james mckay dot net

Earlier this week I took delivery of a new laptop at work. Because I use Colemak with my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard and qwerty when the ergonomic option is not available (unfortunately I find flat keyboards and Colemak just don’t mix, though the Colemak/ergo combination is light years ahead in terms of comfort) this means I am likely to be switching to and fro between the two layouts a lot more on the same machine.

Unfortunately, the Windows keyboard switcher is completely insane in this respect. It’s maddening that it sets your keyboard layout separately for each individual window rather than letting you set it across the board for all the windows that you have open, and even more so that it doesn’t give you an option to change this behaviour.

But it gets worse. In IE8 you can set the keyboard layout individually for each tab. This meant that at one point this morning I had Colemak in Twitter and qwerty in the browser’s address bar.

Yes, I know there’s the whole thing about each tab being in a separate process, but Google Chrome has a similar architecture and gets this right. Microsoft: this is a bug, not a feature. Please fix it.

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Posted at 23:05 on 5 June 2009.
Tagged: colemak, IE8, qwerty, 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 on 11 January 2008.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, qwerty, typing

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