2009.04.15 in uncategorized

Colemak

So it's now been a year since I switched my keyboard layout to Dvorak, and now it's time to change it again now to Colemak. It was very upsetting last year when I first found out about Colemak. It was about a week into the transition and I had destroyed my ability to type on any keyboard, and I was already committed to Dvorak. Colemak is supposed to be much easier for QWERTY users to switch to because there are fewer changes, so I was wondering how it would be for me coming from Dvorak. I wanted to switch to Colemak largely so I could have Z, X, C, V in a row again for common keyboard shortcuts, as well as it supposedly being a little bit better. So far this transition is going much faster and smoother. I started on Friday night, and by the end of the weekend I could more or less use all 3 rows of letters on the keyboard. I'm now ready to try using it full time, although it will be slow for a while, and I'll need to drop to Dvorak for passwords. It took at least a week or two in the last switch, so this is much faster. I wonder why. There are several possible reasons I've thought of. Could it be that because I already successfully changed my keyboard layout before and my brain is now keyboard trainable? Is it because of Colemak's similarity to QWERTY and something was retained (I pretty much can't use QWERTY keyboards at all anymore)? This time I learned it a row at a time instead of tiny steps adding pairs of keys on each finger and gradually adding the 1st and 3rd rows. I hit 44 wpm on keybr, although the number of errors I make varies. For a while my Dvorak ability seemed to not be affected. More recently I've been experiencing some issues (which may still get worse), but it seems that for now at least my Dvorak ability has not been completely destroyed. Unlike last time when I lost all ability to use QWERTY. So I used only Colemak to type this post, although it took forever. This is the longest block of text typed so far using Colemak. I also remember making note of my first wowomg typed with Colemak. Alternative keyboard layouts are fun and everyone should try one, although learning and switching requires some degree of patience. It's supposedly relatively easy to switch to Colemak for QWERTY because there are few changes.