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What Do You Think of the COLEMAK Keyboard?
dafuchs asks: "Colemak, a new keyboard layout claims to be better then QWERTY and Dvorak. While i'm not certain if I should switch, it looks neat. It is better for hacking then Dvorak, and best of all, the 'l' is not in the right top corner. What do you think? Is it worth a try?"
I have the same problem with this layout as I have with every other alternative keyboard layout (including Dvorak): I want to be able to sit down at any computer, anywhere, and touch type. If I commit the COLMAK layout to memory, I'll have big problems the next time I go to a friend's house, an internet cafe, whatever.
Not worth the trouble.
that I'd hurt myself trying to learn a new keyboard layout.
That having somehow learned to touch-type on QWERTY some time in the last 30 years, there's zero chance I'm going to switch to a new variation of a conventional keyboard.
... yea great. Typing lessons didn't get me to touch typing on QWERTY, experience did. I have little time for classes, and I tend to devote those to something that's going to make my paycheck larger.
Alternative input, chorded keyboards and the like might have some value.
A "different sequence of letters" would do little but slow down my touch-typing for YEARS and interfere with the interface for any games that I choose to play on the PC.
TFA: "Typing lessons available"
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
It looks like your 'e' and 'a' keys need to be further apart.
As with all keyboard layouts that aren't QWERTY, you're going to have a rough(er) time switching back and forth layouts as you go home, go to work, and family and friends PCs. I'd stick with what is the most common, and although the layout might not be the absolute fastest around, it is the most common.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Two questions:
1 - Why do people keep coming up with new keyboard layouts when there's already only a few hundred million people with QWERTY committed to memory? It's not like they've come up with a new energy supply.
2 - And why does Slashdot keep posting about them? Have any geeks anywhere (other than the makers of these keyboards) actually sat around thinking of all the things they could have, it'd be a new "improved" keyboard layout? If there's a good reason please let me know.
Go ahead and try, and please tell us it looks interesting and if only 2 keys move between hands it should be easy to learn. The only problem I see is that the caps lock acts like a backspace, this could cause AOL 12 PRETENDING TO BE 14 YR OLD YELLING SYNDROM. It keeps the short cuts for cut/copy/paste in the same spot, this is very good.
Without actually using it I say it sounds neat and I might try it also, if someone makes a keyboard for it, right now it seems that you have to relabel/not look at, your keyboard.
Anyone else feel like they steped into a wikipedia article when they used the link?
I don't preview or spellcheck.
and best of all, the 'L' is not in the right top corner.
But now the 'K' is in the top right corner, which is much worse!
Any improvement in efficiency is ultimately worth it.
Also, 'We've always done it this way' is a terrible excuse for anything.
Are we still looking for a keyboard which is somehow quicker to type on than Qwerty? Why? What characteristics are we after, exactly? How would you measure how much better it is? Keep finding 1000 people to start from scratch with it, time them learning it, then time them using it at a reasonable level of competence? Where are you going to find people who haven't been "tainted" with Qwerty?
Give up, or at least, stop posting about it to Slashdot. Please.
Upon looking at the layout, one striking thing astonished me. The Ctrl-Z,X,C,V are the same for Qwerty and Colmak. Muscle memory shortcuts were the one thing that kept me back from using Dvorak, the inital creators of these shortcuts put them in the lower-left hand corner of the keyboard for a reason; they are incredibly easy to access. With Dvorak I found it cumbersome to stretch in weird places. I think that I'll feel truly at home with this layout
I just looked at the picture of the layout and typed "What are you doing" in COLMAK, and it's true, most of the work is done on the main line. I don't think I'll switch, QWERTY is just too convenient for me.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Their website cites "multilingual" as a major feature of this layout. Reading a bit more about this however, they've just made up lots of key combos for various "multilingual" characters. So? Anyone can pull a bunch of key combos out of their $ORIFICE and list them on a web page, or even write a custom keyboard map. And speaking as someone who does a lot of typing in my native language, I'd rather have my Ås, Äs and Ös as first-class letters, thankyouverymuch. Putting either under a (non-initiutive) key combo like [AltGr][f] is, principally, the same to me as putting "Q" under [AltGr][O]...
Btw, according to TFA, it's "Colemak" not "COLMAK". The website is even Colemak.com ffs...
I'll stick to QWERTY for the time being.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
I have a Sun system with a Sun keyboard, and I work with Sun servers at work. I also deal with several PCs at home and work. There are no less than five keyboard variations.
I have problems switching between the Sun keyboard and the PC keyboard due to the row change of the backspace key. It takes 10-15 minutes before I am confident I won't make mistakes. Depending on which PC keyboard I was using last, a mistake may mean hitting enter or '\' instead of backspace. That can be a fatal error when you are root. At work, I always use a PC keyboard to ssh to the Sun systems, that way I don't make mistakes.
