I typed Dvorak for 8 years at ~100 wpm, but wasn't fully satisfied with it. About a month ago, after much research, I decided I was going to give the Workman layout a try. Once I got up to about 70 wpm on that, I realized two things: 1) Workman is comefortable to type 2) Workman was not designed for speed. Now I'm giving Colemak a try, and so far, it looks like it will be much better on the speed aspect. Although I'm only at ~30 wpm currently.
I can't imagine why after 8 years and a speed of 100 wpm you would consider switching between layouts which are all well-optimized. Speed is not the only relevant factor though. Perhaps you had some other reasons for switching?
Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.
If you have plenty of time to kill, then layout switching can be fun. You may try Carpalx optimized layouts too, but they are pretty the same in term of efficiency.
My fastest typing records http://hi-games.net/profile/4314
My switching experience https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=970
A comparative writeup (once you've gotten your Colemak speed up) might be interesting; I doubt many others have tried all three!
I would be happy to write up a detailed comparison of the three as soon as my Colemak speed reaches 70+ wpm.
This is day two on Colemak, and I'm at 37 wpm. I hope to achieve 70 wpm in 2 weeks.
I can't imagine why after 8 years and a speed of 100 wpm you would consider switching between layouts which are all well-optimized. Speed is not the only relevant factor though. Perhaps you had some other reasons for switching?
It does seem crazy to switch after 8 years for minimal gain. I guess my curiousity to know which layout suits me the best is just too strong to ignore. And learning a new layout is rather fun, in a sick, painful sort of way.
I switched from Dvorak to Colemak and have been very happy with it ever since. Both are optimized, yes, but the feel is quite different.
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
So far I am really liking Colemak. The R and S keys seem to be giving more trouble than the rest, but I suspect that is because I recently picked up Workman, which has those keys in almost the same places, just with fingers swapped.
Anyway, progress is going well. Day three, ~47 wpm.
I am up to 65 wpm average and my fingers are flowing well enough. I'm still making mistakes that I feel like I shouldn't, but that's to be expected. I am having some early reservations about the comfort of the layout though. Usually by the time I'm up to this speed, the early discomfort I feel from switching layouts goes away. But my discomfort level is at a peak right now. Maybe I should take a few days off and let my hands and wrists take a break. I have been typing a LOT during the past week.
Yeah, take care. Even the safest layout will hurt you if you overdo it! :)
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
that is insane - 65wpm in a week
just insane..
For the last few days, I reverted back to Workman, and the pain has gone away. I am going to start back into Colemak (starting right now), but take it a little slower this time. The reason I was trying to ramp up so quickly was to minimize the productivity hit at work. It was all going well until it became too painful to type.
So when I switched back to Colemak (2 days ago), my speed had plummeted back down to 30 wpm. It's coming back pretty quickly though, and so far, almost no pain involved. An interesting side note, yesterday my manager walked into my office and asked me if I could code up a prototype for a new project within 1 week, which would have been hard even if I hadn't switched layouts recentiy, but I was like "Uhm... yeah sure." It has been slow going, but 100% written with Colemak. Hopefully I can make the deadline :)
I imagine your pain is analogous to using chopsticks, if you weren't raised using chopsticks. I wasn't. My hands would hurt at first. The first thought was that my hands weren't strong enough and that I needed to build up strength. This wasn't true. And it certainly isn't true in your case because you type in other layouts. The truth turned out to be that I wasn't skilled enough, and that as I gained more skill, I could loosen my deathgrip on the chopsticks. I imagine you're straining to pump out 70 wpm on Colemak when it isn't natural yet.
It's really odd isn't it? When I started out I pushed myself a little too much. I typed for about 4 hours, and everything felt great. But the next day my hands could lock up to the point that I thought that I'd never be able to type again. It was pretty miserable.
I thought at the time that it was a symptom of touch typing. So it's interesting to hear teething problems from a veteran touch typer. I want to ask whether there's something particularly odd about Colemak compared to say Dvorak? Weirdly it has quite a different feel. Any particular hand or fingers suffering?
