Do you like to live in ‘Difficult Mode’?
Adventures into the clandestine world of Colemak
In September 2014, whilst on a coding Bootcamp with Makers Academy, I was introduced to the Colemak keyboard layout by @ecomba. He introduced one of his lectures with a brief introduction about why he used to carry an unlabelled keyboard with him, explaining that he used the Colemak keyboard layout rather than the more traditional QWERTY one. He made reference to it being more ergonomic because the most commonly used letters are placed along the middle row. What stuck with me was his example that the letter ‘J’ was in prime position on a QWERTY keyboard despite it rarely being used.
Dvorak is usually the other keyboard layout people are aware of. This is where vowels are moved to the left of the keyboard and the symbols/punctuation keys also move. Colemak however is based on the QWERTY layout with 17 letters moved. As I type this, 17 sounds a lot, but the 9 that remain are keys associated with traditional shortcuts Q,W, Z, X, C, V which helps. In fact, the bottom row of the keyboard only has one key changed which adds to the familiarity of it. The Colemak concept is then based around moving the keys so that the ‘home’ line (in the middle) is populated with more popular letters reducing movement.
According to colemak.com:
“Your fingers on QWERTY move 2.2x more than on Colemak. QWERTY has 16x more same hand row jumping than Colemak. There are 35x more words you can type using only the home row on Colemak.”
Stats like this are pretty convincing in a world where ergonomics and improving personal health are becoming ever more important. Here are the heatmaps generated by this blog post. Thanks to Patrick Weid and for his heatmapping tool!
I certainly don’t have a photographic memory, but it’s pretty good at memorising things quickly; my wife would counter this with countless stories of memories and experiences that I’ve forgotten, but I’m blaming that on the dementia that runs in my family! I am easily inspired and have a tendency to want to impress whilst loving a challenge. So before the end of @ecomba’s lecture I had memorised the Colemak layout. I used mnemonics to help me. For example, the key ‘home’ row started like Arsenal Football club (A R S) and finished with vowels in alphabetical order (A E I O). The top row contained a sequence of F P G which were the initials of a working party from my previous company. These little mnemonics really helped. I have no idea what the lecture was about!
It was not memorising the layout that was difficult though. It was trying to undo years of muscle memory. I spent a week trying to use it. It hurt. My head felt heavy and cloudy that week. I found it hard to think about anything clearly — which probably didn’t help when trying to master Ruby and Rails! I was slow, but this didn’t really matter because I was coding, and generally I needed to think before I typed anything and it wasn’t about speed.
I think, one of my barriers was that I had never been able to touch type. But when using Colemak I matched my fingers to the precise keys for touch typing in order to reap the ergonomic benefits and help learn the layout without needing to look at the keyboard. This meant I was having to adapt to a new layout and also a new technique.
Needless to say, it was ditched. However, over the next 2 years the odd day was spent using Colemak to keep the layout in my head, convinced that one day I’d revert to it completely. I purchased a keyboard cover to see if that would help too. I had moved into a Project Management role which required more regular typing and the speed was a real hinderance. I found the hardest thing was to have a conversation in Slack, our messaging tool. I could not keep up with a conversation, which was frustrating and slowed me down further. In these cases, the keyboard cover did help, but I wasn’t mapping my fingers correctly when looking, so it felt a little pointless.
So I picked it up again recently and gave it my best shot. 35 days. I even downloaded the App for my iPhone to stop me having to switch when using iMessage or WhatsApp. This really helped and the layout started to feel almost second nature. I kept the keyboard cover for times when I really needed to boost my speed, but tried to continue touch typing. My head still hurt at the beginning but this reduced after the first week. The Team I worked with had great fun with some of my typos!
There was another comment from one of my friends ringing in the back of my head though, essentially “What’s the point?”. He questioned using my brain power for other things (like improving my Ruby!) and questioned what the gain was if I was typing more slowly. I had tried to convince myself that speed was not the most important part of typing. That Colemak gave me a different skill, something that made me a little different from the ‘norm’. I can honestly say that it did feel easier on my fingers, and that some words and sentences felt like they required such little effort. Surely this health benefit was enough?
I took the plunge and did some speed and accuracy tests using an online typing test. Here are the averages:
Colemak — Looking at the Keyboard 40.7 WPM 98.1% accuracy
QWERTY — Looking at the Keyboard 65.6 WPM 96.9% accuracy
Colemak — Not Looking (Touch Typing) 18.6 WPM 85.4% accuracy
QWERTY — Not Looking (but not Touch Typing) 43.3 WPM 79.6% accuracy
They were pretty conclusive. What was I really achieving by using Colemak? Does the reduction in finger movement balance the reduction in speed? The QWERTY keyboard was purposefully designed to prevent speed after all. The original typewriter was susceptible to jamming when the arms clashed and locked, so QWERTY was designed to prevent this happening. The heatmaps shown previously clearly show the reduction in movement that Colemak offers with the majority of keypresses on the ‘home’ row.
I am back to using QWERTY, but have a real soft spot for Colemak and will no doubt pick it up again at some point. Maybe one day I will be able to get up to a more acceptable speed and stick with it! In the meantime, I’d encourage you to give it a try and see what you make of it…