Then there are keyboards that have ESC where I prefer '`'.
The worst is that there are no less than three ways to position the '\' key on PC keyboards. Sometimes, the placement affects either the size of the backspace key or the shape of the enter key.
I prefer the enter key to be a rectangle (none of that backwards-L shaped crap), the backspace key to be at least as big as two normal keys, and the '\' key to be in between them.
So, you're asking me if I want to change a dozen or more keys around?
Hell no!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I touch type Dvorak and QWERTY fine. It's like when I learned French or Japanese; I didn't forget English.
I'm pretty sure most people will agree, this is a straw man. Learning my Xbox controller did not make me turn into a retarded puppy when it came to my GameCube controller.
... it's spelled Colemak.
I think the poster is an idiot.
I think the poster will have no luck with the Colemak keyboard, since he doesn't read very well to start with. How will he ever tell he has mistyped anything? May as well use the ABCDE keyboard and forget learning to touch type.
Infuriate left and right
I think i will have to change all my passwords from qwerty to colmak.
Frankly, it sucks. I'm a dovark user for quite some time, and wouldnt mind changing layout if colemak were better.
So, what have I done?
Wrote 10 sentenses in english, and 10 sentences in portuguese (I'm brasilian). Long and toughfull ones.
After that, I typed all of them in both dvorak and colemak. It did not surprised me that colemak did not kept its promisses.
"Cuts finger movement distance in half. 16 times less same hand row jumping than QWERTY."
- It's hard to be worse then Qwerty. My tests proven (to myself) that dovark is still better.
"Most of the typing is done on the strongest and fastest fingers. Low same-finger ratio."
- This is half true. You keep allways using the same finger.
"Only 2 keys move between hands. Typing lessons available. The most common shortcuts remain the same."
- Remains the same as Qwerty. Totaly different from dvorak.
"Allows to type in over 30 languages and to type special characters."
- This is true, but kinda useless. I rate much better my hand crafted shortcuts.
"The punctuation keys which are used often by programmers and sysadmins remain easily accessible."
- Kinda the same as dvorak and qwerty.
"Released under the public domain. Doesn't require special hardware."
- Both qwerty and dvorak never bothered me in this way.
"Available for all major operating systems. Consistent implementation across platforms."
- lol.
My 2 cents.
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
In the FAQ, he says that "It's not possible to use Ctrl-Z/X/C/V shortcuts with the left hand while holding the mouse with the right hand." This is certainly not the case for me; I do this all the time, frequently without looking. With my left hand, I hit Ctrl with my pinky and hold it, while with my index finger I hit X, C, or V as needed. I've been doing this since the Windows 3.1 days.
-2 Double Redundant
You just plagairized an Anonymous Idiot. Go back 3 spaces.
I don't think a new keyboard layout is the solution. I think we need new keyboards. The problem I have is that the keys on all keyboards do not line up from top to bottom. The keys should not be in this 1/3 shift to the right arrangement they are now. That arrangement was a hack for the old mechanical keyboards that had levers that needed to go aside the key above it. Line the keys up from top to bottom, left to right, in a logical grid. That alone should speed up typing and reduce errors.
I know keyboards exist like what I have described, but that doesn't fix the keyboard supplied by my employer. It also is not a replacement for the keyboard in my laptop.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
One of the great mysteries of the universe: who at Sun though it was a good idea to put the caps lock key below the caps lock key?
What this poster is asking is "why did sun swap the location of the capslock and control keys?".
NeXT did the same thing on their keyboards and I've seen it on other UNIX systems as well. I think it's because UNIX users tend to use CTRL a lot more than they use CAPS-LOCK. I actually prefer the "Sun" layout as it's easier for me to hit the CTRL key in that location, and I rarely accidently hit CAPS-LOCK that way.
FWIW: Sun sells two versions of they USA keyboard.... one with the "UNIX" layout and one with the more common "PC" layout.
I switched over to the Dvorak layout a few years ago for one of my machines and I rarely had a problem moving to different layouts. It became second nature really -- a piano player doesn't get confused when he sits in front of a typewriter and vice versa. That machine is now no longer in use and I never took the time to change layouts since I move from machine to machine an awful lot. It's really a question of what you're used to. QWERTY is a layout that, by nature, impedes typing. Getting better at it simply means you've learned how to type uncomfortably. Anyone who's tried learning Dvorak for a week or so will easily realize that.
For two reasons: 1) It is fun to say... 2) A few comments before mine, I have to agree with... getting used to one layout, then having to go back to basically the default standard setting on any other computer will just slow down my elite typing skills!