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Physicians deafen our ears with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panacaea, their sovereign Guiacum.
This is my analogy. It's kind of like trying a new form of exercise, it takes some time for you to get used to it, but in the mean time you'll end up being a bit sore.
Well, my colemak speed is back up to a reasonable speed ~60 wpm. I have limited myself to one or two typeracer texts per day in an attempt to keep the pain down (which is still there, but managable.) I have been using Colemak exclusively at work, and changing my vim habits is now the biggest battle for me. I am happy to report, that today was the deadline for my week-long project, and I was *almost* able to make the deadline. I told my manager I needed one more day. Turns out I am still pretty productive despite the recent switch. My left hand is doing a lot more work than it did on Dvorak. Part of that is certainly the backspace key though.
I struggled with vim for a little while. Shai made a nice configuration file. for example, switching back to command mode by pressing Tab instead of reaching up to Esc. But there were too many changes for me and I didn't know how to edit the config file to my liking. Someone on these forums pointed out to me that minimal changes were necessary to get vim working with colemak. Because pretty much all of the commands are mnemonic, it doesn't matter where on the keyboard they're placed. The only issue is with the directional keys: hnei.
Still, all this got me thinking about the philosophy behind vim and I realized I didn't like it. I'm not a power user and I won't pride myself on having memorized all those commands. When I want to search across multiple files (this was the scenario that convinced me), rather than remembering some arcane command, I want to pop open a gui that remembers it for me, type in what I'm searching for, select my files or folder, then search across those. Ultimately I went with Sublime Text, which I learned about because Shai says he uses that now. I still use Sublime Text, though the developer has been silent since last year and there's no word on when an update will come out. Sublime Text costs $70.
@youbane, not wanting to denigrate the thread, but the key difference between Sublime and Vim, is that one is open and one is not. If you want to search through loads of files, grep is great, and easier than opening up some GUI! ;)
$ grep -lr needle /path/to/files
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Physicians deafen our ears with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panacaea, their sovereign Guiacum.
I will say that Sublime is the best editor that isn't either vi or emacs. Emacs has already assimilated several features from it (e.g. multiple cursors, fast search in a project). The main disadvantage of Sublime is that it's not libre, so improvements are limited to what the extension system can support. Also no terminal ui, but that's a niche complaint.
(Niche! How very dare you. ;) )
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Physicians deafen our ears with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panacaea, their sovereign Guiacum.
(Niche! How very dare you. ;) )
Well, I say that even though I daily use Emacs on a terminal...in Android, no less. With MessageEase.
the developer has been silent since last year and there's no word on when an update will come out.
This seems to be a recurring theme with "popular proprietary text editor of the [time period]". I'm not sure how I'd react to investing many hours over a long period of time configuring an editor to be right for me, only to find out it's lost support.
Shai made a nice configuration file...But there were too many changes for me and I didn't know how to edit the config file to my liking.
One unexpected circumstance that might've determined my emacs-evil alignment was patbl's (imo)much-easier-to-comprehend colemak-evil. You can more or less blame vimscript for that one.
Well, I say that even though I daily use Emacs on a terminal...in Android, no less. With MessageEase.
I don't really get how anyone could use anything other than a vimlike editor (or at least something whose inputs are mostly unmodified letters - shift might be sort of okay for ME in particular) on touchscreen; even with ME, C- and M- are a bit of a reach and hard to press in combo.
I don't really get how anyone could use anything other than a vimlike editor (or at least something whose inputs are mostly unmodified letters - shift might be sort of okay for ME in particular) on touchscreen; even with ME, C- and M- are a bit of a reach and hard to press in combo.
Well, to me, the Control and Escape gestures on ME are so quick and handy that entering Emacs keybindings is just like regular typing. Alt is the same, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be recognized by any of the terminal or VNC apps I'm using. I actually wrote a brief article on Emacs with ME, I like it so much. I can see how one might like to use Evil, but I don't find it necessary.
