing speed on other people's computers. > if you ever look down at your keys for reference (something you want to do a lot when you're learning a new layout) This was a feature for me rather than a bug. Proper touch typing is "never glance at the keyboard" (and I was taught that over and over from childhood with Qwerty lessons, though I was bad at it with Qwerty; including teachers that insisted lessons needed to be done with a cover over your hands and the keyboard so that you couldn't look) and if you can't trust the key caps you have more reason to never look. > Also the unlearning process can be slower than I'd like, and my typing speed plummets while I'm learning these things, so I'm less useful at work or school or working on personal projects. For what it is worth, what worked well for me was taking a long holiday weekend where I didn't have work or school or personal project deadlines to do just about nothing but Colemak typing lessons. Going entirely cold turkey on not using anything but Colemak when touch typing from that point onward. (I also make a distinction between touch typing and "swipe typing" as entirely separate skills despite both involving "a keyboard" and don't have a problem touch typing in Colemak and swipe typing in Qwerty.) That long holiday weekend was enough that I felt comfortably fast with Colemak for work/school/personal projects as I started to get back into them that I never felt like falling back on my old bad Qwerty habits, even if it was still maybe a small bit slower than where I had felt like I'd been before the switch, and as with anything once committed to it and using it every day speed only improved from there until I didn't feel any speed difference at all (and presumably am faster than I ever was with Qwerty though I never trusted speed metrics enough to say for sure). I was highly motivated though to unlearn Qwerty, so obviously your mileage will vary. My Qwerty touch typing form was wrong from years of self-taught programming (my left hand was shifted off the home row left by a key to spend more time on the accelerator keys and my right hand had to move a lot more to compensate). Late in grad school with a mountain of assignments both school and otherwise I was dealing with an immense amount of hand pain that I was sure likely meant I was deep into the early stages of carpal tunnel and buying a cheap laptop and switching to Colemak seemed like a great cost savings over surgery. More than a decade later, almost closer to a decade and a half now, it still seems like a great deal and I'm very glad that I did it.

codetrotter 5y ago

> Like I'd have to set up Colemak everywhere I go, if I sat at someone else's computer or a public computer it would be back to Qwerty, if you ever look down at your keys for reference (something you want to do a lot when you're learning a new layout) they're telling you Qwerty, etc. I use Dvorak. One of the first things I did when switching to Dvorak was buying a keyboard with hardware Dvorak layout and a black skin. The hardware layout meant that to use it on any computer all I had to do was set the computer I wanted to use to US English. The black skin meant I couldn’t cheat and look – it was painful for a short while and it was extremely effective in forcing me to learn the layout. The fact that other computers are in QWERTY don’t matter. In fact on my laptop I use QWERTY when using the builtin keyboard. On my phone I use QWERTY. But with my keyboard I use Dvorak. You don’t need to unlearn QWERTY to learn Dvorak. In fact it’s better to keep using QWERTY on the side like I do, because you still reap the benefits of Dvorak when you use Dvorak, without becoming incapable of using “normal” computers and devices. The original keyboard I bought when learning Dvorak was the TypeMatrix 2030 USB ortholinear keyboard with an all black skin. My current keyboard, that I’ve been using for the past few years, is the programmable mechanical ortholinear keyboard ErgoDox EZ Shine. All black. For my ErgoDox EZ Shine I created a custom Dvorak-based layout that I use: https://github.com/ctsrc/ergodox-ez-shine-dvorak https://github.com/ctsrc/ergodox-ez-shine-dvorak

cableshaft 5y ago
I'm glad you figured out how to make it work for you. But in a way you're kind of proving my point when you're saying you use QWERTY on your laptop and your phone. You may be able to context switch fine but I was having a hell of a time. Also last time I tried was probably 15+ years ago.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  I've used Dvorak for over 15 years. I keep Qwerty on my phone, since the advantages of Dvorak are disadvantages on a phone keyboard -- I want the letters to be spread all over the place, so the swipe-to-type thing works. Jobs differ, but I very rarely type more than a word on computer keyboards other than my own. If a colleague asks me to help with something, I almost always think it's more polite to ask them to type.

godshatter 5y ago

I ran into these issues myself. I've been typing in dvorak at home and qwerty at work for about 20 years now. I was having pain in my fingers typing all day on qwerty, and sought out another way of typing hoping it would help. Switching to dvorak + qwerty permanently solved the pain problem for me. I was unaware at the time how difficult it would be. There is no incremental approach to switching keyboard layouts, at least for me. As soon as I started learning dvorak, my performance in qwerty dropped drastically. I'd blank on what key to type or I'd spend more time correcting dvorak keys in qwerty or qwerty keys in dvorak errors than I was actually typing. I was at a severely degraded typing ability on any keyboard layout for a week or two and it was a couple of months before I felt comfortable in either again. It was several months after that before I could easily context switch between them without errors. Occasionally now I'll start typing gibberish and realize that I need to switch my brain over because I'm at work now and need to type in qwerty, but once I've made that context switch I only have normal typos for the layout I'm in instead of the cross-layout problems I used to have. I don't know if I'm just terrible at learning keyboard layouts or if this is something everyone will encounter, but I wouldn't recommend switching over to anyone that doesn't have a good couple of weeks to effectively be at the hunt-and-peck typing level again and a long while until they can expect to type long documents without multiple errors. I don't use a hardware dvorak keyboard, I still use the qwerty layout keyboards with a different keyboard layout in software. This may have been part of the problem I had learning dvorak. I learned to touch type without looking at the keys in high school on IBM Selectric typewriters, so that helped a lot.

inter_netuser 5y ago

To ease into colemak, you can yous TARMAK, transitional colemak layout (2-3 keys switched at a time). fastest way to ramp up. https://forum.colemak.com/topic/1858-learn-colemak-in-steps-with-the-tarmak-layouts/ https://forum.colemak.com/topic/1858-learn-colemak-in-steps-...

birdyrooster 5y ago
I think moving j just to move it again is annoying. I don't see how this was considered worth it. Cool to see someone trying this concept of transitional layouts.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  There are numerous versions of this. I’ve constructed my own with a generator and it was actually quite helpful to maintain speed.

birdyrooster 5y ago

You don't have to stop using qwerty. You basically stay fluent in both layouts, enjoying the advantages of Colemak on your personal machines and still typing quickly on other machines. For me, it's definitely been worth the effort in terms of managing RSI. The only complaint I have had is bindings in vim. I found there was no point in trying to have a custom vimrc since I would be using vim in all sorts of situations where I couldn't have a vimrc. My hjkl was awkward to get used to, but now I don't even realize I'm pressing random buttons for up down left right.