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    [old] my experience so far

    • Started by countach
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    • Registered: 19-Dec-2005
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    I've started to learn the colemak format [Edit: the old version of Colemak -- Shai], converting from dvorak.

    The negative things I have found so far are the things I am used to with dvorak as a computer programmer - things you don't realise until you switch.

    I've become accustomed to the things I can do with my left hand while using my right hand with the mouse. This is often to do with punctuation. For example, in Java programming language I can cut a list of exceptions from one part of the code, then click where I want them pasted. I hit comma with my left hand (which is required in a list of exceptions) and mouse->paste with my right. With comma now on the right I have to take my hand off the mouse. Similar problems happen with period.

    The same thing also happens with quotes on dvorak. If I want to cut some text and put it in quotes, I can insert the quotemark with my left hand, paste with the mouse, then insert the second quote with my left hand.

    The other thing that worries me is that the colemak/qwerty position for quote is in a weak position for the pinky. I don't think the pinky is very happy about making the sideways movement necessary to hit this key. I notice that when I do use this key (for minus or underscore) in dvorak, my ring finger tends to move with my whole hand to make it happen. This would be a bit of a problem for "I'll" or "I'm" n colemak because you need the ring finger to stay put to press "I".

    I also miss having E on the left side, because I am used to clicking on a line with my right hand on the mouse, then hitting either ctrl-A or ctrl-E with my left hand to go to beginning or end of line. But that I guess is because I am an anti-social emacs key binding user. I also miss the left handed ctrl-alt-< and ctrl-alt-> emacs beginning and end of file, and I miss the convenient dvorak underscore (emacs undo). On the other hand, having X, S and C back in their qwerty spots is clearly a boon for emacs bindings.

    On the positive side, I suspect that having ZXCVS back where they were could be a benefit for cut and paste as far as left-hand-keyboard, right-hand-mouse work is concerned.

    I appreciate the fact that L on colemak is in a much better position, because I think this is a big flaw of dvorak, and I think it is a reason my pinky feels over-worked.

    On the other hand, I am suspicious about what having the period, comma and slash back on the bottom row will do to my ring finger, as I suspect that bending those fingers tighter to press their traditional positions will be a lot worse than the dvorak position which is stretching these fingers, which is less strain.

    So at this point, I've got mixed feelings, I'm not sure if I should continue or not. On the one hand, the letter layout of colemak is clearly more optimal than dvorak. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to give up having punctuation on the left hand as well as being on the top row, when it might undo the benefits I gain from having L in a good spot, and generally better layout.

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    I thought I'd do a little analysis of my own comparing keyboard layouts, so I wrote a little program that assigned weightings to each key and penalties for having the same finger typing consecutive letters. Of course, how much to weight these things is subjective, but it seemed like a starting point. So I gave weightings of between 5 and 50 for each key, where 5= good, 50 = bad. Then I had a 60 point penalty for using the same finger twice in a row.

    Analysing a bunch of English literature I got these scores:

    Qwerty:   84119043 fing: 430274
    Dvorak:   74657489 fing: 295600
    Colemak: 74334483 fing: 267198


    The first number is the overall score, where a low score is good. The second number is the number of times the same finger had to type two consecutive letters. And we see that Colemak is the winner here. But when I put some Java computer code through the program I got this:

    Qwerty:   93699673 fing: 795548
    Dvorak:   81284609 fing: 588235
    Colemak: 83264953 fing: 621636

    Now Dvorak is beating Colemak. Now I'm wondering if the reason is something specific to the Java language. So I decided to try some Eiffel source code, since that language is a lot more "wordy" than Java, and has less symbols, and I got this:

    Qwerty:  1587789 fing: 12316
    Dvorak:  1402223 fing: 11260
    Colemak: 1535469 fing: 11444

    And still Dvorak wins in both categories. The scores might be partly explained by my giving very slightly worse scores for bottom row keys than top row, and thus dvorak's use of top row punctuation. But Dvorak's winning in the finger jump category is a surprise.

    So then I tried some Cobol:
    Qwerty:  9440707 fing: 80423
    Dvorak:  9085586 fing: 78546
    Colemak: 9309487 fing: 78236

    Here Dvorak wins on points, but Colemak edges a win in finger jumping.

    For completeness I tried  the C language too:
    Qwerty:   231977372 fing: 1728116
    Dvorak:   196325018 fing: 1458932
    Colemak: 218228432 fing: 1498967

    Which unsurprisingly gives the same result as Java.

    One thing my program doesn't measure is "hand jumping" as defined on the Colemak FAQ. But its not clear to me why hand jumping is particularly bad. Finger jumping is bad, but hand jumping? With MINIMUM on qwerty, the last MUM is obviously bad, but is there anything enormously wrong with the row jumping of MINIM?

    It's hard to fully understand why Colemak loses to Dvorak in computer languages, but I can make some guesses.  Firstly the minus key ranks as the 6th most important key compared to 26th in English literature. However, even in English the minus (dash) easily edges out the semi-colon, slash, J, X, Q and Z. This suggests that the minus (dash) deserves a better spot than Qwerty (Colemak) gives it.

    Another problem is that the #6 digraph in C programming is "-." (minus period). This is a REALLY bad combo under both Qwerty and Colemak. Under Dvorak it is a very easy combo. And there's quite a few other problematic digraphs involving minus.

