Ideas on New Keyboard Layouts (Colemak)

Recently I’ve been programming and doing other activities that involve using my keyboard a lot. I knew that if I could type faster, my overall productivity in these activities would increase. Out of curiosity, I tried various typing tests on websites like Monkey Type and TypingTest.com. I managed to hit 120 wpm¹ on the former (which consist of english words with no capitalization and no punctuation) and 110 wpm on the latter (which comprises actual passages). Although this is by no means fast compared to skilled typists (who typically max out above 200 wpm), it was definitely fast enough for most of my needs.

However, in the meantime, I unintentionally dove into the rabbit hole of alternative keyboard layouts, where I learned about the history of the QWERTY layout. I found this to be interesting because I have been using a keyboard for over a decade and never questioned why the keyboard is laid out the way it is. Although I found out that learning an alternative keyboard layout will probably not benefit typing speed (and cause it to decrease in the short term) from others sharing their experiences on YouTube, something about using a layout that is meant to separate common english bigrams and make typing inefficient in order to solve a problem that no longer existed just didn’t sit well with me. So I set out to find a replacement and ditch QWERTY.

My goals were simple: I wanted to find find an alternative keyboard layout that was more efficient than QWERTY. Some claim that QWERTY’s inefficiencies can actually add extra stress on our forearms, potentially causing injury after long-term use. Regardless, I was encapsulated by the offerings of efficiency and less finger movement of various alternative layouts. Out of the many keyboard layouts available, I wanted to start with one that is quite popular, so that compatibility would not be a big issue. The two widely recognized alternative layouts are Dvorak and Colemak. Here are the common arguments for why they are better than QWERTY. Both of them optimize typing by reducing finger movement, which is accomplished through a rearrangement of keys so that the home row (which is the middle of three rows on the keyboard containing letters) is used more. Colemak claims to use the home row 122% more than QWERTY and 14% more than Dvorak by placing the ten most common english letters on the home row. On the other hand, Dvorak takes an even more radical approach and places all five vowels underneath the left-hand-side of the home row and saving the common consonants for the right hand. This is beneficial to right-handed users compared to the left-hand dominant QWERTY layout, and it also helps split up and alternate keystrokes between both hands.

I ultimately chose Colemak over Dvorak because Colemak was easier to learn and preserves many keyboard shortcuts (e.g. by preserving the letters “Q, A, Z, X, C, V”). Colemak also has a DH and DHm mod, which are modifications that try to fix problems with the Colemak layout (such as the D and H keys causing the center columns to be overused); however, these modifications are not available by default on mainstream packages, which defeats the purpose of choosing Colemak in the first place, so I decided to stick with the vanilla layout. There are many great resources on the internet to learn touch-typing on QWERTY and alternative layouts. For example, I used Keybr to learn touch-typing with QWERTY. And there are also layout-specific tutorials online for Dvorak and Colemak. Personally, I found Keyma.sh’s tutorial for Colemak to work the best. Thanks to only 17 keys being swapped, two of which switching hands, I was able to learn the Colemak layout and commit it to memory in less than an hour. Before deciding to learn Colemak, my worst fear was that I would forget the QWERTY layout. Forgetting QWERTY would be quite inconvenient in today’s world, and I would also be stuck with my slow speed on Colemak until I get fast. To my surprise, after clocking in at 12 wpm on 10 fast fingers (10FF) using Colemak on my first day, I was able to switch back to QWERTY while playing Nitro Type in less than a minute and reach speeds up to 100 wpm again. This reminded me of the time I committed the Russian keyboard to memory, but my mind automatically switches to the Russian keyboard whenever I think about something Russian (even if it’s in English). This time, I am consciously jumbling two english keyboard layouts in my mind and switching between them at will. I am curious to see whether more Colemak practice will (and hopefully won’t) begin to impair the speed and accuracy of my QWERTY typing. Inspired by Jashe’s insane layout-fluid skills I will keep practicing both Colemak and QWERTY until I hit (at least) 60 wpm on Colemak to see how it would affect my typing on QWERTY.

1. This initialism stands for “words per minute.” Since words are variable in length, it is customary to define 1 word/minute as 5 characters (including whitespaces) per minute (or cpm), making the two units interchangeable. ↩