this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Mechanical Keyboards
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This layout is called Colemak-DH, which is a slightly optimized variant of the original Colemak layout.
It was designed to make typing more efficient for your fingers than QWERTY. If you were to analyze the top ten thousand words or so in English, you’d start to notice lots of common bi-grams and tri-grams (two and three letter combinations). Colemak looks to optimize the position of the keys such that these n-grams are typed by “rolling” your fingers from one side of the keyboard to the other. In addition, it places a lot of other common letters in intelligent positions to reduce finger travel. Over longer periods of typing, your total finger travel across the keyboard is greatly reduced in comparison to QWERTY.
In theory, you can type faster on this layout, but in my experience that’s not necessarily true (I type the same speed on Colemak vs QWERTY). But it does feel so fucking good to type on. That alone should be reason enough to consider learning it.
Does less finger travel make a difference in the long term? For example if you go back to QWERTY do your fingers feels fatigued?
I can’t say that I am an expert on the science, but theoretically less finger travel might reduce repeated stress injury. I don’t know if it has been scientifically shown that Colemak helps reduce RSI in comparison to QWERTY.
From my personal experience, Colemak feels significantly more comfortable to type on. When I switch back to QWERTY, I feel like my fingers are all “spidery” in nature, stretching out and crawling all around the keyboard.
The design of the keyboards I type on in general also help improve ergonomics, but regardless if I typed on standard row staggered keyboards I’d still choose Colemak over QWERTY.
Hey this is interesting to me! I've only ever known/learned qwerty. How long did it take you to learn a new typing variation? Is it hard not to type the wrong letters when you switch back and forth?
I switched to a split keyboard and to Colemak at the same time (so it might be longer than if you simply switch to Colemak) and it took me about two months to regain my speed and now I'm faster on Colemak than qwerty.
I'm only on a split when typing Colemak, so it's very easy for me to switch back and forth as I have separate muscle memory for my split keyboard.
Oh that's an interesting strategy with the separate muscle memory. kind of a built in mental cue to remind your brain to type the right letter set.
It took me about three months to reach my QWERTY speed on Colemak. I now type with Colemak full time as a software developer.