Just me
the colmak layout:
[12] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
[13] Q F W P G J L U Y K [ ] \
[10] A S R T D H N E I O
[10] Z X C V B ; M , . /
is ALMOST congruent with my UK keyboard layout, BUT having a different number of keys on each row, being:
(ignoring special keys like backspace, enter, tab, shift etc)
[13] ` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
[12] Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ]
[12] A S D F G H J K L ; ' #
[11] \ Z X C V B N M , . /
A test re-mapping comes to
[13] ` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
[12] Q F W P G J L U Y K [ ] (Dropped \ to last row)
[12] A S R T D H N E I O ' #
[11] \ Z X C V B ; M , . /
I may give it a go.... I have enough usb and wireless keyboards at home (including with build in mouse-joystick and tray-like handles) that I can just swap keyboards if I need to.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I'm 21-years-old and typed in QWERTY for seven years starting at age 12, ultimately reaching 130+ words per minute. Rather than study for a test at uni two years ago, I decided to start learning DVORAK. For the rest of the semester lab reports were hard to write and after a week, I was a steady 40 wpm on Dvorak but my QWERTY speed dropped to about 50 wpm--after such a loss, there was no turning back! After four months exclusively on Dvorak I was at 90 wpm and by the half-year mark I was at 120 wpm. As for people who compare switching back-and-forth between keylayouts to bilingualism, they either (a) do not speak from experience or (b) do not type fast on either layout. Occasionally switching back to QWERTY is a REAL PAIN. The only words I can type fast on QWERTY include the URL to my uni's webmail page, my first and last name (email login), and email password. I've found that I only reach tolerable QWERTY speeds if I'm going back to QWERTY on a daily basis. I also think it helps to use the EXACT SAME KEYBOARD IN THE EXACT SAME LOCATION to really rev up QWERTY rates quickly. Of course, the latter statement sounds like psychobabble, but my muscle memory seems to benefit from these constants. If you haven't garnered these from DVORAK fan sites, here are some little tidbits: * 'a' and 'm' are the only keys that are not moved between QWERTY and ANSI Dvorak (more on ANSI later...) * the Dvorak home row includes aoeu ih htns - (spaces insert for readibilty) * as an OS X user, I find Dvorak much more amenable to common keyboard shortucts. Quit is cmd+Q and Close Window is cmd+w, which makes for easy muscle-memorisation on a Powerbook keyboard with the keys physically rearranged for Dvorak (http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dv orak_powerbook.jpg [geocities.com])
As for ANSI mentioned above, here's the real doozey: August Dvorak initially proposed an alternate number-row layout in his book Typewriting Behavior (1936, I think?). Rather than 12345 67890, Dvorak liked 75319 02468 (again, spaces inserted for readability). In theory, I don't know how much this helps. In practice, it's kinda useful these days since the '@' character is easily accessed with the index finger. This alternate number layout was NOT included in the standard ANSI Dvorak layout, but keymap files may be easily modified by true fanatics. On OS X, I highly recommend Ukelele (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_softwar e.asp?id=94 [sil.org]). I'm two-weeks into learning the alternate layout and am finally getting good at it.
In sum, the Dvorak layout markedly reduces finger movement for standard English text (http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePag e.html [vt.edu]); it seems to not be so helpful to developers. If you type fast on QWERTY now, you'll lose a lot of it after learning Dvorak. You may be able to get good enough at QWERTY but it won't be soon after learning Dvorak and it won't be fast and your boss will look at you funny when you're hunting and pecking.
Hope this helps.
Jon
My main problem with this comes from my own experience. I bought a Trust 'internet keyboard' which has a 'function key' in Ctrl's normal place, which I have to hold down to use any of the F keys. This means now that when I'm on a regular keyboard, I find myself pressing Windows Key + C to copy something, because my fingers are now used to the Ctrl button not being on the very far left. If that's the result with moving just one key, I don't want to experience the same irritating pattern with all the others.
As the home row clearly points out, this layout is:
ASs ReTarteD
Hey I got out of the cubie farms (not by choice) and I've got time. Let me get one of these bad boys http://www.pfu.fujitsu.com/en/hhkeyboard/hhkbpro/i mages/Pronl_sumi_top1_a.jpg and see if my typing goes to ludicrous speed...
As long as it doesn't remap ASDF for my classic Quakin I'll be fine.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Everybody mentions the layout but there's no link on the home page even. Help me Obi Wan.
Used to be that old people had real complaints, like walking to school uphill both ways. Now the best they can do is complain about carrying a calculator keyboard around and turning the light back on upon re-entering a room in which the other occupant prefers the light off.
Look, while anyone can grab a dictionary and find out the most commonly used letters in the English language, and then create an "optimal" keyboard layout, the problem is that this doesn't take into consideration trends in product branding or advertizing.
;.-> in the set), you pretty much have to learn how to make your keyboard layout more efficient. Mostly by breaking the "rules" introduced by touch typist.
