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    from colemak to qwerty - may be strange but true :)

    • Started by bombadil
    • 14 Replies:
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    • Registered: 06-Oct-2008
    • Posts: 71

    I have been typing on colemak for about a year, maybe more, it seemed easy, efficient and the best thing in the world to adopt.
    Yeh, strange title to such confession. But it happened that I was forced to type on qwerty for a week due to some security reason, I was not working at my laptop, and it happened that after such a short time I got used to qwerty. It is no longer strange or straining. Now I type very easy on qwerty, without any strain, 99% accuracy, with the speed of 60WPM (the same which I achieved on colemak). On the other hand when I returend to my worksataion I found very stressed typing colemak and little drop of speed, due to errors. I was a kind of busy so I switched off colemak and contiued my work and the next day I questioned myself "what is it for, messing with colemak?". The reasonable answer is it is only a placebo in all the facts. The design principles of colemak - less travel distance, rolls etc. - seems to be true, and maybe are a great factor of preventing CTS but in my experinece it has no advantages in terms of typing speed or ease of typing. When you are deeply familiar with your layout, there probably is no stress in fingers caused by disorted signals from your brain trying to move muscles of your fingers in different ways at once - probably different neurons activate differnt signals... neuron network is complicated and to some degree unpredictable.

    I agree with my logic :) I reaped of colemak from my workstation. In fact I experienced lots of micro-troubles typing on colemak - sometimes it didn't worked, sometimes I had to use somebody else's computer and sometimes someone else had to use mine. So social barriers and technical barriers payed for the hope and thrill to do something better. No, I am going to stay QWERTY and get busy with other things than practising touchtyping.

    So it is time to say good luck with your choice.

    For some users out there interested in pros and cons of colemak. For a long time I had troubles with 3,4 letters rolls - it took almost half of a year to get it easy - the most frequent example "art". "le" and "el" seems to never get easy. The most surprising is the fact that I did lots of the time typo "d" instead of "g".


    Anyway, dear readers, I encourage to find your own way... because maybe some day qwerty would have gone in favour for colemak :)

    Cheers!

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    • Registered: 01-May-2009
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    While I would like you agree with your logic, I have some serious objections:

    According to my own personal typing model using colemak should yield the following benefits (assuming you type exactly like me):
    - your fingers travel 45% as much
    - you type slow, awkward combinations 69% as often
    - you type fast, super easy combinations 22% more often
    - based on the change in slow and fast combinations alone (not counting distance at all), your speed will be 13% faster

    Additionally, Colemak balances the hands and does other things in attempt to reduce injury or increase speed.  It's unlikely they are all useless, and because you have only reached 60 wpm on either of them it is likely you simply are more familiar with one than the other, as you have "mastered" neither.  I believe this is a better explanation than the one that QWERTY and Colemak are equivalent in quality.

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    • Registered: 07-Aug-2007
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    I think it's good to switch back and forth when you get comfortable with one layout and have a day or two to rehearse the switch.  The very act of switching may be beneficial.  When I switched back from Colemak to QWERTY and a few months later, back to Colemak, I found both the switches pleasant.  There was even a nostalgic flavor attending the relearning of the layout.  Sort of like walking in a place that you haven't been to in a while gives you the enjoyable thrill of remembering nooks and crannies that you didn't know you remembered.

    Switching to a brand new layout may have benefits too, because you're taking your fingers out of a rut, but it is too frustrating and time-consuming to be practicable more than a couple times.

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    • From: Belgium
    • Registered: 26-Feb-2008
    • Posts: 482

    For similar reasons I once in a while intend to (temporarily) switch back to Qwerty, too.

    When typing plain text, I can still use Qwerty pretty effectively with few mistakes, but I'm using a lot of keyboard driven programs (vi, mutt, ...) and for those it's a real pain as muscle memory seems much stronger for single-key commands (and those can't be "backspaced" easily), so I usually just give up after 5 minutes and revert to Colemak. :-)

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    • Registered: 01-May-2009
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    I agree that switching back and forth may have its benefits, but there is no question which layout is superior.

    QWERTY will remain a layout that is practical to know for a long time, even in the unlikely case that it is on its way out.  I believe that with a small amount of daily effort one can maintain their QWERTY ability.  Everyone who has lost QWERTY ability completely seems to report that they completely neglected QWERTY in favor of their new layout.

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    • From: Horsham, West Sussex, UK
    • Registered: 11-Jun-2007
    • Posts: 86

    I find alternating between Colemak and qwerty much more comfortable in the long run than using either one or the other exclusively. They use different muscles in different ways so when one of them gets uncomfortable or tiresome I can just switch back to the other for a few weeks. I've been back on qwerty myself for the past three weeks or so, but this is unlikely to be permanent.

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    • Registered: 27-Nov-2009
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    I frequently switch between Colemak and QWERTY and whenever I use QWERTY I get wrist strain, which is quickly relieved if I stop typing or go back to Colemak. What are you doing differently that has prevented your wrist strain on QWERTY this time around?

