Hi, I just got the idea to try and learn Colemak. Again.

I checked when I wrote my last posts here, and it's been almost exactly one year since I last tried Colemak. I had the user name "Hinco Spade", but I seem to have lost the password and have no idea what email address I used. But never mind.

What happened last year was that I got curious about just how effective Colemak would be for me. I am Swedish and I type both Swedish and English, perhaps 50/50 or 67/33. I wanted to know if I could find a better layout, since letter and digraph frequencies are slightly different. I would have to modify the official layout to include Swedish characters åäö, so my reasoning was that perhaps I should see if other changes would be beneficial as well.

I spent a lot of time gathering sample texts and writing scripts to try different layouts. I even tried to write one of them programs to evolve an optimal keyboard layout! It was fun to write and fun to watch, but I never got it to produce good layouts. The trick is rating the layouts, a way to find a good combination of several different characteristics, like the total distance your fingers have travelled while typing a sample text, or the balance between fingers, rows and hands. I grew tired of the project before I could finish it.

At the time I was typing Svorak -Swedish Dvorak. But I didn't have a real keyboard layout, I was using an autohotkey script. It was a little buggy, and when I used it, my shift and alt keys would sometimes get stuck. Then I bought a macbook, and rather than creating a new keyboard layout for mac os x (and maybe fixing my autohotkeys one), I simply switched back to qwerty.

That was about a year ago, and now it's time to learn Colemak again. I've made my mind up and decided to learn it. I found ukulele, and added the swedish characters to the mac version of the official layout, similar to padde's layout: https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=52. On my windows computer I am using the official layout for now, until I can figure out MSKLC.

I checked my current speed at Ryan Heise's very cool typing test (http://www.ryanheise.com/typing-test/) and found that I can type qwerty at 41 wpm. That is using about six fingers and keeping an eye on the keyboard. Since the typing test doesn't include åäö, I also checked my Dvorak speed. I reached 39 wpm even though it's been a year since I last typed dvorak. It came back to me instantly, and it felt really good to be able to touch type again! The punctuation was on different keys than my old layout, which slowed me down a little.

Since I can only type 40 wpm, that'll be my first goal to reach with colemak.