    The next point is how highly comma and semi-colon rank in Java code, being ahead of twelve regular letters. This suggests to me the better Dvorak positions are going to make a difference.

    But also the parethesis ranked very highly in Java code, being ahead of eleven of the letters. Even in English writing the parethesis were ahead of all punctuation except quote, period, dash, semi-colon, slash, exclamation and asterisk. This suggests that maybe parethesis deserve the position traditionally held by square brackets.

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    • Shai
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    Did you filter repeated characters in your analysis? Strings like ------------- will score much worse on Colemak if you didn't.
    Did you give a bigger penalty to the keys in the B/Y QWERTY positions (difficult reach)?
    Emacs hotkeys can be remapped, so I don't see the Emacs hotkeys as an issue.
    Here's a possible variation of the layout with Dvorakish punctuation

    12345 67890[]
    'FWPG JLUYK/=\
    ASRTD HNEIO-
    ZXCVB ;M,.Q
    Last edited by Shai (25-Dec-2005 14:58:31)
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    >Did you filter repeated characters in your analysis? Strings like ------------- will score much worse
    >on Colemak if you didn't.

    No I didn't, but the Java code I tested at least doesn't have anything like that.

    >Did you give a bigger penalty to the keys in the B/Y QWERTY positions (difficult reach)?

    Yes I did. These were my weightings where the top row qwerty TY is 45/45. GH is 20/20  and B is 40. Everything on the numerical row gets 50.


        static final int sctop[] = {45, 35, 30, 25, 30, 45, 45, 30, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50};
        static final int scmid[] = {15, 15,  5, 10, 20, 20, 10,  5, 15, 15, 35, 45 };
        static final int scbot[] = {40, 40, 35, 35, 40, 35, 35, 40, 40, 45 };

    >Emacs hotkeys can be remapped, so I don't see the Emacs hotkeys as an issue.

    True, but it depends how much time one wants to invest in relearning everything, as you recognize from retaining the qwerty ZXCVB.

    >Here's a possible variation of the layout with Dvorakish punctuation

    That variant wins in all categories, in both code and literature. In fact it wins by a much greater margin in regular literature than code.

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    Shai said:
    12345 67890[]
    'FWPG JLUYK/=\
    ASRTD HNEIO-
    ZXCVB ;M,.Q

    I really like that layout alot. Can you switch S & R to be the same as the new colemak, and publish that layout as the Colemack Programers Variant/Version?

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    • Shai
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    Here's a better variant based on the new Colemak:

    `12345 67890[] 
     QWFPG JLUY;/=\
     ARSTD HNEIO'  
     ZXCVB KM,.-

    It really depends on what things you use often, and it really doesn't make that much of a difference IMO.
    e.g. in this forum BBCode uses a lot of [], MediaWiki also uses lots of [], and I use the / key all the time in Firefox and Vim for searching, and it's used in HTML for closing tags, and all those keys []/ move to worse positions. And in most programming languages the {} are used very often. Since most applications are designed with QWERTY in mind, it makes sense to leave everything in its QWERTY positions. Since the punctuation keys are not used very often they take longer to relearn.
    I've left all the punctuation on the right hand so you can use the Ctrl+X/C/V shortcuts with the left hand.

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    True, it does depend on what you do, I havent seen a layout that places the '<' and' '>' in great postions for markup languges. Overall though i think that having the shortcut and puntcuation keys in optimal places are more important for a programing layout than having keys in the qwerty postion. Some puntuation marks are used more often than letters in programing.

    I do know that reaching up to the top corner for '=' in qwerty has always been bad . I've also wondered about placing the ';' on the left hand. There are a lot of ';' 'enter' combinations or ';' 'enter' '} in programing.'

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    • Shai
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    The Q (and/or Z) can be exchanged with the ; (or any of the other punctuation keys) to avoid the ;+Enter combo.
    The Arensito layout places all the punctuation keys with AltGr hotkeys, but that's not very comfortable with normal keyboards.

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    How about this one for Programing and IMing?


    `12345 67890+\ 
     ;WFPG JLUYK/-]
     ARSTD HNEIO'  
     [XCVB Z,.Q
    Last edited by mpteach (03-Jan-2006 18:59:21)
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    • Shai
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    It doesn't seem like a very logical layout.
    The Ctrl+Z hotkey can't be used with the mouse on the right hand.
    And the 'O' and 'K' cause a somewhat frequent same-finger digraph on the pinky finger, which is best to avoid.
    I don't think it makes sense to put the [ in a better position than -

    `12345 67890[] 
     ;WFPG JLUYQ/=\
     ARSTD HNEIO'
     ZXCVB KM,.-
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    I can reach the Ctr+Z hotkey easily in either position so thats not a problem for me. I cannot reach the Ctr+Y with my left hand in colemak. Completely moot points though if your mouse has undo and redo buttons on it.

    My punctuation logic was to create the opposite hand digraphs   ';' and 'enter'    ';' and ']'    '[' and 'enter'    '[' and ']'   . The same finger diagraph  ']' and 'enter'  shouldn't be bad because 'enter' is right below ']' on the homerow and you can hit it in one motion.

    I didnt properly factor in the prominece of '-' and didnt think about the 'O' and 'K' diagraph.

    Last edited by mpteach (04-Jan-2006 02:11:02)
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