I've decided to try out a minor modification to Colemak-DH by adding a cycle of (Z, ;, '). The motivation of the mod is to move the quotation mark a better spot. Specifically, I want it off the right pinky.

I initially tried the cycle of (Q, ;, '), but I didn't like that very much for a couple of reasons.

1. The top row pinky positions are significantly worse than the bottom row pinky positions for me on my keyboard. I have short pinkies compared to my other fingers, and the conservative columnar stagger of the Moonlander puts the home and bottom row keys in good spots, but I need to shift my hand a bit to reach the top row pinky keys. The quotation mark is easily the highest usage key among those I'm dealing with, so it deserves better.

2. 're and 's are specifically bad when the quote is in the top left pinky position.

3. I actually dislike having the Q on the right pinky. I thought having QU on an inward roll would be good, but QUE and especially QUI were just worse.

4. Z tends to usually follow a single vowel, so it doesn't cause redirect problems when on the right pinky.

I'm curious how long it will take me to learn the new positions. I think the new quote position will be natural pretty soon, if I just type some fiction for practice. The new Z position will probably require some more specific practice.

I've now moved Ctrl-Z off of the left hand. Avoiding doing that for the core shortcuts was one of my original core principles and a reason that I chose Colemak-DH over other more exotic options. Still, I think it's okay. I've become used to using Extend for the Undo action anyways.

I know that swapping the quotation mark and semicolon is a good and sufficient fix for a lot of people, but the top row pinky positions are just significantly worse than the bottom row pinky positions for me. If I had to put numbers to it, I'd say that the bottom pinky is about 2.6 and top pinky is about 3.2 (compared to 3.2 on bottom and 3.0 on bottom that you have for matrix keyboards on the Colemak-DH site). Pinky preference seems to be highly personal and probably related to both the relative length of your pinky and keyboard choice.

But mostly, the right pinky is just the worst finger for the quotation key for anyone who inputs a lot of quote encapsulated file paths or even just comma delimited lists of strings. Since writing and modifying PowerShell and sometimes Bash scripts is a fairly common occurrence in my day job, this isn't rare, and it's not comfortable.

I finally decided to get serious about the issue when I wrote something like the following PowerShell command:

'.\path1\', '.\path2\', '.\path3\' | fix-permissions

You don't have to write a command like that too many times to want to move the quotation key off of the right pinky.

So, it's almost just a nice bonus that the bottom left pinky is also a fantastic spot when the character is used as an apostrophe in contractions and possessives. The inside roll for 's, 't, 'd, 're, and 've are all between good and great. And the bad interactions with I' and you' are eliminated (I' is really bad for me when putting the quotation key in the top right pinky spot, probably because of my relatively short pinky and minimal columnar stagger).

Finally, spending a day with this change has made me truly appreciate how irreverent the position of the Z key truly is. I would bet my accuracy on it is at about 25% (haven't drilled it at all yet), and even that just doesn't matter, because I basically never type it!

Bonus: On a whim, I just did a find-on-page for 'Z' on this post edit page, and if had 13 hits! Five of those hits were referring to the letter / key itself, one was in ZSA, and only seven were in normal English words. If I wrote British English, I think that only "amazing" would still contain a Z. WOW.

That's a good point on the ANSI angle mod. I never use Colemak on ANSI, but if I had maybe I would made the realization of the rarity of Z earlier. It's definitely not something anyone should worry about when considering the angle mod.

My Z is currently above the O. It's a pretty bad spot for any consonant. -ize is not very good in my hands. That trigram is not so common that I'm worried about it. No trigram with Z is really worth worrying about. Not sure if OZ / ZO is more or less common than AZ / ZA. Again, it doesn't really matter.

However, I'm strongly considering moving the Z again anyways. :) The dash is a pretty common character for me, and I currently have it to the right of G on the extra center column that Moonlanders have. This isn't a good spot for it, because so many Powershell commands are Get-Noun or Set-Noun, and "T-" makes for an extremely nasty SFB. However, that's a perfectly fine spot for the Z (as long as you don't type much German with TZ). The spot above the O is absolutely perfect for the dash, because it doesn't have any particular interaction with the vowels or the other punctuation on the right hand. Extra bonus: this returns the Z to the left hand! This means I'll be able to use Ctrl-Z with only my left hand on any occasion when that's more convenient than Extend-'.

