5 ms·

I'm not sure how relevant this is to anyone, but this post is as good excuse as any to talk about my transition to Colemak. In January I moved from Qwerty to C

by dmnd 13y ago

I'm not sure how relevant this is to anyone, but this post is as good excuse as any to talk about my transition to Colemak. In January I moved from Qwerty to Colemak, and also from a staggered to a columnar keyboard layout (on a Kinesis keyboard[1]). My Qwerty speed was only 75 wpm and my accuracy was terrible. Also I couldn't touch type - I never learnt to type properly with Qwerty; I just started typing when I was young and developed lots of bad habits. By the time someone tried to teach me how to type properly my habits were too ingrained to change. (Or maybe I was too stubborn -- I also have a strange way of holding a pen.) Anyway, I decided to change to Colemak, and to learn to touch type properly. I also liked the idea of a columnar layout so I changed to a Kinesis. What's interesting is that because of the physically different keyboards, I actually cannot type in Qwerty on my Kinesis, and I also cannot type in Colemak on my laptop keyboard. This means I have maintained my Qwerty skills. My current maximum speed is roughly 70 wpm in Colemak, so I am almost at my Qwerty speed after 6 months, although now I can touch type so it's more useful. When I type with Qwerty now, it feels like my hands are flying all over the place. I also feel like I have a lot of room to get faster than I currently am with Colemak. So even though I have maintained my Qwerty skills, the only reason I need them is because I can't get a laptop with a columnar keyboard. I may end up just biting the bullet and switching to Colemak on that laptop keyboard anyway, though missing the thumb cluster is killer. One other interesting thing I learnt is that using Colemak on a smartphone completely sucks. Having commonly used keys on the home row on a small touchscreen means that it's much more error prone, as you're hitting the same area on the screen consecutively. [1]: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm

