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    2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    • Started by neeasade
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    06-Dec-2018 05:19:49#1 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    Hello all, just a newbie adding to the experiences section.

    -> Start

    When I started this, I was qwerty ~75WPM. I kind of decided to learn colemak on
    accident after realizing the new pok3r I purchased had built in support for the
    colemak layout. The first few days of progress were really rough, I was watching
    lord of the rings and would just try to type dialog when it came up to get used
    to the feel. I quickly found https://www.keybr.com/ which helped immensely --
    the gamification of unlocking the next letter was really motivating. Still, it
    took me about 2 weeks to unlock the whole alphabet there (~35WPM, but nonsense
    words so didn't quite apply to daily use). Very early on I found colemak-dh,
    effectively I've not used vanilla colemak (modded pok3r board to get dh).

    -> Useable

    After unlocking the alphabet on keybr I found out that the site 10fastfingers
    has a section where you can unlock the top 1000 most common words in your
    language, 50 words at a time. It has a pretty high bar for a newbie at 50WPM so
    it was VERY slow going at first -- again having something to gamify my progress
    helped though. I'm still going through these sections, because daily use became
    tolerable so I slowed practice. When I type qwerty now I notice my left hand
    going everywhere. Hand rolls truly are comfy in colemak-dh land.

    -> Vim/Emacs

    I'm a big fan of emacs+evil/use it in my day to day. On colemak-dh an initial
    major pain point were the j and k keys. l and h still made sense. I ended up
    doing a NEKJ rotation: n is j, e is k, k is n, j is e (I do not use e in vim
    that much so that makes sense to me). I'm also one of those weirdos who used fd
    as the ESC key -- finding an OK replacement for that on the colemak-dh homerow
    was hard! I ended up using tn as my new ESC pair. You can view my changes in the
    links at the bottom.

    -> Current speed and thanks

    I measure on 10fastfingers -- I am currently able to comfortably type at ~55wpm,
    and my record is 76wpm on there a few times, I'm pretty happy with the progress
    and look forward for the rest of the muscle memory to fall into place. Thanks to
    everyone who posts here and provides resources and mapping scripts. It helped
    inspire me and allowed me to smoothly test this layout on windows and linux.

    tl;dr
    - 2.5 months
    - started qwerty 75wpm
    - colemak 55 wpm, with occasional 75wpm hits
    - colemak-dh
    - I can feel the difference in hand comf

    tips:
    - https://www.keybr.com/
    - https://10fastfingers.com/, the top 1000 words section (after you get ~45 WPM)

    vim and emacs changes:
    - https://github.com/neeasade/emacs.d/search?q=colemak
    - https://github.com/neeasade/dotfiles/se … &q=colemak

    Last edited by neeasade (06-Dec-2018 05:20:54)
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    • From: Viken, Norway
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    06-Dec-2018 09:44:47#2 Re: 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    Grats on your progress! ^_^

    There's something to be said for using Vim out of the box, in this world of multiple virtual machines and Linux sublayers. For that, I use Extend. See my Big Bag. It handles both navigation (Ext[+modifiers(A/S/T)]+{U/N/E/I;L/Y;J/K} etc) and Esc (Ext+Q) easily, omnimode and omniapp.

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

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    06-Dec-2018 11:12:43#3 Re: 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    Nice report, and decent progress made so far. 55 wpm is in the comfy zone.

    I've always been a bit indifferent to keyboards having Colemak built-in to hardware, thinking that only full programmability would do (I would always need DH, Extend, other custom mapping etc). But at least it performs a useful function of making Colemak more widely known, and that's half the battle.

    So many newcomers mention vim! Using vim remappings for the arrows is a satisfactory solution, but to me the answer is always Extend. For reasons not clear to me, not everyone is convinced though! As DreymaR mentions, Ext-Q is (by default) escape but you could remap it to something even easier.

    Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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    06-Dec-2018 17:35:48#4 Re: 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    Awesome post and congratulations on your progress! I am about four weeks behind and have just cracked the 50WPM barrier myself. I hear you on the comfort and rolling goodness. I still keep one foot in the QWERTY world and the difference in range of motion is really pronounced.

    I am particularly interested in trying out the 10fastfingers and the 1000 common words functionality that you mentioned. I have done a very poor job of regimenting my learning and gamifying my progress, instead opting for a brute force approach of simply learning by cold-turkey-doing. I'm looking forward to trying something that has a bit more structure. :-)

    Cheers!

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    14-Dec-2018 22:40:14#5 Re: 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    Thanks for the responses all.

    @ DreymaR, stevep99

    > but to me the answer is always Extend.

    Is extend linux only?  I work at a windows shop during the day, so for now I have been making due there with an autohotkey script (whilst at home, it's on the pok3r firmware).

    My current setup is Caps -> Ctrl, and left Ctrl -> pok3r FN, so I can hold that down for arrow keys or whatever else

    @ galactican

    Thank you! good luck/hope your progress is well now.

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    15-Dec-2018 11:35:21#6 Re: 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles
    neeasade said:

    Is extend linux only?

    No. DreymaR has a PKL implementation for Windows. I also made an AutoHotKey implementation which is here.

    I use LeftAlt as my Extend key, but you can configure it to whatever you want.

    Last edited by stevep99 (15-Dec-2018 11:36:28)

    Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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    18-Dec-2018 09:49:47#7 Re: 2.5 months colemak-dh, 55wpm, vim, comfy hand roles

    For the beginner, PKL_eD has help images which may prove useful while you're finding your way.

    I also have an implementation for programmable controllers, using TMK. I use it for an USB-2-USB QUICKIE converter device.

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

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