My basic take-away from this experimentation is that everyone should consider the Z free to move. Consider putting whatever key (or lack of key, as in ANSI angle-mod) works best for you in that spot, and just let the Z go where ever is convenient once the rest of the keys have good homes.

Yeah, the home row of the symbols layer is not too bad. That's where I've put my parens. By usage, they're almost definitely more common than Q and J, but the home row of the symbols layer works very logically for them.

I think there is something to be said for keeping even the rare letters like Q and J on the prime 30 spots, because they're always used within the rhythm of typing, where as something like the parens or other brackets frequently occur where there is a natural mental break.

I do wonder if people who like to type all numbers on a numpad layer might be well served to dedicate the easy to reach keys on the number row (2-4 and 7-9) for my hands on the Moonlander) to some of the symbols that they use regularly, whatever they may be. I feel like those number row keys are better than any position requiring a layer activation for single characters. I haven't tried that, because I like the number row for numerical entry (it's faster than the number pad, which has SFBs like crazy), but I might make a numeric layer that moves the numbers down to the home row and try doing other things with the number row on the base layer.

I don't type lists of quoted Windows relative file paths nearly enough to dedicate and learn a compose sequence for them. Similarly, I don't do enough quoted Linux file paths (which use the other slash), or lists of quoted strings, or any other single kind of awkward interaction between the quotation key and the other punctuation on the right pinky. Individually they're annoyances. Together they're a problem with an easy solution: move it to the old Z spot.

Do you actually think that top right pinky is better than bottom left pinky for the quotation key, or is the objection with my decision to move Z?

Once, the decision is made to put the quotation and dash keys are both more worthy than Z for spots on the 30 prime positions, I think it's clear that dash should go to the top right (near its old position and well placed for typing 555-555-5555 phone numbers, etc.) and quotation should go on the bottom left (to avoid the clashes with all the other punctuation and the o' SFB and I' awkwardness).

I think maybe my modifications feel more major than they are, because I've explained them with words instead of showing the keymap:

* 1 2 3 4 5 *       * 6 7 8 9 0 *
* Q W F P B =       | J L U Y - \
* A R S T G Z       $ M N E I O ;
* ' X C D V           K H , . / *

That's not really much of a change. The Z is actually in a similar sort of spot to the ANSI Angle-Mod, which wasn't intentional, but I think it would be a plus for someone who also used that. The =, $, and | are there because I use PowerShell a lot and definitely personal choices. Perhaps this layout gives too much priority to the dash for anyone who doesn't use command line interface, but it's a very dense character in that situation, and it's more common that Z even in normal typing if you hyphenate compound nouns properly and use "--" at all.

Have you ever tried putting the quotation key in the bottom left? Even if you don't care about the way quote interacts with .,/ and O, bottom left is really good for all of the contractions and the possessive 's / s'. I don't expect that you'd keep it there over your Compose key, but for people who either don't use Compose or put it on a thumb, I think it's worth considering. That's especially true for people with short pinkies.

Ayup, t'problem even worse for people from Yorkshire.

I'm trying out the I' bigram on thumb key then apostrophe (in vanilla's semicolon position). Including the shift for I that's a three-for-two deal so it should be good. But I never remember to use it, so there's the matter of mental load versus utility...

You're so right! The punctuation tricks work relatively well since punctuation is for word boundaries, but I agree that a word part is much harder to remember and use. People with really quick and agile minds may use such tricks and benefit I guess. A trick like autocompleting Q to Qu might be okay, especially if you're mostly writing English texts, but I don't think it's really worth it either and it'd mess me up whenever I didn't intend to follow the Q with an u.

I have a demo PowerString in EPKL that I don't actually use but it's there to show the power of AHK syntax. It prints out:

for (int i=0; i<; i++) {
    
}

Then it moves the cursor next to i< so you can write the max and then arrow-down to proceed. That shortcut should be worth remembering if you use C for loops a lot.

One neat feature of EPKL is that the dead key help images can give you a pointer to make it easier to remember where you put mappings. I'm planning to release a new feature soon, that lets you specify a 1–2 character string to use when generating a help image for any prefix-syntax mapping. Today AHK code is merely displayed as ·α· on the generated images, which isn't very helpful after all.