reeses 13y ago
Fascinating about the phone. iOS only supports colemak on an external keyboard (or in a custom app) so I've not tried it there. You make perfect sense. I made a move fairly similar to yours. I went for the Truly Ergonomic keyboard because laterally staggered keys seem stupid if you're giving up Sholes anyway. I typed about 5-10 wpm for the first month. No matter what I tried, it was far too slow. Part of this was losing faith and moving keycaps (on mac keyboards) and putting letters on the TE. That gave me a crutch for a while that kept me slow, although I was careful to maintain hand position. Then suddenly, it clicked, and I went from 15wpm to 50, then up to about 90. I'm still slower than I was with Sholes after 1.5-2 years now, but I can type on any keyboard and not have pain or tingling. That said, I am back to about 5 wpm with Sholes, and I'm perfectly fine with it. Just as when I first switched to colemak, it makes my emails and documents much more brief. I think about dictating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and choose my words carefully. (This was obviously typed on colemak. :-)) It took a long time to get used to emacs keybindings. I ended up using arrow keys for a long time. P and F are close enough that I ended up with a lot of confused misses. What I like about colemak over Dvorak is that Dvorak is a pain for a lot of common unix commands. 'ls' is especially onerous.
- zobzu 13y ago
  Its not "fascinating" about the phone. It's 100% normal. You could say it's a pretty interesting turn of events in the history of keyboards however. Qwerty was designed for typing machines (typewriters) where you needed enough space between keys so that the machine wouldn't jam. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter) That's exactly why qwerty is better on the phone as well as fingers, like the metal tyepbar, can't type letters too close to each other. Except its flesh and bones instead of metal.
  - lstamour 13y ago
    Actually I find that the hardest part about Colemak on the phone is being unable to distinguish the home row from the rest of the keyboard -- and if you can't touch type with fingers, using what's familiar (QWERTY) is easier. Thumb travel time is shorter than finger travel on full-size keyboards, after all.
  - reeses 13y ago
    That's precisely why I found it fascinating. :)
adsr 13y ago
Interestingly, the home row issue you experienced on the phone is rather similar to the reason qwerty was invented in the first place, to avoid key jamming on mechanical typewriters.
lstamour 13y ago
I've also tried Colemak on my Android and iOS devices ... it's only useful for attaching physical keyboards -- at least when on a phone. A tablet might prove different, and I'd confirm with my Surface Pro, except I like its QWERTY touch keyboard better than the Colemak layout which isn't as touch-optimized in on-screen styling. I wish Windows 8.1 had Colemak built in. Apple's had it built-in since Lion.
veidr 13y ago
I am very jealous of you -- my inability to maintain QWERTY after I switched to Colemak was what forced me to grudgingly switch back. I just couldn't do it; after I became acclimated to Colemak, my QWERTY was just destroyed. I had to think about where the keys were in QWERTY, and I realized I don't even really know, because typing is a doing-without-thinking activity. So I ended up having to look, which is extremely inefficient and finally I abandoned Colemak. (I couldn't avoid QWERTY because part of my job these days entails showing people how to do things on their own computers, which aren't using Colemak.) The same thing happened when I learned Japanese; I used to be conversant in Spanish, and after I got to roughly the same level in Japanese (from living in Japan) one day I noticed that the Spanish wasn't there anymore -- I would have to think about what I wanted to say in my native English and convert it to Spanish. Seems like a way different thing, but it felt the same, because it was like an unconscious activity being supplanted by another, and thus becoming something I had to think about. Which broke it. It made me sad though, because now typing QWERTY feels idiotic. Kludgey and stupid. Colemak didn't make me a significantly faster typist (maybe it would have had I done it for more than 9 months) but it was way more comfortable.
- mbrock 13y ago
  I use Dvorak, and I have almost no problems typing QWERTY. But this only came after I became completely fluent in Dvorak. When I still had to think to type Dvorak, I couldn't switch to thinking about QWERTY without getting all confused. Now I just peek a little at the keyboard with QWERTY, especially for non-alphanumeric symbols, but it's no problem.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    Same story here. There was a time during my transition to Dvorak where I kept tripping myself up if I tried to type QWERTY, but once the Dvorak layout went into muscle memory QWERTY came right back without any special effort on my part. I still have to peek, but I had to peek before I learned Dvorak too (that's why I switched to Dvorak).
  - JungleGymSam 13y ago
    I had to abandon Dvorak because it killed my ability to do QWERTY. It was also an almost traumatic experience because when I was going through it I felt like I was going crazy or that I was just plain stupid. How could my brain possibly discard 20+ years of QWERTY after just a few weeks of Dvorak. But having said that I recently learned that other people have had the same experience and so now I don't feel so bad and I want to change again. /lifestory
enimodas 13y ago
it took me a year from when i first started trying to learn colemak to actually completing it, had a 6month break in the middle, and many lapses, but after doing the trainer program for 10min for 2 weeks i fully switched and it went OK. I use it on my smartphone too, in the beginning i also had that thought that maybe it's worse on smartphones, but using swiftkey i haven't noticed all that much problems, only for words that look alike and have the same first letter, so usually when i get the first letter right the rest can be all wrong but it will still guess the right word.
- stevewillows 13y ago
  I just switched to colemak using SwiftKey and I'm loving it. It's tough to avoid autocomplete.
robinator 13y ago
I use the Bépo layout (dvorak equivalent for French) on a TypeMatrix at work and a TrulyErgonomic at home. I've had the same experience as you though, I switched to touchtyping, changed the layout, and the keyboard (columnar) at the same time, so I can always switch back to an AZERTY (french QWERTY), but only on a regular standard keyboard (and it's a pain to use BÉPO on a non-columnar keyboard, slow and lots of mistakes). As for the speed, well, I was around 70wpm on AZERTY, and now (around 4 years later), I'm around 100wpm on BÉPO, so yeah, I'm never going back.

by dmnd 13y ago

reeses 13y ago

Fascinating about the phone. iOS only supports colemak on an external keyboard (or in a custom app) so I've not tried it there. You make perfect sense. I made a move fairly similar to yours. I went for the Truly Ergonomic keyboard because laterally staggered keys seem stupid if you're giving up Sholes anyway. I typed about 5-10 wpm for the first month. No matter what I tried, it was far too slow. Part of this was losing faith and moving keycaps (on mac keyboards) and putting letters on the TE. That gave me a crutch for a while that kept me slow, although I was careful to maintain hand position. Then suddenly, it clicked, and I went from 15wpm to 50, then up to about 90. I'm still slower than I was with Sholes after 1.5-2 years now, but I can type on any keyboard and not have pain or tingling. That said, I am back to about 5 wpm with Sholes, and I'm perfectly fine with it. Just as when I first switched to colemak, it makes my emails and documents much more brief. I think about dictating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and choose my words carefully. (This was obviously typed on colemak. :-)) It took a long time to get used to emacs keybindings. I ended up using arrow keys for a long time. P and F are close enough that I ended up with a lot of confused misses. What I like about colemak over Dvorak is that Dvorak is a pain for a lot of common unix commands. 'ls' is especially onerous.

