james mckay dot net

It came as no surprise to me when I decided to revert to qwerty that my blog was inundated with spirited comments from the Colemak crowd. After all, some of them seem to think that the aforementioned layout could triple your typing speed, cure cancer, and stop global warming, and for me to admit that I’d failed to reach my qwerty speed after four months was nothing short of heresy for which I should be burned at the stake.

Well perhaps I was a bit too hard on it, and no doubt I’ll get another firestorm of comments from the fanboys here, because I’ve started using it again.

I’m not using it all the time, mind you. I tend to use my laptop at home, and in my experience, Colemak and laptop keyboards simply do not mix. But I’ve been using it increasingly at work with my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard, and the two of them seem to go together fairly well. I really can’t emphasise this strongly enough: if you want to get the most out of Colemak, get a split ergonomic keyboard.

Switching between the two layouts also seems more comfortable in the long run, once you get used to it. They exercise different muscles in your hands and arms, so I find that when I get tired working with one, switching to the other helps a lot. I also seem to be picking up a bit of speed with it too, and though I haven’t got round to testing myself again, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m managing to hit 70 a bit more consistently.

Now if only someone would treat me to an Aeron chair…

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Posted at 08:00 in Typing

Now when I saw what this guy had to say about Colemak, my initial reaction was that he was being a jerk. Four days is nowhere near enough time to come to a reasonable conclusion about whether or not you’re going to get anywhere with an alternative keyboard layout, as even the most diehard fanboy would admit. Colemak actually has a lot going for it — it is easy to learn, and well supported by a vibrant online community, which comes in handy when you’re doing something as off-beat as using a different computer keyboard layout to everyone else.

But you can’t say the same thing about someone who draws exactly the same conclusions after having been at it for several hours a day for four months — by that time you should certainly be able to tell whether it’s going somewhere or whether you’re wasting your time. And in the past week or two, I have done exactly that.

My switch back to qwerty was partly prompted by our recent recruitment drive — as part of the interview process I’ll be wanting to do a little pair programming exercise with potential developers, and this is the kind of situation where an alternative keyboard layout would get in the way. However, much more significantly: I have found that Colemak has failed to meet my expectations.

My top Colemak speed of 71 words per minute may sound pretty impressive, but when you consider that my top qwerty speed on the same test was 90, the picture looks quite different. My typical results for Colemak have stuck stubbornly in the 62-64 range without budging an inch in three months, occasionally even dropping down into the 50s.

I’m sorry, but a net speed loss of 20% must be some new meaning of the word “fast” of which I was not previously aware.

I haven’t noticed any significant difference in comfort or accuracy either. Colemak initially gives the impression of being more disciplined and comfortable, but after four months of it, I was still making just as many typos and mistakes, and when switching back to qwerty, I did not notice any difference in long term comfort whatsoever.

Psychologistst talk about something called “cognitive dissonance.” This is where you get into something at considerable personal expense, then eventually, further down the road, it begins to dawn on you that you may be barking up completely the wrong tree. At this point, what many people do is to start rationalising their decision, and even defending it vigorously — the classic attributes of fanboyism. I sometimes wonder if this is what we see to a certain extent among devotees of alternative keyboard layouts, leading to the advantages of their layouts and the disadvantages of qwerty being exaggerated. They certainly would have you believe that qwerty is a total disaster area. They love to quote statistics about how much less your fingers travel on their layouts, how much more you use the home row, and so on. Frequency usage diagrams are all very well, but to be honest, that’s just theory, and unless you can demonstrate that this translates into a clear and obvious advantage in practice, which outweighs the disadvantages involved in using a non-standard layout, these statistics become no more meaningful than lines of code as a metric of developer productivity.

There have never been any scientific studies that have demonstrated significant advantage to alternative keyboard layouts, and even those that demonstrate relatively minor advantages are disputed. “The Fable of the Keys” by Liebowitz and Margolis is the well known paper here: its bottom line was that there were conflicts of interest behind wartime studies showing an advantage to Dvorak, and while it has seen one or two rebuttals from Dvorak fans, these don’t seem to have been given any serious consideration whatsoever by ergonomics researchers.

To be honest, I think this is why alternative keyboard layouts simply aren’t going to take the world by storm. Colemak is probably about as close as you’re going to get to attaining that goal, and sure, it’s easy to learn, and yes, its lively, friendly online community is fantastic, and yes, it’s maybe better than Dvorak, but its advantages are simply not sufficient to present a convincing case for its widespread adoption.