Few would consider the letter X to be a popular character in the english language. Words containing the letter X are more rare then with the letter E or T, but look at the prevalence of X in products.
Xbox
OSX
XP
Matrox,
etc, etc, etc. Any keyboard layout using ONLY character frequency as its data for keyboard layout will fail as it can never take into consideration trends in society to suddenly focus on a specific letter or symbol.
Look at the @ symbol. Until email, few people would ever consider using @, in fact, I can't even remember why the symbol existed before email.
As a programmer, I really could care less what keyboard layout it used, none will ever truely cater to the specific needs of software developers. With a variety of both symbols and characters used with no such idea of character frequency (unless you start including
In the long run, I am actually quite surpised how many people are adept at figuring out how to hunt and peck at a keyboard without adopting any kind of typing style. In my office, probably only about 1/4 of the programming staff are actually touch typists, the rest hunt and peck, using 4 - 6 fingers at a time. Most people could care less about a formal approach to using a keyboard, so again, regardless of how the keyboard is layed out, it won't matter to a large number of computer users.
Finally, its the keyboard itself rather then the layout that causes the most grief. Laying out keys in straight rows without taking into consideration finger position and just plain biology. Your fingers form an arc, your middle fingers are longer then the outside ones, yet most keyboards are not optimise with this in mind, in terms of the physical placement. The only ergonmoic keyboard I have seen is one that bows into the desktop, keeping keys used by outside fingers shallow while those by middle fingers deeper. I would place more emphasis on ergonomic design rather then keyboard layout. Changing the layout on existing keyboards would do little to truely solve the problem of stress.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I worked at a place where there were teenage workers and at a time before _everyone_ had a cell phone. We had the Merlin phone system and I had implemented a dial code if you wanted to dial out.
Well, if I changed the code in the morning, by that night the teens had the new code so in addition to the code, I had remapped the keys so that 1 was 4, 2 was 5 and so forth. There were many combinations I used like 1=7, 2=8, or 1=3, 4=6.
After changing the pattern for a while, some of the teens could dial by tone and they figured out the pattern.
What worked was when I removed the tone for the first digit then kept the weird map for the rest of the digits.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I wish my brain were fast enough that my keyboard typing speed was the bottleneck for anything other than mindless dictation... but it isn't... so I'll stick with good ol' QWERTY.
I'm with Cliff--if we're moving keybindings to be hacker friendly, why do we still have to use shift for both parentheses and curly braces? Of the three sets, square brackets are the least often used, yet every layout I've ever seen gives them their own keys.
In fact, I type so fast that I have to step away from my keyboard before I submit one-line comments on Slashdot due to the "idiot filter" that some idiot put in (and which I don't appreciate).
In short, I don't need a better keyboard. Even keyboards that move the backslash from above [ENTER] to beside [SHIFT] drive me insane. It's not that I don't want to commit to a new keyboard layout, it's that I don't need to bother. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the one that is in use now, and no amount of self-serving BS from would-be layout designers can convince me otherwise.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
This concession was to use what is now the "Microsoft Natural" keyboard form factor. This was because I had developed large cysts on my wrists. Within a week of my starting to use the Natural keyboard, these cysts went away. This isn't due to the layout, but the shape of the keyboard, which allows me to keep my hands slightly turned in as they naturally do at rest.
With some rough calculation, I can guess that I've typed over 65 million characters at minimum in my life, and my hands are non-arthritic and fully flexible. Of course it also helps that I play the bass guitar.
Keyboard layouts don't impress me. Never have.
I often equate this to people who may for some reason wish to re-arrange the order of notes on a musical instrument. Proficient users of the instrument can adjust rapidly. People who have no skill or speed or fluency will never have those things no matter how they re-arrange the keys or the notes.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
The reason that I never learned to properly touch-type is because the keys are not where they should be when I place my fingers on the home keys. It hurts a tiny bit to hit them in the prescribed manner. Due to arm-angle and the natural motion of the fingers, the keys are all in the wrong places... it has always seemed like they should be shifted.
Split keyboards make a little bit of progress in solving this problem by rotating the halves of the keyboard so they fit the arm angle a little better, but practically none of them do anything about relative key placement.
Switching the layouts does not address the ergonomics of arm-angle and finger motion and it causes the added problem of learning another layout which will slow you down whenever you encounter the ubiqitous QWERTY layout.
I thought it might be a genius idea to invent a split-keyboard that lines the keys up the right way in a QWERTY layout for around $100, but these guys beat me to it:
U-Geek Review: Darwin Keyboards' SmartBoard
I have no idea why they didn't license their design... It's a crying shame that they are out of business.
DataHand also solves this problem the right way, but even at 50% off, their keyboard costs $500. It might be an efficient keyboard, but it's not $500 efficient.