I used the Colemak layout for a little over a year and eventually switched back to QWERTY. I had the same problem that many other people had with alternate keyboards - it's great if only you use only your own computer(s). Whenever you have someone else use your keyboard or you use theirs, you have to remember to switch physically (for them) or mentally (for you). You can argue for maintaining both layout proficiency, but what's the point of an alternate layout if you have to continue to practice the old one. I also never really had a health problem typing in QWERTY and Colemak didn't solve that (non-existing) problem.
Also, so many things are built with QWERTY in mind. Games default to WASD and some don't even have the option to switch. Shortcuts are created with QWERTY and are sometimes awkward to change (vim) to match the design goals of the shortcuts.
All in all, it was a fun experiment. But seeing as I don't have any RSI/other hand reasons to switch, it's not worth the extra effort to use.
I found this to be the biggest issue with using Colemak or any other alternative layout. I use my own computers exclusively so I had complete control over using my layout, but it just got so tedious having to rebind everything all the time and I would often run into games and programs where you couldn't rebind keys at all. Trying to rebind keys to work in a sane way in Emacs was an uphill battle that never ended.
Why not just buy a keyboard with a layout switch button. No program will force you to use qwerty if your keyboard manages layouts. But seems like no such a keyboard is out there. Couldnt find it on Google or Amazon.
The TypeMatrix has such a button (Dvorak Key). It remaps the keys at the hardware level. It's accessed with Fn+F1 and has a LED indicator on the left side.
Ha, well calling it hopeless was not meant to be a qualitative assessment, merely a concession to reality. And no, I never tried the Dvorak. I'm way too lazy and set in my thirty year-old ways.
Ah, gotcha. Ok, in that case, I'll admit - when I was busy learning it, I felt hopeless quite often! It was not until I got visuals in my mind (see my post on that, linked in my previous comment) that my curiosity was piqued.
Being lazy, meh, I'm also lazy. I just noticed that the brain continues to teach itself the dvorak layout after you stop practicing (for the day/week). That made it feel like I was just feeding it the right instructions, and that took almost all of the stress from my experience and it made me patient.
15 years later I can say, it was worth the frustration those first three weeks. :)
Every time I see one of these alternative keyboard layouts it almost scares me into switching—look at the QWERTY stats for all books, they're horrendous. I always decide against it because it seems like one of those things that's hard to unlearn. This one does seem to be an improvement, but I don't think I could ever switch. The most I've really switched around my keyboard layout is movekey[0]; it's much more useful than switching layouts (in my opinion, anyway) because the arrow keys are what slow me down the most.
You don't forget the old layout when you learn a new one. This has been widely misunderstood.
In fact, it's more like learning yourself to write with your other hand. Say, you try this with your left hand -- you don't forget how to write with your right hand -- you can do both, but after a while you'll realise you got better with your left hand than your right!
I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak over ten years ago, and I am crippled going back to QWERTY. I apologise routinely to students and colleagues whilst using their keyboards, explaining that I'm no longer used to the QWERTY layout.
Hey, I didn't say you should stop typing in QWERTY! Wink. My point is that people who want to learn it won't replace their QWERTY skills -- They'll just learn another one. A brand new superpower.
It helps me to have a sensory key over which set of habits to use. I usually use Dvorak, and don't look at the keyboard. If I look at the keyboard, I get QWERTY.
Why make caps lock into backspace? Control has always felt a much more natural option to me.
Usually, when I am pressing backspace, I am taking a mental break anyways (even if only a tiny one), so I am ok with having a bit of travel to press it.
Because you use it that often. Or at least, I do. Maybe you're a much better typer than I am, and for that matter, much better at correctly typing what I want in the first place, but I consider it an important key.
One issue with using statistics to layout your keyboard is that you if you analyze your layout via text corpus, you'll come up with a usage of 0 on the backspace key. This is inaccurate. You really ought to do an analysis based on actual key usage, but that data is much harder to come by. (You'll probably just have to take your lumps on the possibility that changing the layout would itself change key usage.)
