Ok, so I found this site because I was not too happy with the Dvorak layout I have been learning for the last couple of weeks (which I just sort of have managed to learn by now)
So I will give this a try.. However I have to modify it to make the layout Norwegian as there are three special letters in our language (øæå).
I will keep you informed, just started writing my master thesis last week, so will be interesting to see if I actually am able to write all of it with the new layout!
First thoughts - way easier to learn than Dvorak.
I type faster after a couple of hours with Colemak than I ever managed after having spent several weeks trying to learn Dvorak
thought i would give you an update.. been using it for a week and now write about 3/5 of my original QWERTY speed..
finished second week, around 5/6 of original speed, still more typos, but getting there.
writing at about 50 wpm now.
btw, im using mac os x and have reconfigured the original Norwegian layout.
guess it is not totally following the "Colemak standard" since everything is the same except I swapped the letters to Colemak, but it works for me!
I also have remapped the caps lock to delete on my macbook pro
back up to QWERTY speed.. took me 20 days..
If you achieve higher speeds please let us know. I haven't really seen anyone explicitly say what higher speeds they achieved (if any). Even the guy who made the layout...
30% faster than QWERTY now. Been using Colemak for two months.
I did a test changing back to QWERTY, and i write less than half my original QWERTY speed.
Padde, you got me interested in this thing through your comment to the Norwegian Dagbladet article (Shai, don't get excited - it was an article about a lame alphabetic keyboard)!
Now I'm pondering whether to make the switch from Dvorak or not.
I'm guessing that we just keep the Norwegian letters in their QWERTY positions to keep things simple? (Well, as simple as it can be in a confused world - after all, the Danish keyboards switch the positions of the Ø and Æ in comparison with the Swedish/Norwegian ones...)
Time Will Show!
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
Hey DreymaR, cool to see other people picking up on this. In my view Colemak is way better than both QWERTY and Dvorak.
What I did was to keep the Æ and Å in the QWERTY position, obviously the Ø needs to be moved as the O has occupied this space in Colemak. However, the QWERTY P position is free to take, so why not put the Ø there..
This is how I set it up, the Ø is easy to reach in this position:
Note that I only altered the keys from my Norwegian QWERTY Os X layout, which means that everything is similar except the actual keys which have been moved around. This is because that is what I am used to, and the Norwegian layout differs quite a bit from the US layout, which would make everything more akward for me..
When it comes to speed, I still am writing 30% faster than QWERTY, so no more improvements for me. Still I think this is quite good, and I have also managed to write my entire master thesis with the Colemak layout..
Hi there Andreas; and a good Jol to you!
I finally found the Norwegian Colemak layout for Mac (ColeMac?) on your page... via an IPod forum, haha. But being a MacNoob I had a bitch of a time getting it to work. Part of the fun stemmed from cutting and pasting from a Safari page, and getting the encoding all wrong in the process. (Incidentally, Shai's .keylayout is more robust since he has used codes like "a85", "a107" and "a108" instead of the special characters directly.) I also didn't manage to change the file type from .txt to .keylayout so I had to resort to pasting the file's content into a copy of Shai's layout file!
Do you think you could find time to put up a proper link and instructions (also a link to Shai's pages of course!) so we can have somewhere to direct people in the future? I'll put out the Windows install package I made soon, I guess - I'm still pondering whether to make some nice layout graphics like I once did for my extended Norwegian Dvorak install.
One weakness, if you can call it that, with your Mac layout is that it isn't as internationally nor Unicode friendly as Shai's installs are. Mine is and more - to the point of overdoing it! - but then the problem is that I've done the international/Unicode stuff my own way, before I even heard of Shai. Oh well, I suppose that's acceptable at least for now.
There are a few bugs and omissions in your layout if one tries something fancy: The accent apostrophe plus "o" produces an accented ø for instance, while the grave/diaeresis/caret apostrophes don't make anything with "o"/"O" like they ought to. You probably don't use those yourself, or maybe you have updated your own file since the one on your page?
If you don't have the time to look into this, maybe some other Norski has. Maybe even me. If it's okay with you, that is.
[Edit: I've found a strange quirk. Although the Mac layout is just fine for general typing, e.g. in a browser text field such as this one, in Flash games such as Air Typer or Letters/Words the "o" key doesn't work! In Typer Shark it's okay (is that a Java app and not Flash like the other two, maybe?). Could something like Windows' VKEYs be the problem? The "o" is mapped to the key that holds our special letter "ø" in Norwegian QWERTY, so I suspect that this is part of my problem. But I have no idea where to start convincing a Mac that there's nothing special about that key anymore...]
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
I think I have tweaked the file a bit since that version.
Try this one: https://folk.ntnu.no/fredhoi/ColemakNor … layout.zip
The problem with the apostrophes is that I never changed these values when altering the original keyboard layout. This means that they are set up accordingly to QWERTY characters when used. I will try to fix this later.
I have now used Colemak since September, that is more than 4 months ago.. I estimate my typing speed now is around 40-50% faster than QWERTY, and it is still slowly improving..
I have kind of became a Colemak-addict and I have to install the layout on every computer I use regularly..
[Edit: I've found a strange quirk. Although the Mac layout is just fine for general typing, e.g. in a browser text field such as this one, in Flash games such as Air Typer or Letters/Words the "o" key doesn't work! In Typer Shark it's okay (is that a Java app and not Flash like the other two, maybe?). Could something like Windows' VKEYs be the problem? The "o" is mapped to the key that holds our special letter "ø" in Norwegian QWERTY, so I suspect that this is part of my problem. But I have no idea where to start convincing a Mac that there's nothing special about that key anymore...]
I am in the U.S. on a Macbook, "o" key works for the Words Flash game on the English setting
but I do find the "o" does NOT work for the Letters or the Air Typer game.