Yeah, programming boiler plate should be dealt with by a smart editor / IDE. The editor has so much more contextual info, so typing for... can be expanded out to whatever is appropriate for the language you're working, and the expansion can include tab-stops to aid movement between the places that need customization. And the editor can easily handle indentation. This sort of thing can become extremely powerful if you work with languages that are heavy on the boiler-plate. Emmett does amazing things for HTML, CSS, etc., if you have the misfortune of having to deal with those sorts of things.

Even BBCODE tags aren't super useful as macros, because every forum that I use regularly already includes keybindings for the codes that I use most frequently, and they're smart enough to add the tags around selected text, if I decide to add the bold or italics after the fact.

I think there's something to be said for programing super common keywords or identifiers as macros in QMK since you can trigger them without consuming a hotkey combination, but even then it's often going to be better to create language specific Snippets in the editor and assign a keybinding.

I feel like the sweet spot for EPKL / AHK macros is for commonly used phrases like full names of me and key coworkers, common URLs, emails, phone numbers, business names, product names, etc. All the sorts of things that are commonly used in emails, chat messages, and documents.

The thing about having those things in EPKL though, similar to Extend, is that you'll have it at the ready everywhere. You may want to write, say, a signature footer or an address macro in several apps such as your email program(s) and text editor(s), and this way you'll likely only have to implement it once. So yes, for hardcore programming you'll likely want to implement that in the IDE of your choice – but I still think there's a real benefit to having the power to implement PowerStrings that are always with you.

I always type out my BBCode tags manually. Turns out that using Colemak-CAWS such tags as b are sweet rolls for both index fingers!

And as I said, the C4-loop is only intended as a proof-of-concept from my side. It shows off the ability to write multiline strings and move the cursor.

Another week and another small gain. I'm no longer really drilling the English 5k list anymore. Most of my practice now is with real quotes. However, I still do a series of ten every once in a while to see if I'm making progress. Now that I'm two months in, I'm finding it much easier to relax into a good typing zone. In the past, I would need about thirty minutes of warm-up drilling the 60s English 5k test before I was able to string together a good batch of ten times. These times today are actually the only ten tests I did in this format. And they aren't perfect runs, but I'm now able to keep good speeds even when my accuracy dips below 97%.

58 wpm average
97% accuracy average
76% consistency average

58.39    58.39    96.70%    75.37%    292/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:24
59.78    59.78    98.68%    77.88%    299/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:23
59.59    59.59    98.03%    80.98%    298/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:21
57.18    57.18    97.96%    73.21%    286/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:19
54.99    54.99    95.19%    73.16%    275/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:17
58.59    58.59    98.65%    76.26%    293/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:15
57.98    57.98    96.67%    73.67%    290/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:14
60.18    60.18    97.76%    77.57%    301/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:12
60.18    60.18    97.73%    79.12%    301/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:10
57.98    57.98    96.67%    70.79%    290/0/0/0    time 60            22 Feb 2022 13:08

Additionally, I'm now confident that I'm at least as fast on Colemak-DH as I ever was on QWERTY, regardless of the metric used to judge (with the probable exception of a few CLI commands that I learned to spam really fast on QWERTY).

I've been able to achieve >64 wpm a couple times on TypeRacer races, which is about where I was on QWERTY, but I'm actually better (relative to QWERTY) on Colemak when the complexity of the quotes goes up. A lot of this is due to rearranging symbols, which isn't strictly part of Colemak, but it is part of the total layout change. Having the Quotation on the left pinky is probably the biggest gain on the complex texts that have dialog, but having the Dash on a prime spot is also really helpful for some of them. The rest of the credit goes to how much practice I've put into the English 5k and 450k lists. Long words aren't intimidating, especially if they're made of common trigrams.

I'm now also decidedly faster when typing PowerShell commands and scripts. This is due mostly to moving $, |, =, and especially - to good spots on the base-layer of my layout. Being able to type out several commands in a pipeline without even touching a modifier key (except for the parens and brackets) makes the typing so smooth. I'm 100% convinced that the good double reach keys are better for me than layered (including shifted) keys unless I'm likely to stay in that layer for multiple keystrokes. Ironically, numbers are bad candidates for the number row, because the numbers that are on the good spots (2, 3, 4, and 7, 8, 9) are rarely typed by themselves. At some point I think I'll try moving some symbols up there probably (, ), !, @, ?, and *, but I'm not sure. No rush. The current layout is more than workable.