my observations about switching: inhibition and lookahead - Experiences

pmyshkin
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20-May-2009 06:09:51#1 my observations about switching: inhibition and lookahead

Hi:

I've been typing colemak for about a week now (cold turkey), and am still very slow at it. For what it's worth, here are some things I noticed about the switchover process. I was wondering if other people noticed the same things?

1. The biggest problem is inhibition.
I found that I memorized the colemak layout pretty quickly, but I was still pausing for long periods of time before being able to hit certain keys. It seems to me that a majority of this time is spent inhibiting my qwerty muscles from acting up and pressing the wrong key, and only after that was time spent recalling the colemak position of the key. Furthermore, the time it took to inhibit the qwerty response seemed linear to the ease of hitting the key in qwerty, because I'm having the most trouble with f, g, j, k.

2. Performance is different when typing in a tutor versus composing text on your own.
I can get 30 wpm at keybr.com, but less than 20 (i think) as I'm composing this message. I'm also seeing a lot more qwerty inhibition failures as I compose. I guess this must be because a large portion of my executive control is allocated to deciding what to type, so inhibition of natural qwerty response suffers significantly? If so, it seems also reasonable to conclude vice versa that my composition skill takes a big hit (sorry about this post's quality then). It's kind of like 2 programs constantly paging each other out of main memory.

3. emacs is the worst.
In any program where you have to hit isolated key sequences in the form ctrl-<something> a lot, those keys are the hardest to get right. I didn't rearrange my keycaps, so that may also be a factor. Thankfully, the bottom row is preserved, so ctrl-x and ctrl-c are painless. But the others are driving me insane. I'm guessing that when you're typing entire words, there is a lot of lookahead toward the later letters as you type the earlier ones, so you have a lot more time to prepare. Also, my muscle memory seems to learn common groupings, so certain sequences like "the" and "ough" seem to come out much faster than individual characters.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to drill more effectively in light of these problems? I'm kind of disappointed that typing tutors don't take these observations into account. For example, it would be easy for a tutor to detect qwerty inhibition failures, and drill you on the specific keys you're having trouble with. There can also be tutors that drill you on composition as well as typing, for example, ask you a question and make you give a response of a certain length, then look at the mistakes you make as you type an open-ended answer.

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DreymaR
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20-May-2009 08:39:50#2 Re: my observations about switching: inhibition and lookahead

Eventually, I think you'll have to remap some bindings like in emacs to be maximally happy. I've done that in vim at least.

To fight the frustration of your inhibition, I think rhythm would be nice. I'm not too good at typing with a steady rhythm myself; I think I may be too impatient to type any more slowly than I can at any moment. I do belive that rhythm can be helpful though - in theory if not in my practice.

If you manage to type with a slow, steady rhythm you should relax more. For now, you should fully expect to be slow! Just don't get frustrated by it, and you'll be fine.

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pmyshkin
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20-May-2009 09:08:43#3 Re: my observations about switching: inhibition and lookahead

Actually, I switched from vim to emacs simultaneously with switching from qwerty to colemak. I figured that I had so much muscle memory in vim that trying to relearn it for colemak was a lost cause. Plus the constant mode switching was getting to me. Anyway, emacs is very very nice.

I'll take note of rhythm. I just found the Amphetype tutor from browsing this forum, and it has a viscosity measure, which is the opposite of fluidity. Very nice program.

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ghen
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20-May-2009 10:07:07#4 Re: my observations about switching: inhibition and lookahead

For 1) I think you have to realize that most typing tutor programs weren't designed to help people switching layouts, but primarily to help people who can't type (correctly) at all, so they have a different focus than what you're describing/expecting.

For 2) yeah, today's computer use is mostly "typing what you're thinking" rather than "here's a letter can you type it for me" kind of old school secretary jobs. :-)

For 3) I'm a vi user, so I understand your problem. It's the same for other key-driven programs eg. mutt, screen, ... Because you really think in individual keys (or rather: key locations) rather than words, and often, esp. with Ctrl/Meta combo's, you won't have your hands in the "home row position" so you have to look at your keyboard which makes things worse. And ontop of that, unlike with regular text, you can't usually backspace errors as they're action keys and the action has to be undone. I found mutt especially hard. However I just got used to it in Colemak, without remapping any application keys (because I have to use vi on so many different machines at work), and it now works quite well for me. I find :wq very elegant in Colemak. ;-) And I use the arrow keys for navigating anyway.

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