Colemak Keyboard Layout Update

After a three weeks of trying out the Colemak layout, with 5-20 minutes of practice almost every day, I was able to reach 43 words per minute on monkeytype on a one-minute test.¹ Although I have to note that I used monkeytype’s default configuration, which consists only of all-lowercase common english words with no punctuation, and in reality my typing speed would probably be much slower.

I have since stopped training on Colemak, but I still intend to keep using it for fun, although I don’t know if I will ever make the switch from QWERTY to Colemak. A few interesting things happened while I was training on Colemak. As I expected, I completely forgot the Russian keyboard layout as I committed Colemak to memory. It seems like my muscle memory on a keyboard comprises a “slow section” and a “fast section.” QWERTY occupies the “fast section” and the Russian layout used to occupy the “slow section,” that is why when I try to type slowly and meticulously, sometimes gibberish comes out because I am actually clicking the corresponding keys for Cyrillic letters. Colemak seems to have replaced that spot, though I am not worried as when I need to use the Russian keyboard again I could probably recover it within a week. Furthermore, I’ve also noticed that after training on Colemak I begin to make seemingly random keystroke mistakes. Usually, I would expect myself to mistake the same (or a similar) letter in a different keyboard letter for the letter I am trying to type on a particular layout. But sometimes these mistakes just come out of nowhere, and I would consistently press a random key for a key I am trying to type. This phenomenon seems to be layout confusion and only occurs when I switch between QWERTY and Colemak (especially if I do so repeatedly), whereas the normal “layout confusion” occurs whenever I type.

Trying to learn Colemak has also motivated me to train more on QWERTY (as a effort to preserve my muscle memory for the layout), and helped me my speed on consistency on QWERTY. The biggest improvement came when I realized that I should adjust my posture and lift up my wrists slightly. I will be working on typing accuracy and consistency on QWERTY after I stop training on Colemak. Also, as I thought about the Colemak argument for greater home row utilization, I realized that our hands naturally curve up while resting on a level surface (such as a keyboard), and the middle/ring fingers naturally lean toward the top of their home row keys. Perhaps, ergnometrically speaking, using the top row in QWERTY is not all that bad. I still think the best argument for Colemak is the placement of common bigrams. One day I may try to take on Dvorak, but that is much harder for someone coming from QWERTY (and now QWERTY + Colemak).

1. Measured by 1 word per minute = 5 characters per minutes. ↩