Adventures in Colemak

I started switching over to Colemak instead of QWERTY for typing.

Though the rationale for this choice is rather transparently "for nerd cred", it is also something that can potentially reduce finger strain over the long run, and preventing carpal tunnel is second only to back strain in terms of the improvement to my personal quality of life. Though I can't claim with any degree of certainty that this will help, I will anecdotally say that this does feel like it causes less strain to type with.

I'm using Colemak Mod-DH, a version of Colmak that curls D and H down onto the bottom row for the index fingers, rather that reach across to the middle. This does destroy the whole appeal of Colemak keeping the most common keyboard shortcuts of ZXCV, for undo, cut, copy, and paste, but unlike Dvorak they are still easily struck with one hand.

As far as software to change the layout itself, Colemak-DH was built-in to Pop!_OS and Fedora. For Windows, there is EPKL, which hasn't proven to be too much of a hassle to get up and running.

When I started out, I spent long enough learning it that I knew where every key was. I practiced with KeyBR at first. I stuck with this on default settings for a while, but the problem with the tool is that it is much better for training once you're already somewhat familiar with the layout. It tries to isolate and focus on your weak keys, but when you're just starting out, it winds up getting stuck on one key until you're fluent in that key specifically.

It looks like the typing enthusiast community prefers monkeytype, and for good reason. It's an excellent typing speed test tool, but is extremely customizable and automatically tracks your progress with fancy graphs. Though I stopped actively practicing for long sessions, I still shoot for a daily long quote on the site. I'm up to about 60 WPM on Colemak, slowly increasing to hopefully match my ~90-100 on QWERTY.

I started out by getting strong enough to remember where each of the keys were, about 10 WPM, before switching mostly cold-turkey and practicing regularly. It was a little painful, but altogether not too bad. What was much worse was the full two days where I couldn't type at all in QWERTY more than like 5 WPM. (I had to stare at the keyboard to type with any semblance of speed.) After being more proactive about switching between the two, I managed to find my full QWERTY speed again.

I've already rebound some games to use it (and I'm also experimenting with ESDF -- er, FRST, rather than WASD for first-person controls.) Some software really just refuses to respect the change and insists the keyboard is QWERTY, and my mouse keybinds are set up to only work in QWERTY for the time being. Edit: this bugged me enough to stop and go fix it immediately. Turns out piper replaces the Logitech gaming software just fine. But switching between layouts is only a single keypress, so it's not too terrible if I need to type quickly for a bit.

I'll probably stick with it until I either get bored of dealing with the application inconsistencies, or wind up spending probably way too much money on a custom keyboard setup.