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:I have two questions

[kurosawdust]

Two questions:

1 - Why do people keep coming up with new programming languages when there's already only a few hundred million people with C/C++/Python/Perl/Lisp/BASIC 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 languages) actually sat around thinking of all the things they could have, it'd be a new "improved" programming language? If there's a good reason please let me know.

I think ...

[A nonymous Coward]

... 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.

It sucks.

[gothmog666]

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.