Oh, and per other comments on the difficulty of trying out new keyboard layouts... rewriting how you do all the letters is very challenging. But if you are interested merely in trading Caps Lock for backspace, you can literally try this at any time; adjustment will take on the order of 5 minutes, tops, as long as you unmap the original backspace key. And it's about a minute to switch back if you don't like it. Professional keyboard users really ought to be people who have tweaked at least a key or two, if not tried entire layout switches. It's so fast and easy to run the experiments.
setxkbmap -layout us -variant dvorak -option ctrl:swapcaps,compose:rctrl
(You can leave -variant dvorak out; the -option stuff will still work.)
The compose key, used to compose all kinds of characters from æ to ż, is one of those smart and fantastic options, and it works really intuitive. Just hit that key, then guess two characters (like a and e, or z and .) and voila.
Yeah, the other setting switches ctrl and capslock. My left pinky just really doesn't like the original place of ctrl, and caps is something I use only rarely.
Indeed. I set caps to ctrl. I don't even bother swapping them. I've simply eliminated caps all together. I so rarely type in all caps that I simply suck it up and hold shift when I need to.
The only time it really comes up is if I'm typing out constants in code. Yet, I have to type each only once and then autocomplete deals with it from there on out.
I'm a colemak user. Out of all the changes that colemak provides, the best is the optional replacement of capslock with backspace.
I do like that all of your fingers are used on the home row, but ultimately all the other changes are much less important than the backspace thing.
If you're on the fence about changing your keyboard layout, just make that one change.
Capslock takes up very valuable keyboard real estate but is essentially unused. I move my hands much less because of that change. It also seems more logical.
If you're a vim user that uses it as an escape key, well... at least you already kinda understand the uselessness of capslock.
I just got a mechanical keyboard (Cherry MX Blues) and I have to say, the actuation force is much, much lighter, and it definitely is taking some getting used to. Right now I'm trying not to bottom out as I type and it's actually really hard. Just as a warning before anyone goes out and buys a mechanical keyboard. It can get expensive too—I bought mine from Max Keyboards on their Black Friday sale.
Ha - Coolermaster brought out a CM Storm with Cherry MX Green keys. They're like blue, but the springs are thicker, requiring more force. I found it on Amazon.
I'm crazy about that keyboard, love it very much. Usually I switch between that one, and my TypeMatrix 2030 USB. Cause they're both so nice. :-)
I use colemak and I love it but I do agree with him about the he bigram in colemak. At this point though, I don't think his improvements would make it worthwhile for me to learn Workman.
Switching to Colemak was very good for me but it also was a big time investment since the loss of productivity when learning a new keyboard layout is not negligible. I had wrist problems which stopped after switching to Colemak so I really had an extra incentive to slog through the tranaition.
I did a lot of work once to learn Colemak and I got pretty good. It is not a bad way to type at all, but it fails pretty hard once you switch betweeen machines.
A better optimization is getting a great ergonomic keyboard, like the the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop keyboard. It's really fantastic and can be had for like $70 if you shop around.
I bought one of those. I quite like the feel (except for the F keys, and Esc, which are a bit nasty - still, unlike some keyboards, at least it has them) but for my money the layout wasn't quite right. As always with chiclet keyboards, there's a gap between keys. But the keys are about the same size as an ordinary keyboard - e.g., my MS Natural 4000 - and so the distance to the Return key is much greater than normal.
For US users, with the fat 1-row Return key, this probably isn't too much of a bother, but I found it rather uncomfortable with the European-style inverted-L Return key. The Left Shift key is also a bit on the small side. I'd definitely advise a test drive before purchase.
(Shame, because the chiclet keys are pretty nice, it feels nice and solid, and it's nice to have a removable number pad.)
"[Dvorak] was created in the 1930’s and promised to be vastly superior to QWERTY. I went ahead and tried it out and soon enough after doing “ls -latr” on the terminal, I had to shake my head and sadly walk away from it."
Because, obviously, Dvorak was optimized in 1930 for typing things like ls -ltar on a typewriter.
Heh, yeah, that's a silly argument. But in that case I'm very glad for him that linux doesn't have a command called "hypolimnion"! Just type it in to see what I mean.
