Aqeel Zafar

Few months ago, I wrote about different keyboard layouts and planned to switch to Colemak. I wasn’t able to completely switch, mainly because I am a programmer, and wasn’t able to give Colemak enough time. I tried it couple of times but postponed complete switching.

Couple of weeks ago I tried Colemak again, but this time I went cold turkey. The best way to start Colemak is to download typing lessons from it’s site and try first few lessons (they recommend going through first three lessons in one sitting). It helps get the hang of new layout.

Learning a new layout when you are already used to one is not very easy. Just as everyone had told me, first few days felt like walking thorough mud, my fingers were not able to type at the speed my mind and body was used to, it had that dream like effect where you are moving in slow-motion and can’t move fast no matter how hard you try. Don’t let me discourage you though, as that’s just for first few days, after that your fingers and mind start getting used to new layout and it becomes easier. My typing speed with Colemak is now almost equal to what it was QWERTY (though I make lots of typos at that speed, so, I go bit slower) and my speed and efficiency is still increasing.

It could be just a psychological effect but it feels my hands are less strained than how they were with QWERTY. Even though it’s a great layout and I will highly recommend it to everyone,  but switching layout is just not for everyone. There are many people who type by looking at the keys, it won’t help them much, similarly, those people who don’t type much, the incentive of learning new layout is very low for them. But anyone who is using QWERTY, types a lot, or have ever complained about RSI, should definitely give it a try.

Aqeel General colemak, keyboard layouts, qwerty

Until recently, whenever I got option to choose layout during any software installation, I always wondered what’s the reason of using anything other than the superior QWERTY layout. That is until I came upon Dvorak and Colemak.

QWERTY layout was initially designed for typewriters. One of the reason told for QWERTY design was to slow down typing and separate the keys so, that two keys pressed one after another are far away and doesn’t jam the early typewriters. It also helped salesmen to impress their clients by typing “Type writer” from single row .This resulted in very un-efficient design. QWERTY doesn’t make efficent use of home row, it places some of the most used letters on other rows, according to few researches, it’s home row is used only 32% of the time and not more than 100 English language words can be typed without leaving it’s home row, where as this amount is more than 400 for Dvorak and Colemak.

Even with all the problem, once it started getting widely used, it became difficult to change the layout cause of simple economics, as no one was able to justify expense of time and money to convert existing typists to new layout.

QWERTY Layout

Dvorak was designed in 1936 to overcome the problems of QWERTY keyboard layout. Dr. August Dvorak studied letter frequency and physiology of human hands to create a layout that requires least stress on fingers and increase typing speed significantly. He moved the most used keys to home row which is easiest to use and least used keys to bottom row which is hardest to reach. Also, it was made sure that pinky fingers should have least amount of work to do, and more frequently used keys should be under our strong fingers. According to carpalx, Dvorak reduces typing effort 35% – 40% over QWERTY.

Dvorak is optimized for English language; their are versions for different languages available, but they have few problems. Almost all these layouts leave roman characters (English alphabets) in their original position, even though letter frequency for their language is different and require different layout. Dvorak also puts curly brackets and semi-colon in hard to access place, which makes it worst than QWERTY for programmers.

Dvorak Layout

Colemak, as stated by their homepage, is modern alternative to QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. Colemak implemented same optimizations as Dvorak with few differences, like it too moved all the vowels and most used keys to home row, but it did’t attempt to maximize hand alteration. Also, Colemak keeps all the punctuation in it’s original place with the sole exception of semi-colon, which it keeps easily accessible, making it much better option than Dvorak for programmers. As colemak doesn’t change all the keys on the keyboard it is also much easier to learn.

Colemak Layout

Even though many people claim that changing layout doesn’t make any difference, but mostly these are the people who haven’t tried any other layout. There is enough anecdotal & researched evidence on Internet that these layouts do make significant difference.

I compared all three layouts by typing different texts. Dvorak and Colemak outperformed QWERTY in all the English language tests, Colemak showed even better performance than Dvorak, but the difference between the two wasn’t huge. When tested using programming code, QWERTY’s performance was better than Dvorak but much less than Colemak. You can read more about different layouts on carpalx.

I am going to try out Colemak for a month or so, and see how it goes. I will post my results here.

Aqeel General colemak, dvorak, keyboard layouts, qwerty