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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 mad

by 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. :)

by reeses 13y ago

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. :)