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?"

Comments

Re:Same Old Problem

[Canthros]

Actually, it's not so bad. I switch back and forth from QWERTY to Dvorak on a regular basis. Like, whenever I come home from the office.

Re:As with all layouts that aren't QWERTY. . .

[Hast]

At least, that was the case the last time I looked into it.

Look into it some more then.

I actually don't know about admin rights to install. As we all have admin on our own computers at work. Adding a Dvorak layout to my XP computer took about 30 seconds.

But changing the settings takes about a Left SHIFT + ALT press to change. You can also have different keyboard settings and change them by simply clicking.

Takes all of 5 seconds.

Learning to use it, well, that's a different story.

My related Dvorak story

[jbreidbord]

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

Re:Same Old Problem

[Eivind Eklund]

I find even the punctuation moving around between Norwegian and US standard keyboards to be bad enough when having to type the simplest of texts (text with only letters, digits, period, comma, and exclamation marks; the rest of the punctuation has moved around). It isn't like I cannot use it, but once I get to a point where there should be a question mark and i get an underscore instead, or a left parentheses and not the right one, I have to slow way down from the "typing while looking at the screen"-mode, where the thoughts, the fingers, the keyboard and associated circuitry run like a smooth-flowing pipeline, about as easy as talking, to "hunt-and-peck" mode, where the flow is more like the stop-and-go traffic of a city street grid.

Actually, this is just lack of training with switching between these.

And again in norwegian: Dette er faktisk bare fordi du mangler trening i å bytte mellom disse.

I use both layouts, and have for two decades. When you've used both in parallel and switched a lot, it's trivial, and it sits in the fingers for both. It can take quite a while to get used to, though.

Eivind.