UPDATE: Tarmak-Curl is in place

I rearranged the posts a little so Tarmak-Curl(DH) has its own post now. I think the Curl mod is quite important and its Tarmak steps are a little different so it's cleaner this way.

Hi! :-)

The main topic post has a link to the Big Bag for PKL, in which you can learn more about the program.

Basically, PKL is a portable program (so you can run it without installing it first, and it can be even be run from a USB drive if your PC permits it). I've made PKL[eD], my own version of it with some additions. There's a full set of Tarmak layouts you can use by editing the PKL_Settings.ini file then running the PKL_eD.exe program. You can specify the layout's path from the main folder directly, or use the lines I've commented out in the settings file. If using those, also set whether you have an ANSI or ISO keyboard and whether you use any ergonomic mods; make the entry "--" if not.

Let me know if that works well for you! ^_^

Let me know if you run into any trouble!

Maybe you'd like to spell Tarmak correctly, Ghen? Tarmac was the two-step progression Ezuk used, but since then much has happened. ^_^

I think I used Patorjk to analyze the steps in my posts, so this is useful. But it tells us little new: The steps have been sorted to do the biggest improvements first so naturally the first step brings the most model improvement. I'd be careful about proclaiming that people could stay there happily though, as there are things the models don't pick up on. Some n-grams can be awkward for instance. Well, several of them are awkward in QWERTY so improvement is likely after all. But there's still something. I feel that the last step is really good, even if it brings little model improvement. Finalizing Colemak gets all those little things in place...

I don't know whether people use Minimak or any of its siblings. Yes, it is an interesting observation. But I still distrust those layouts for all their model gain. ;-)

Hi, I just started with Tarmak 1.  For those interested, I'm using an ergodox infinity keyboard -- also a bit of a change for me, but I'm fairly comfortable with that by now after practicing with QWERTY for a while.

Has anybody here learned at home while still QWERTYing at work?  I'm doing a fair amount of typing at home too, including both "real" typing and deliberate practice.

I'm highly reliant on my typing speed at work and I really can't imagine switching there (even partially) until I'm at maybe 65 wpm on full Colemak.  Also I'm reluctant to abandon my QWERTY skills, in case for whatever reason colemak doesn't work out for me.  But I hope Tarmak might open the door to Colemak for me even so -- I tried some years ago without Tarmak and R and S defeated me -- I think the incremental reward of Tarmak might get me over that.

Thoughts?

Hm, how about this for vim-Tarmak?

The idea is to make the Y take the place of the J in Tarmak.

vim-Tarmak #1: (Y) -> E -> K -> N -> J (same as Tarmak #1 but then swap the J with Y)
vim-Tarmak #2: (Y) -> G -> T -> F (same as Tarmak #2 but with Y taking the role of J)
vim-Tarmak #3: (Y) -> R -> S -> D (again just like Tarmak #3 except using Y instead of J)
vim-Tarmak #4: (Y) -> O -> ; -> P (just like Tarmak #4 except J is already in place, so it's only Y moving into its final position)
vim-Tarmak #5 (Colemak): L -> U -> I (identical to Tarmak #5 of course)

Note that step #1 brings all of HJKL except L into place immediately; as in Tarmak, L only moves once, in the final step.

What do you think?  Y is not as rare as J in English, but it's fairly uncommon.

Edited to note: one problem is the big stretch between L and HJK, until the final step.  I suspect the way around that would be to move your right hand one space over to the left while HJKL-navigating, and use your little finger ("pinky" for you US people) for the L -- and then switch to your middle finger in the final step (maintaining the same left-shifted hand position for navigation).  I expect seasoned Colemak vim users can enlighten me on the best final Colemak HJKL technique, though?

OK, though I rather like how "vim-Tarmak" turned out so easily, after some thought and research I think I'm likely to stick with Tarmak proper, combined with, probably, the last "HNEI" cursor key remapping here, which leaves the key motion keys unchanged (hooray):

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/p … -254357683

With that setup, Tarmak actually won't interfere much with my use of vim keys, since I happen not to use N and E at all (I think because I started with emacs, then moved to vim bindings), and, emacs permitting, I can just not rebind L, U, and I until the last step -- so until then, it'll be "HNEL" rather than "HNEI".

I fear this might break a bunch of emacs packages that may have hand-hacked HJKL bindings... but I hope spacemacs has already fixed any of that in a way that will support this transition.  I'll see.  For those not initiated in emacs ways: spacemacs is a popular and rather polished emacs configuration that is heavily vim-keys-centric, and as you can see above, already has some Colemak support.

The main reason I've decided to go with HNEI rather than sticking with HJKL in their new Colemak positions is that a big part of my reason for wanting to switch to Colemak is avoiding too much up-and-down finger motion.