So sorry to disappoint any of you alternative keyboard fans out there. If you’re already a satisfied Colemak user, don’t let any of this put you off, of course. If you’ve found that it works for you, that’s fine — it’s just that it hasn’t worked out for me as I’d hoped.

Nothing personal…

(Update 4 June 2008: added a note on cognitive dissonance. Hat tip: Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, who discuss the topic in their latest podcast on stackoverflow.com.)

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Posted at 08:07 in Typing

Over the past few months I’ve been rather intrigued by some of the reports that I’ve read about Windows Vista speech recognition.  For example, Scott Hanselman claims an increase in speed from approximately 72 words per minute when typing to about 125 words per minute with voice recognition—an improvement of approximately 75%.

Now Hanselman works for Microsoft, so it is only natural that he would give something to do with Windows Vista a glowing report, and let’s face it, a typing test is actually a very artificial way of trying out this kind of thing—you’re not chopping and changing all the time but reading verbatim off the screen.  Other people are less complimentary.  Microsoft’s ill fated demonstration of Vista’s speech recognition went down in history, with the immortal phrase “Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all” appearing on the evening news and geek T-shirts.

I haven’t actually used Windows Vista that much until recently.  My old laptop only had Windows XP on it, and I use Windows Server 2003 at work.  However, a couple of weeks ago I got a new laptop, complete with Windows Vista, so I thought I might as well put it through its paces, and so today, I’ve been trying it out.  I’ve set myself the goal of writing a complete blog entry without using the keyboard or the mouse: opening Windows Live Writer, navigating Firefox and Google Reader, finding other pages that I want to reference, and inserting hyperlinks, using speech alone.

My experience so far has been more along the lines of the ill fated demonstration than Hanselman’s glowing report, but to be fair, it’s still early days.  Initially it was painfully awkward, and after a few hours it’s still pretty clunky, but it does seem to be learning from its mistakes and it does get it right about 80% of the time.  The problem is that the 20 per cent of the time when it doesn’t get it right, or when you want to chop and change things, it is very slow and fiddly.  Some things don’t even work: “show numbers” doesn’t show numbers correctly for hyperlinks on Ajax enabled sites in Firefox, and your blog’s category names don’t appear in the “categories” drop down list in Windows Live Writer.

Yes, it’s more comfortable than using the keyboard, but it does take a lot longer, and thoughts only trickle from your brain into your document rather than flowing.  It is also pretty frustrating if you keep chopping and changing things, as I do when I’m writing. Perhaps if I persevere at it I might find it improves, but I don’t think we’re going to be dispensing with our keyboards anytime soon. 

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Posted at 20:06 in Typing

I surpassed 70 words per minute on Colemak for the first time today. I have now all but abandoned qwerty…

(For those of you who are getting bored with me being a noisy Colemak fanboy, this will be the last of it round here — promise. I’ve started up a separate blog for that.)

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Posted at 17:56 in Typing

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying out the Colemak keyboard layout again. I’ve been a bit ambivalent about it up to now, partly because I found some Colemak users a bit too enthusiastic, but more because I was getting thoroughly disillusioned with ye olde Kinesis keyboard, so my attention to it has been rather intermittent, to say the least.

However, unlike Michael Kaplan of Microsoft’s International Fundamentals team (that’s the mob that decide which keyboard layouts get included with Windows and which don’t), who dismisses it out of hand because he thinks they’re too zealous, I have actually tried it out, and on Ryan Heise’s typing test the other day I managed about fifty words per minute with it. That is about as fast as most people type, and faster than anything I managed with Dvorak. Impressive, even if it is only about two thirds of my qwerty speed.

Since Colemak is so similar to qwerty, and many of the keys stay in the same place, it is vastly easier to learn than Dvorak if you are an existing qwerty typist, and it is also much easier to retain fluency in qwerty while you’re at it. I’ve managed to get this far with surprisingly little effort using a “qwerty by day, Colemak by night” approach, which has the added advantage that it doesn’t interfere with your productivity while you’re learning.