zobzu 13y ago
Its not "fascinating" about the phone. It's 100% normal. You could say it's a pretty interesting turn of events in the history of keyboards however. Qwerty was designed for typing machines (typewriters) where you needed enough space between keys so that the machine wouldn't jam. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter) That's exactly why qwerty is better on the phone as well as fingers, like the metal tyepbar, can't type letters too close to each other. Except its flesh and bones instead of metal.
- lstamour 13y ago
  Actually I find that the hardest part about Colemak on the phone is being unable to distinguish the home row from the rest of the keyboard -- and if you can't touch type with fingers, using what's familiar (QWERTY) is easier. Thumb travel time is shorter than finger travel on full-size keyboards, after all.
- reeses 13y ago
  That's precisely why I found it fascinating. :)

adsr 13y ago

Interestingly, the home row issue you experienced on the phone is rather similar to the reason qwerty was invented in the first place, to avoid key jamming on mechanical typewriters.

lstamour 13y ago

I've also tried Colemak on my Android and iOS devices ... it's only useful for attaching physical keyboards -- at least when on a phone. A tablet might prove different, and I'd confirm with my Surface Pro, except I like its QWERTY touch keyboard better than the Colemak layout which isn't as touch-optimized in on-screen styling. I wish Windows 8.1 had Colemak built in. Apple's had it built-in since Lion.

veidr 13y ago

I am very jealous of you -- my inability to maintain QWERTY after I switched to Colemak was what forced me to grudgingly switch back. I just couldn't do it; after I became acclimated to Colemak, my QWERTY was just destroyed. I had to think about where the keys were in QWERTY, and I realized I don't even really know, because typing is a doing-without-thinking activity. So I ended up having to look, which is extremely inefficient and finally I abandoned Colemak. (I couldn't avoid QWERTY because part of my job these days entails showing people how to do things on their own computers, which aren't using Colemak.) The same thing happened when I learned Japanese; I used to be conversant in Spanish, and after I got to roughly the same level in Japanese (from living in Japan) one day I noticed that the Spanish wasn't there anymore -- I would have to think about what I wanted to say in my native English and convert it to Spanish. Seems like a way different thing, but it felt the same, because it was like an unconscious activity being supplanted by another, and thus becoming something I had to think about. Which broke it. It made me sad though, because now typing QWERTY feels idiotic. Kludgey and stupid. Colemak didn't make me a significantly faster typist (maybe it would have had I done it for more than 9 months) but it was way more comfortable.

mbrock 13y ago
I use Dvorak, and I have almost no problems typing QWERTY. But this only came after I became completely fluent in Dvorak. When I still had to think to type Dvorak, I couldn't switch to thinking about QWERTY without getting all confused. Now I just peek a little at the keyboard with QWERTY, especially for non-alphanumeric symbols, but it's no problem.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  Same story here. There was a time during my transition to Dvorak where I kept tripping myself up if I tried to type QWERTY, but once the Dvorak layout went into muscle memory QWERTY came right back without any special effort on my part. I still have to peek, but I had to peek before I learned Dvorak too (that's why I switched to Dvorak).
- JungleGymSam 13y ago
  I had to abandon Dvorak because it killed my ability to do QWERTY. It was also an almost traumatic experience because when I was going through it I felt like I was going crazy or that I was just plain stupid. How could my brain possibly discard 20+ years of QWERTY after just a few weeks of Dvorak. But having said that I recently learned that other people have had the same experience and so now I don't feel so bad and I want to change again. /lifestory

enimodas 13y ago

it took me a year from when i first started trying to learn colemak to actually completing it, had a 6month break in the middle, and many lapses, but after doing the trainer program for 10min for 2 weeks i fully switched and it went OK. I use it on my smartphone too, in the beginning i also had that thought that maybe it's worse on smartphones, but using swiftkey i haven't noticed all that much problems, only for words that look alike and have the same first letter, so usually when i get the first letter right the rest can be all wrong but it will still guess the right word.

stevewillows 13y ago
I just switched to colemak using SwiftKey and I'm loving it. It's tough to avoid autocomplete.

robinator 13y ago

I use the Bépo layout (dvorak equivalent for French) on a TypeMatrix at work and a TrulyErgonomic at home. I've had the same experience as you though, I switched to touchtyping, changed the layout, and the keyboard (columnar) at the same time, so I can always switch back to an AZERTY (french QWERTY), but only on a regular standard keyboard (and it's a pain to use BÉPO on a non-columnar keyboard, slow and lots of mistakes). As for the speed, well, I was around 70wpm on AZERTY, and now (around 4 years later), I'm around 100wpm on BÉPO, so yeah, I'm never going back.