Finding pure TarmakN words (in this sense) using unix shell commands:

Sticking here to words of length 3 or more for the first two levels, because some of the two-letter ones in the really big word list don't look like words to me -- in fact some of the others are a bit weird too (note this does drop "an" and "at" for example from Tarmak1 and Tarmak2 respectively -- you can just add those back by hand).  Also the top 10000 file also includes single-letter "words" like "p" so I've filtered those out too -- maybe somebody can find better word lists for this.

grep '^[qwahnezxcvbkm]*$' words.txt | sed -r '/^.{,3}$/d' | grep 'n\|e\|k' > pure-tarmak1.txt
grep '^[qwahnezxcvbkmfgt]*$' words.txt | sed -r '/^.{,3}$/d' | grep 'f\|g\|t' > pure-tarmak2.txt
grep '^[qwahnezxcvbkmfgtrsd]*$' google-10000-english.txt | grep 'r\|s\|d' | grep -v '^[rsd]$' > pure-tarmak3.txt
grep '^[qwahnezxcvbkmfgtrsdjyop]*$' google-10000-english.txt | grep 'j\|y\|o\|p' | grep -v '^[jyop]$' > pure-tarmak4.txt
grep 'l\|u\|i' google-10000-english.txt | grep -v '^[lu]$' > pure-tarmak5.txt

I used these files:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/first … nglish.txt
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dwyl/ … /words.txt

The resulting files have the following lengths:

Pure Tarmak1: 462 words
Pure Tarmak2: 1068 words
Pure Tarmak3: 1119 words
Pure Tarmak4: 1797 words
Pure Tarmak5: 6653 words

I just noticed that the top 10000 word file was uploaded by a guy (maybe he's on here?) who has this open source Colemak training software:

https://github.com/first20hours/keyzen-colemak

You put that much better than me, thank you.  To be slightly more precise / explicit: They include at least one new (at that step) Tarmak#-specific letter and none of the QWERTY-specific letters at each step.

Exactly: happily, having this list of words doesn't prevent you from typing other words ;-)  And some practice on these words gives me motivation to stick to Tarmak4 rather than jump straight to full Colemak ("I'm almost there!"), because I know this component of my practice doesn't have any penalty of learning non-Colemak bigrams at all.  Are you asking about the "front page" of the thread?  If so: of course, if you think it's worthwhile (and if somebody feels like uploading a zip with files similar to these somewhere, I'm sure there will be people who'd find that useful).

But from this point of view, Tarmak does also seem like a reasonable program of study for a pure-Colemaker who doesn't want to actually switch to Tarmak layouts -- also it leaves them free to change their mind and switch to a Tarmak layout halfway through if they feel like it.

This is really a support question for EPKL I take it? So ideally it'd belong in the Github repo for EPKL. However...

So, that's interesting. Looks like you have some sort of problem with Sticky Shift. You don't have that on in Windows by any chance? Because then having it in EPKL in addition could get quite messy. Anyway, look in the Settings .ini file and remove or comment out the StickyMods line. Then you won't be able to tap a modifier and then the letter to modify but I'm guessing your problem may go away too.  (=^･ω･^=)丿

[Update: Found the bug causing this problem, and squished it (June 2020). Make sure you use the latest EPKL version!]

Okay, in the Layouts_Override file remove the semicolon in front of the Tarmak line (the top one holds all of them and the one below only two of them). Now make sure the settings above are right for you: ANS(I)/ISO, and you probably don't want ergo mods yet so just comment out the Curl/Ergo/Othr lines.

If you can tell me how to make EPKL beginner-friendly and still contain a ton of hella advanced features, please let me know.  ∩(●'‿'●)∩

But the Big Bag topic has a "fast lane" that gets you straight to EPKL with Colemak without any text walls. When you get to GitHub, the second item on the Readme "text wall" is Getting it up and running which should be a simple read-n-click in my opinion. Keep in mind though that the text walls do contain a lot of nice info that you may want to browse at some point. Otherwise you may miss out on a lot of nice things such as Extend!

Hi! Some answers right away:
• My take on the Wide mod so far has been that you can easily learn it after your Tarmak transition.
• You're right, Extend is the bee's knees and we absolutely want it!
• Also, yes indeed – the Angle(Z) mod is recommended and pretty much the standard for ANSI boards. I've mentioned the others mostly out of interest.
• You're also right about me having made Tarmak remaps that I haven't put to good use yet. Indeed, it'd be cool to see those babies in use.
• Yes, remap sequence does matter. But what you did looks right to me so I can't quite say what's up there. I'll test it out later.
• It's been a lot of work updating the pages and files for the new Colemak-DH(m) standard. Yeah, I guess I didn't do the Tarmak topic yet...
• However, the images are in the latest EPKL release and commits. If you select a Tarmak ANS(I) CurlAngle variant there you should get the right one for DH(m) now.
• Also note that the very latest EPKL commit is awesomesauce! It finally contains a Layout/Settings UI that should make life so much easier for newcomers.

Best of luck and yes – if you want to contribute we'll find lots of cool stuff to do! And making a Tarmak-CAW sequence w/ images by using the remaps sounds awesome. Did you manage to make images using the EPKL Help Image Generator (HIG) and Inkscape?

[edit: You're right, something's fishy. For one thing, I've baked the Angle mod into the Tarmak_#C_ layouts without calling them Tarmak_#CA_ as I should. But even accounting for that, there's something that prevents them from working. The plain Tarmak_# layouts work just fine it seems. I'll have to look into it.]