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Long trem user of QWERTY to colemak

  • Started by cartman-2000
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  • Registered: 26-Oct-2013
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That isn't switching between hands. I mean, it is, but the problem is the 'r' and the 's' key. They continue to plague me, too. That's because the s key is only one position different between qwerty and Colemak.

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A little update to my previous posted speed, I currently average around 36-40 wpm in amphetype, while peaking out at around 45-48 wpm, fastest one so far is at 47.8 wpm. Still the real speed can be a bit erratic just for free typing(can feel as low as 30 wpm or feel as fast as 40-45 wpm, depending on what I'm typing, how familiar I am with typing those words.). I kind of have to "warm up" into my faster speeds first thing in the morning, at that time I get a speed about 15-20% slower than my usual speeds where typing just feels sluggish, probably due to in part to a lack of concentration in the morning(Not a morning person lol.).

Also at these higher speeds I'm getting a somewhat increasing amount of out of order typos in typing when switching between hands, which was a common problem with QWERTY if I was typing quickly with it, although the general accuracy has increased to some degree over the past couple weeks since my last post(~96-98%). Amphetype logs a couple of the words that I type at over 70 wpm,"hat" trigram at 101 wpm, "the" at 93 wpm, "that" at 91.9 wpm, "then" and "them" both at 71 wpm. The most common word that I get out of order is the word "that" typo'd as "taht", basically my right hand is just a little to slow at hitting the "h" key on that one sometimes when I get a typo on that one. The out of order typos probably account for around 30-40% of the typos that I make in this layout, the rest are either hitting the wrong key, missing a key by accidentally pressing it to lightly, or accidentally bouncing a key(having it come out twice), also from pressing keys to lightly.

Last edited by cartman-2000 (20-Sep-2014 05:19:33)
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pressing too lightly? lol, i have to focus so i don't bottom out. the brown switches i have now are great at helping with that, but before, i had red switches. and i'd always slam the keys down so hard that my fingers would hurt >.< i could never type lightly on those

sounds like you've got a "ta" pattern memorized, but you've got to learn a separate "th" pattern for "that". for example, you're set to roll your left hand "ta" regardless of what your right hand needs to press. and you're trying to time the "h" to squeeze in between. but try practising a "th" pattern, followed by an "at" roll. that's my guess

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Well I'm using a relatively stiff membrane keyboard to type on, so it can be relative easy to hit keys a little to lightly sometimes on it, with that high initial resistance on the keyboard. That high initial resistance isn't all that good for getting a good press force on it, you either press to hardly and end up slamming the key down, or press to lightly and fail to press it down all the way, missing the key or bouncing it. The press force that you get on a membrane  is pretty much inverted from what you'd get on a mech key, high to low on membrane, and low to high on a mech.

[Edit]
I've been more or less able to measure the stiffness of the keys on my board, they go anywhere from 65 grams up to as much as 80 grams for some of the more stiff letter keys.

Last edited by cartman-2000 (24-Sep-2014 20:50:24)
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A little update on the speeds that I'm getting so far, the best that I have had so far in Amphetype, is at 53.4 wpm at 98% accuracy, average is probably somewhere around 45 or so. Also did some tests on the 10fastfingers site, but I'm a little slower on there with the random texts, at about a 41-43 wpm average.

40 wpm is pretty much my magic number where it becomes considerably easier to type, as in the amount of concentration that you need to type. With the words that you know the best, you can type them with very little concentration on the task of typing out the word.

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sounds like you've cracked it... good work

like you say, once past 40wpm you can get stuff done and don't have to worry so much about further progress

but you will definitely continue to get faster, but at an ever decreasing rate

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bph said:

but you will definitely continue to get faster, but at an ever decreasing rate

Of which I've already started to notice so far with it, I may eventually get to a 60+ wpm average consistently, but that might take up to a year or so to do. So far I have been doing this for about three months now. The current rate of gain of speed is somewhere around 6-10 times slower than it was when I first started learning the Colemak layout.

Even though I have gotten up to a speed of 40 plus wpm, I still have to work on my accuracy to some degree, as that is still somewhat inconsistent, however this should get better with time too as you learn to type more and more words by muscle memory. It's the words that I don't know very well by muscle memory that I have the most trouble with when typing, in terms of accuracy.

Last edited by cartman-2000 (22-Oct-2014 20:39:25)
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i've managed to hit an average in the low 60's now but it has taken me 15 months to get there..

its been said a lot here but worth repeating, focus on accuracy and not speed - aim to achieve > 98% accuracy at all times. let the speed catch up with the accuracy

i think to get quick you have to teach your brain to 'chunk' words (or at least common parts of multliple letters that constitute words), i.e. to know the finger pattern required for every word automatically without effort, certainly without having to think about the individual component keys.

When you think about it, thats quite a feat if you want to cover the whole language and will inevitably take a lot of time and effort to master.

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For reference, it's taken me 7 months to get up to mid-60s in Colemak. My former QWERTY speed was mid 90s.

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I spent 6 months prior to learning colemak trying to learn to touchtype qwerty, got up to about mid 40s over that period. Prior to that i was a qwerty hunt and peck merchant at about 50wpm.

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I finally got my Ergodox to come it yesterday, and got it built. This will probably take a couple days to get used to, went from having a 50wpm average to having around a 40wpm average with this new keyboard, with about a 4% drop in overall accuracy. The stagger on the standard keyboards can throw you off a bit with the left bottom row with this keyboard. I went with blue switches in this keyboard, the clears this keyboard usually comes with, with the default option, would have been to stiff for me to use on my pinkies.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fr7t9xhimcv9y … 8.jpg?dl=0

This is the layout that I'm using on this keyboard, I origonally had the tab and backspace key swapped, but that was a bit too awkward to type on, accidentally pressing tab when I meant to press backspace. And I may tweak the other layers on it over the next few days or so.
https://www.massdrop.com/ext/ergodox/?r … 92a6cbfd96

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Got used to it and find it easier to type on than the standard staggered keyboard, have both a little higher average accuracy and speed on it.

Here's a pic of the keyboard that I have. It's the full hand version of it with the DCS style of keycaps, and programmed in hardware Colemak, with qwerty on another layer, if I need it for something(not using the Colemak layout in the system).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5jnzi0f055eji … 6.jpg?dl=0

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