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

Same Old Problem

[keithmo]

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.

Re:Same Old Problem

[Ashtead]

Actually, the keyboard remapping is not on the same level as using different languages. They are more on the level of having to use the same old alphabet in a new sequence. Imagine a country or province where all signs, newspapers etc. had been printed with a specific transposition of letters, (say, rot13 as an example, but any of the other possible 26!-2 combinations would have been the same) and then having to quickly switch back and forth between them? You can probably do it with some practice, but in the meantime it has slowed you way down, for no reasonable purpose at all.

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.

This has nothing to do with language, but all to do with the path from brain to machine.

I think...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

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.

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" ... 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.

I have two questions

[MuNansen]

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

[Gyga]

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 vote yes.. for me

[Carpe PM]

Disclaimer: I am a typing bonehead. I do not touch-type. QWERTY has never been 'right' in my mind.

Any improvement in efficiency is ultimately worth it.

Also, 'We've always done it this way' is a terrible excuse for anything.

Not really multilingual

[W2k]

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.

Re:Not really multilingual

[W2k]

Forgot to add: They also claim that their layout requires "no special hardware". This too is highly questionable, as most people would value having a keyboard that actually produces keypresses in accordance with what's printed on the keys. This is especially valuable when trying to learn a new keyboard layout, as (almost) anyone adopting Colemak would have to do.

However, since there are (at this time) no known vendors of Colemak-layout keyboards, anyone wanting to use such a keyboard with the proper key mappings would have to rearrange the keys by himself. Even then the result would not be perfect as the symbols combined on a number of keys (like the number keys, hah) have changed. In other words, not only does the Colemak layout require special hardware, there are possibly no keyboards that can even be (easily) modified to be fully Colemak-compliant.

Of course, you could always buy a Das Keyboard and write on the keys yourself. But I'd hardly consider that an easy mod.

I have enough trouble with keyboards already

[Kymermosst]

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!

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

[countach]

Where in heck are you going to get a hardware implementation of COLEMAK????

Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[cortana]

xmodmap

I Type 90 WPM

[SlippyToad]

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.