(Heh. I just realised that I never even bothered to change the 'hjkl' keys, in vim, as navigation keys, on the dvorak layout. It took about no time at all to get it into my system. I just stopped thinking about it.)
If you need to do a lot of typing you can ask your employer for a better keyboard, or buy one yourself. High-end mechanical keyboards allow you to reprogram their firmware and rearrange their keys, so you'll get a new layout without any involvement of the OS and, if you buy the keyboard for yourself, you'll be able to carry it with you whenever you move.
This is the greatest disappointment of the new crop of Cherry-based keyboards: you can't physically rearrange the keycaps because they're shaped differently for the different rows.
The good, old IBM Model M keyboards made switching the keycaps to your preferred layout trivial.
I like how the units are presented in meters and centimeters not percentage improvement. 65,000cm sounds like a HUGE deal, but it was only ~2.29% improvement.
I've been using the dvorak layout since 2001. Never really had many problems; all operating systems seem to support it, and coworkers are easily trained in the use of one's preferred keyboard switching UI should they need to use one's PC. Initially some people seemed to act as if this was some kind of fad, one that I'd soon get over, but as the months ground on, and then the years (since 2001 I've worked on and off with many of the same group of people), and my keyboard layout didn't change back, this attitude seemed to die down.
The only technical problem I've had, I think, is that at one point if you were the first person to sign in to a remote system over Remote Desktop, you'd imbue that session with your locale and keyboard layout. No good when I happened to be the first person to log in.
I haven't even found my QWERTY skills atrophying that much; on a non-split or laptop keyboard I can type QWERTY without looking at 75wpm, without too many slips. On a split keyboard, like the ones I prefer to use, if I have to type QWERTY then I do have to look at my hands as I type.
I've typed in dvorak day to day since about 2004. I type in querty on my phone without any issues—the devices are different enough that my nervous system doesn't get confused.
On library computers and such I'm reduced to hunt and peck. It's really hard to switch between dvorak and querty and type both well. I like dvorak enough that it's worth not being able to type full speed on random computers.
Sure. I've used Dvorak about 99% of the time since about 2001-2002. Except on my phone; I use QWERTY there, because it's a completely separate skill and the different layouts don't make any difference when you're typing one-fingered (Android's Gesture typing). I actually just tried switching and typing a few sentences, and I keep defaulting to QWERTY gestures.
I can still type QWERTY if I need to, even though I have barely used it in the past 13 years or so, but it takes me a few minutes to adjust and get up to speed. This happens if I need to use someone else's machine, which doesn't happen a lot. They wonder why I'm suddenly typing like an orangutan. But it goes away after maybe 10 minutes, then I'm up to maybe 70% of my Dvorak speed which is good enough for most short-term purposes. It still feels awkward to type QWERTY, so I try not to do it for more than a couple minutes.
(Interestingly, most of the problem when switching comes from punctuation, the muscle memory for typing punctuation seems to be separate in the brain. I noticed this when I was first learning Dvorak. I'd type 'v' instead of periods all the time, even when I was reasonably fluent with typing letters. Now the same thing happens in reverse, where I'll type 'e' or 'w' instead of periods or commas if I'm typing QWERTY.)
Overall, the fact that I'm using a different keyboard layout isn't something that I think about much. I'd be surprised if I'd even thought about it more than twice in the last six months.
I've been using dvorak (and qwerty) since around 2002 or 2003. Currently I type Dvorak on my kinesis keyboard which is hardware reprogrammable, and I type qwerty on "normal" keyboards.
It was a huge boon for my wrists when I switched, as they were starting to hurt but switching gave them a "break" as I learned the new layout, and then the new layout was more comfortable so the wrists stayed comfortable.
That's one of the first things I thought of, which made me think a priming-configurator ("Hit the 'left' key", "Hit the 'down' key"...) could make a map, saving the "vi homerow" to a file you could load w/ (e.g.) vi -m mymap.cfg ./somefile, or put into your .vimrc or equivalent.
I use vim with alternate layouts. The only keys that don't make sense are hjkl, but I never really learned those ones anyway -- to get around the file, I use search, 'w' and 'b', 'A' and 'I' mostly, and only occasionally do I use the arrow keys.