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    • Registered: 30-Jan-2009
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    Bombadil - I thought in late 2008 you were just learning to touch-type, and learned in dvorak and then switched to colemak  ( https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=542 ).  Where did touch-typing in qwerty fit in there?

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    • Registered: 06-Oct-2008
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    Just as the 2008 year is going away I waste my time to surf here and there... ;)

    To the questions: I do not know why picking up qwerty was so easy, I can only theorize that it is due to the fact that I have had memorized the layout for may years by looking at it, hunt-and-pecking. And why typing on it became easy - probably because I learned to touchtype - I mean I know my keyboard physical dimention, physical keys shapes and layout, the rest is just applying letter layout on touchtyping. Maybe the fact could be applied on when learning another layout such as colemak - it would be interesting if somebody could make that experiment, I mean dedicate some spare keyboard to rearrage key caps to colemak and hunt-and-peck on it a couple of minutes a day for a couple of months and then try it touchtyping, when the layout would be memorized.

    Why I do not get pain in my wrists? I do feel symptoms in wrists when I constantly type regular text for about half an hour. In fact I very very rarely do this and I certainly can afford a break in such case. Most of the time I type in bursts, just drop a line on IM or email or a line of comment in source code as I am software deweloper. Somehow programming languages keywords are not difficult on qwerty as also object names in code, the latter probably because they are often choosen by qwerty users ;)


    To get some testing I have tried colemak today and I managed with it in about half an hour - I still remember touchtyping on it or it is very easy to learn for a qwerty user ;) Certainly I remember letter layout by heart - maybe it is important. Naturally visualizing is speeding my learning process of any kind. As for the feeling it felt unnaturraly tight, but it is because I am used now to "loose" finger dancing all over the keyboard.

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    • Registered: 01-Feb-2010
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    maybe you'd notice a more worthwhile change if you were proficient in either layout. i type at an average of 130wpm at 89% accuracy in qwerty. i'm hoping my accuracy will increase in colemak, due to a decrease in row hoping and finger stretches

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    • From: New York, New York
    • Registered: 22-Nov-2008
    • Posts: 130

    I tend to use qwerty when I play games, and I find that I can talk to people up to speed quite decently. It seems automatic that I just use qwerty while gaming, because of the controls of the games all being in qwerty. But I can't do qwerty when I'm doing work. Very strange.

    Colemak typist

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    • From: Santa Fe, NM
    • Registered: 21-Nov-2008
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    I think that an important point here is that switching to Colemak has a cost even beyond the sheer effort of learning it in the first place. Sure, you may well be saving miles of finger travel every year, but you still have to live in a world where QWERTY is the norm, and you'll still encounter QWERTY keyboards on a regular basis (phone keyboards, other people's keyboards, etc). On top of that you have the hassle of installing Colemak on machines where you want to use it, and dealing with Windows seeming to arbitrarily switch between keyboard layouts whenever it feels like it. All these little things add up to a ongoing penalty that QWERTY users do not have to pay.

    Now you may argue that this is a small price compared to the ergonomic nirvana offered by Colemak, but that is definitely a personal judgement. Clearly using modern keyboards with lightweight key pressures, many people manage to type using QWERTY at a very high speed and without too much discomfort. For these people the minor hassles associated with Colemak may outweigh the benefits it brings.

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    • Registered: 03-Jul-2009
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    syperk said:

    On top of that you have the hassle of installing Colemak on machines where you want to use it, and dealing with Windows seeming to arbitrarily switch between keyboard layouts whenever it feels like it.

    DreymaR dropped a tip about stopping those arbitrary switchings: https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=867

    Dvorak typist here.  Please take my comments with a grain of salt.

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    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
    • Posts: 5,361

    Furthermore, using portable solutions such as PKL there is no need for installation and even on my work computers I'm only a Ctrl+Shift+2 click away from a smooth transition between QWERTY and Colemak (and when I log onto my work account I start in Colemak).

    Typing a bit QWERTY is inevitable (I still haven't figured out a good and cheap Colemak solution for my PlayStation3 for instance) but that isn't a problem for me. Granted, I have to look at the keyboard more than I used to but the speed is good enough and I'm not confused.

    It'll be a personal call, of course it will. Some people are life hackers and optimize their life as a hobby, others couldn't care less if they "waste" a goodly amount of time and effort on inefficient living and would rather be without the hassle of relearning things. Sure. But for the ones who do like to improve things I'll wager that Colemak will be worth their while!

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    • Registered: 08-Dec-2010
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    I just try Colemak for a week and I use Qwerty occasionally, hunt-and-peck to get jobs done.

    And I realized that Qwerty has its own merit since it's the de facto standard, and its root in our brain memory are very powerful. If you don't want to rewire your brain and don't type a lot, then it's ok to come back to the old, well-tried Qwerty.

    Be warned.

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