So will I stick with it? I don’t know at this stage. It certainly seems more comfortable and disciplined for normal text, but I’ve found that it tends to get in the way a bit when I’m trying to write code, especially in C# or JavaScript. However, I now find it pretty easy to switch to and fro between the two layouts depending on which one takes my fancy at any given time, so I may well do. Colemak for text-based work and qwerty for code seems to be a strategy with quite a lot of mileage in it.

Quite how much you stand to gain from learning it I am not sure: the rough impression that I get from people’s reports is that speed gains are of the order of 20% or so at best, so your mileage may vary. Personally, I don’t consider qwerty to be the disaster area that its detractors make it out to be — loads of people use it without complaint, and I can manage a fairly respectable, if indisciplined and inaccurate, 80 words per minute or so with it. However, if you are particularly frustrated with it — and emphatically if you’re thinking of learning Dvorak — Colemak may be worth a try. Since it is dramatically easier to learn, it renders Dvorak a total waste of time. Colemak is also well known for its enthusiastic and lively community, who, although some of them can get a bit carried away with themselves at times, are actually quite helpful and supportive, and more than willing to give advice if you need it.

Alternatively, of course, there is always voice recognition software…

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Posted at 19:05 in Typing

Unapologetic mindless link propagation time — this is just way too useful to let it slip: Olivier Dagenais on a hack to make the "zoom" slider on the Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard function as a "scroll" slider. (Hat tip: Ayende).

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Posted at 21:11 in Typing

I’ve decided to call it a day with my Kinesis keyboard.

This hasn’t been an easy decision. The Kinesis Advantage is a very nice piece of hardware, and I actually quite like it. Once you get used to it, it is very comfortable to type with, though you need to use Dvorak or Colemak to make the most of it. However, there is one very important thing that I have never been able to get used to on it: programming.

I’ve tried it with qwerty, and with Dvorak, and more recently in the past couple of weeks with Colemak, but these haven’t made any difference. The fact remains that there are some keys which are rarely used in normal typing that are used very frequently in writing code. Keys such as the square and curly brackets, the backslash, plus, minus and equals, and the cursor keys. These are frustratingly awkwardly placed on the Kinesis, and I have never managed to get used to them.

Yes, I know that the keyboard is reprogrammable, but you would have to reprogram something else in their places, and that something else would just be as awkward.

A while ago, someone left a comment on my blog assuring me that I would get used to it and I just needed to bear with it. Well, I’ve now had it for eighteen months and I still haven’t got used to it. There comes a point when you just have to face the fact that something isn’t going anywhere and you need to throw in the towel.

Since programming is what earns me my daily bread, I just can’t carry on regardless.

I’m going back to the Microsoft Natural line of keyboards, which are a tried and trusted solution that I’ve always found very satisfactory. I’ve ordered myself a new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard, and I am expecting delivery on Wednesday. I first saw one earlier this year on a visit to a client and I was fairly impressed with it. The key beds are curved slightly to make it more ergonomic, though the effect is much more subtle than the Kinesis. And while the £30 price tag may sound a tad extravagant given that keyboards come pretty much free with computers these days anyway, it is a lot more reasonable than the £225 you spend on a Kinesis. Besides, I don’t like flat keyboards that don’t give you the separation between the hands.

I’m not sure whether I will settle for one of the alternative layouts in the end. I found them almost essential on the Kinesis, on which qwerty is particularly cumbersome, but on more conventional keyboards the difference seems much smaller to me, and probably not worth the effort involved in switching. I never managed to match my qwerty typing speed on Dvorak, and now that I’ve switched back over the past few days I’ve realised that I can manage quite a good rate on qwerty, though I haven’t actually measured it properly. There is also the Remote Desktop Problem — when you have to use other computers, alternative layouts tend to get in the way somewhat. Besides, I’ve expended far too much time and energy on this whole kettle of fish and I am rather disinclined to experiment any further now.

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Posted at 14:00 in Typing

I’ve now been typing in Dvorak for about six weeks, and it finally seems to have clicked. This is my fourth attempt, and this time it all slotted into place after about two weeks. Unlike my previous attempt, this time I have had no discomfort, probably because I am using my Kinesis keyboard almost exclusively now both at work and at home, and avoiding flat keyboards like the plague.

