james mckay dot net

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 on 11 January 2008.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, qwerty, 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 on 9 October 2007.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, ergonomic keyboards, 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 on 23 August 2007.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, fanboys, 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 on 3 July 2007.
Tagged: blogging, colemak, dvorak, laptop

I have given up on Dvorak once and for all. It does make for much more disciplined typing, but I found that just as I was getting up to speed on it, I was beginning to experience some discomfort in my right hand and arm. There are some nasty artefacts in Dvorak, perhaps the worst of which is the position of the L key, in the top right hand corner of the keyboard. Having to stretch your pinky as much as that gets really sore after a while. Since the main reason why I started looking into alternative keyboard layouts was that for the past two years I have been experiencing some general fatigue and mild discomfort on and off in my right arm in the first place, I thought that it would be prudent to take note. I was also finding it very uncomfortable to type URLs on my Kinesis keyboard, where said pinky has to do the Riverdance to handle the forward slash and the shift key for the colon, then move out of the way to let your right middle finger handle the “www”.

At the moment I am back on QWERTY at work and hating it. However, there is a very promising new kid on the block as far as keyboard layouts are concerned: Colemak. Unlike Dvorak, it takes QWERTY as its starting point and only shuffles some of the keys around, leaving almost all the punctuation and symbols and some of the less frequently used letters in pretty much the same place. This makes for a much more comfortable typing experience that is also much easier to learn, and it has none of the nasty artefacts of Dvorak either.

After only two or three evenings, I am already more comfortable with it than I was after three weeks of going completely cold turkey on Dvorak on my first attempt back in July 2000. It also seems that switching to and fro between QWERTY and Colemak will be much easier than switching back and fro between QWERTY and Dvorak. You can get full instructions on how to use it, and a Windows installer, from the Colemak website. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I am good enough at it to be able to use it at work too.

Update: I didn’t eventually switch to Colemak in the end. (See discussion.)

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Posted at 20:59 on 20 June 2007.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, qwerty, typing

Over the past week or so I’ve been having another go at typing Dvorak again. I’ve been getting rather frustrated recently at my long standing indiscipline and uncoordinated habits on a QWERTY layout, particularly in my right hand, and I’ve been anxious to ditch it in favour of something a bit more sane and logical for quite a while now, the problem being, of course, the amount of time and effort it takes to make the switch, and the dire impact that it has on your productivity during the first couple of weeks.

This time I think it is within my grasp, however. This is my third attempt to get Dvoraking, and I can now easily manage over 30 words per minute on my laptop, where I have rearranged the key caps. I am still a bit slower on my Kinesis keyboard which does not have the keys relabelled, so I am having to learn to touch type properly on it, and that makes it a bit more of an effort. Nevertheless, it is now at the stage at which the impact on my productivity is minor enough for it to be tolerated at work, and once you reach that stage, it is plain sailing all the way.

I am well impressed with just how much more comfortable it is than qwerty, and also that it seems to encourage and even enforce much more disciplined keyboard habits. I find that the fingers on my right hand tend to gravitate naturally to the home keys for their resting position now, for instance, whereas on qwerty they tended to gravitate to anything but the home keys. I am also finding it much easier to type without having my palms resting on the wrist rests at the front of the keyboard all the time.

One thing I have found however is that if you frequently have to remote desktop into other computers and servers, a reprogrammable keyboard is absolutely essential. Terminal Services uses the keyboard layout programmed into the server rather than your local machine, so unless you are prepared to switch back and forth all the time between qwerty and Dvorak (and everything that I have read on the subject is unanimous that you shouldn’t while you’re learning), relying on the ability to change the keyboard settings in Windows simply won’t cut the mustard. The keyboard switcher in Windows can be pretty temperamental at the best of times, and nice as it would be to switch all the servers I access to Dvorak, there are other people around who also have to log in as an administrator as well as me, and if they end up typing gibberish or are unable to even log in thanks to the Dvorak layout, they are likely to get rather annoyed.

It seems that there are quite a few alpha geeks and bloggers who type Dvorak. Well known Dvorakists include Bittorrent inventor Bram Cohen and WordPress head honcho Matt Mullenweg. For a light-hearted and entertaining look at the benefits of the Dvorak keyboard layout, check out DVZine.org, a Dvorak advocacy site in web comic format. It’s a seriously cool intro to it that is well worth a read, even if you don’t plan to switch.

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Posted at 20:35 on 8 June 2007.
Tagged: dvorak, qwerty, typing

I recently got a comment wishing me luck with my switch to Dvorak, so I thought I’d better post an update.

Unfortunately, it never got off the ground. The problem with the Dvorak layout is that it is so totally different to qwerty that it takes several weeks to get used to — time during which your productivity takes a pretty big hit. If you don’t want to annoy your boss, don’t do it.

Dvorak is not the only alternative: there are other layouts that are closer to qwerty, such as the Colemak layout. Colemak is based on qwerty — only about half the keys have been shuffled around — and claims to be more tightly optimised than even Dvorak in terms of things like the distance that your fingers move, alternation between your hands, and so on.

However, I don’t think you need to do all that much in terms of optimisation to notice a big difference. Remember the Pareto Principle — that 80% of the wealth is in the hands of 20% of the people? The same thing probably happens with tweaks to your keyboard layout. The figures may not be exact, but most of the improvement will come from a relatively small number of changes. These layouts may be able to outdo each other in terms of the exact figures, but there comes a point beyond which it gets a bit pedantic.

One simple tweak that I’ve experimented with a little has been to swap the E, R, T, U, I, O and P keys with the ones directly beneath them. I haven’t spent a great deal of time with this, but it seems apparent to me that it gives a fairly impressive improvement over qwerty while being very easy to get used to. It moves all the vowels and the most frequently used consonants onto the home keys, and since no keys change fingers, you can adapt quite quickly. Once you’re used to that, you could possibly go on to swap some of the other keys around a bit, and adopt an “evolutionary” rather than “revolutionary” approach.

If you can’t afford to shell out for a programmable keyboard such as the Kinesis, Microsoft has a nifty little program available as a free download that lets you create and edit your own keyboard layouts for Windows.

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Posted at 22:09 on 5 August 2006.
Tagged: dvorak, typing

I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and move over to using a Dvorak keyboard layout.

Everyone thinks I’m crazy doing this but there are some good sound reasons for it, notably that apparently it’s more comfortable. The traditional qwerty layout is actually far from optimal — it was not designed for either comfort or speed and it involves a good deal more finger travel than the DSK. People who successfully make the switch generally report that even if they don’t notice an increase in overall speed, they do find Dvorak to be both more comfortable and more accurate.

As you would expect, it feels quite awkward at present, since I’m fairly new to the game. Going from about 60-70 words per minute to about ten is a bit of a pain, but I’m slowly but surely picking up a bit of momentum as I persevere. It seems that a lot of people give up in frustration rather than sticking it out to the point at which they are good at it. Apparently if you keep going back to the qwerty layout while you are re-training, though, it really slows you down a lot, and this seems to be where most people fall over.

Switching is technically fairly easy as every operating system includes it as an option, and you can stick some labels on your keys with the new layout, as I have done. Unfortunately, Windows only provides you with Dvorak layouts for US English, which means no pound or euro symbols. For some strange reason, it seems to have escaped the attention of some Americans that 95% of the world’s population do not live in the U S of A. Evidently, some such Americans work at Microsoft. However, a UK layout is available for download here.

I’ll be blogging my progress and thoughts on the transition over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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Posted at 22:32 on 10 March 2006.
Tagged: dvorak, typing