I wouldn’t claim to be the world’s fastest typist yet, but it has certainly improved my keyboard discipline. I am now at last able to touch type properly in a way that I was never able to do on qwerty, for starters, and this in turn means that I am finally getting the most out of my Kinesis contoured keyboard. It’s also fun to see people’s reactions when they try to use my keyboard and find that not only are they confused by the shape of the thing, it doesn’t give them the letters that they expect. Hehe…

One thing I have found however is that while Dvorak is a definite improvement for text, the difference is smaller when you are programming, particularly in a curly-brackety language like C# or JavaScript, since you are making much more use of numbers and symbols. Having said that, a lot of what you have to do as a programmer involves writing text — comments, specs and the like — so it is still an improvement anyway.

I decided in the end not to bother with any of the other alternative layouts. I briefly tried Colemak, and while my initial impressions were favourable, I came to the conclusion in the end that its advantages over Dvorak are too small to be worth bothering with. It seemed to work relatively well on a flat laptop keyboard but for some reason I found it no easier to get to grips with on my Kinesis than Dvorak.

There are actually several qwerty derivatives knocking about, and the main thing that makes Colemak different from, say, Asset or Arensito is its small but noisy fanboy community. Its Wikipedia article was deleted back in November on the grounds of non-notability and has since been protected to prevent re-creation, much to the disgust of the fanboys. Yeah, there was the CapsOff million dollar competition, but it seems that was an obscure affair where it turns out that the prize money was entirely funded by donations. Given that the CapsOff website says that they would list all donations on the website, and I couldn’t find any listed anywhere, it seems that Colemak won its designer a lot less than the touted million dollars by a very large margin. Sure, it may become more popular, but I’ve already put in enough effort switching to Dvorak, so I think I’ll give it a miss for now.

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Posted at 13:03 in Typing

I got a new phone today. My old one died at the weekend but fortunately there was a spare one available at work that I have been given the use of. My mobile number is unchanged.

Unfortunately it is not an iPhone, but it does have some rather interesting features. One that I rather like is handwriting recognition, which even makes a reasonable attempt at interpreting cursive (joined-up) handwriting. It is accurate enough to be usable most of the time, and though it does make enough mistakes to slow you down, it seems to get more accurate the more you use it. It is certainly much easier to use it for texting than a tiny numeric keypad.

With technology like this, one wonders whether this means that the writing is on the wall for the keyboard as we know it. Speech recognition may have had a bit of a bad press, but it is improving all the time. We now have futuristic technologies such as Microsoft Surface and the iPhone either out or in the pipeline. Computer scientists at Cambridge University have even produced a device that can decode facial expressions.

Sure, all this may still be slow and resource intensive at present, but the technology is improving all the time, and while voice recognition may not be suitable in all settings (you wouldn’t make many friends using it in an open plan office environment), handwriting recognition is certainly rather promising, and it could well be a serious rival to the humble keyboard as our main data input device.

Having said that, I don’t think it’s curtains for the keyboard just yet. It comes into its own when you need to combine speed and accuracy. Skilled touch typists can reach speeds of eighty words per minute or more — speeds at which your handwriting would rapidly become illegible even to human readers. We developers will probably be the last ones to hang up our keyboards in the end of the day — the requirement for both speed and accuracy is paramount when you are writing code.

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Posted at 23:44 in Typing

Well just a couple of days after I reinstalled Windows on my laptop, the screen finally decided to die. This means that until I get it replaced, I’m offline in the evenings and at weekends. It’s about time I replaced my laptop anyway though. It’s now nearly four years old, and while it’s still perfectly serviceable, it’s beginning to get a bit geriatric in computer terms now. It weighs a ton and feels like having a fan heater sitting on your lap, it gets that hot.

I think this will give my wrists a bit of a well-earned rest. They’ve been getting a bit sore with my recent experiments with /(Dvor|Colem)ak/. Shai Coleman, the designer of Colemak, responded to a comment that I made on the Colemak forums saying that you do experience some discomfort initially, but it goes if you persist. However, I am still on qwerty at work and that isn’t likely to change now.

I’ll still be blogging when I get a chance, however. I’ll just be relying on pen and paper a lot more for the first draft of each entry. I think this speeds up the process somewhat though. I tend to be something of a perfectionist at times: I find it all too easy to either (a) over-research my blog posts, or (b) spend too long editing, chopping and changing them, and just having a pen and paper puts a bit of a restraining hand on me from both these tendencies, since I have to write it all offline in one pass without recourse to Wikipedia.

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Posted at 18:13 in Miscellany, Typing