Type Colemak

Dvorak advocates will no doubt be aware of the paper, “The Fable of the Keys,” by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, in which they claim that there is no advantage to Dvorak over qwerty.

It’s a hotly debated argument, because Dvorak typists are convinced that their layout does have an advantage, if you persevere long enough at it.

“The Fable of the Keys” is rebutted by an essay entitled “The Fable of the Fable.” Like the original essay, it is full of argument and counter-argument, discussions of the relative merits of different studies, accusations and counter-accusations.

Quite frankly, both essays are excruciatingly boring. If you have to resort to dense academic prose, arguments based on the validity of disputed studies, and all the rest of it to make your point, and at the end of it not everybody is convinced, something is wrong with your point.

The Fable of the Fable asserts that Liebowitz and Margolis are claiming that Dvorak is no better than qwerty. However, this is a straw man: if you read their paper carefully, you will realise that they are claiming nothing of the sort. What Liebowitz and Margolis are actually claiming is that the advantages of Dvorak do not outweigh the cost of switching.

This is something that many failed Dvorakists would agree with. It is so difficult to switch from qwerty to Dvorak that the majority of people give up after weeks of zero productivity and intense frustration, convinced that it is nothing but snake oil.

So Liebowitz and Margolis are right about Dvorak. However, if they said the same thing about Colemak, they would be obviously, glaringly wrong.

A simple case of “suck it and see” would tell you that. It takes only a few hours of typing Colemak, if that, to notice that there is an advantage over qwerty in terms of both discipline and comfort. The effort involved in switching is pretty small, as you don’t have to abandon qwerty and your productivity in the early stages. Two hours a day of Colemak will get you a usable speed in only a week or so. And I defy anyone to spend a month on Colemak and then tell me they still think qwerty is better.

One key feature of Colemak is that it does away with Caps Lock, replacing it with the Backspace key.

Until now I’ve been using a slightly tweaked, British version of Colemak, with the punctuation and symbols in their UK rather than their US positions, and I haven’t done away with Caps Lock. The reason for this is that I actually like Caps Lock. There are times when you need it — for instance, when you are typing abbreviations, or in case sensitive programming languages where you get the identifiers in all upper case, or when you really think that something (such as Colemak) should be SHOUTED FROM THE ROOFTOPS.

However, since switching to Colemak-with-Caps-Lock I’ve been getting rather irritated with the conventional position of the Backspace key. It is quite a stretch away from the home keys for your right hand, and when you have a good typing pace up, it can really interrupt the flow while you move your hand back and fro. It gets particularly irritating when your hands return to the wrong keys and you make another mistake immediately after correcting the last one.

It is also pretty tiring, and it was making my right wrist sore.

Personally, I think the best solution is to swap Caps Lock and Backspace rather than having two Backspace keys as the “official” Colemak spec recommends. So last night I decided to take the plunge and swap the two using KMapper.

It’s a bit confusing at first — at first I kept pressing Tab instead of Backspace, and after about half an hour or so I still do that occasionally, but I am gradually getting used to it, and it makes a pretty big difference in terms of comfort.

Unfortunately, due to the insanities of Windows, the registry re-mapping affects all keyboard layouts, so if someone who insists on using qwerty comes onto the computer, it could confuse them a bit. Having said that, you can set it on a per-user basis, so it isn’t too bad in that respect.

So it seems to me that replacing Caps Lock with Backspace is a pretty smart decision. If you can’t live without Caps Lock, however, the best approach is to swap the two.

There have been several attempts over the past few years to design a keyboard layout that is more intuitive, easier to learn and more tightly optimised than qwerty or Dvorak. There are ones such as Asset, Arensito, Plum, Qwerf, the Capewell evolved layout, and others, but most of these were merely proofs of concept and attracted little attention beyond their original designer.

What makes Colemak different? For sure, it is well designed and fulfils its design goals very well indeed, but more importantly it is very well supported with an active and lively online community.

The Colemak forums are a fairly diverse and dynamic community with about 230 members, and are currently growing at a rate of about 15-20 a month. It is full of people who are willing and eager to help newcomers make the transition from qwerty.

I think this community aspect more than anything else is the single thing that makes Colemak stand out from the crowd. When you know you are not alone and that there are other early adopters out there who are going against the flow, it does a lot to encourage you to stick at it.

Here is a screenshot of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” alpha 4, freshly booted up from the live CD. The first thing I did before anything else was load up the keyboard preferences:

Sure enough, there it is. So far, Colemak is only available for the US keyboard layout, but it’s a start.

To switch to Colemak:

• Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard
• Choose the “Layouts” tab
• Click “Add”
• Under “Layouts” choose “US” and under “Variants” choose “Colemak”
• Click “Add”
• Select Colemak as the default layout (or even better, remove the existing qwerty one)
• Click “Close” and you’re done.

The final production release of Hardy Heron is scheduled for April 24th. Hardy is also one of their LTS (long term support) releases, so it’s a pretty good time for Colemak to make its debut in a desktop OS.

There is one BIG problem with Dvorak. Learning it is a major hassle if you are an existing qwerty typist — which you almost certainly are.

Thirty-three keys change position from qwerty. Twenty-three of these change hands, and only two letters (A and M) remain in the same place. If that isn’t bad enough, you lose all your handy shortcut keys — Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and so on.

Howtos on switching to Dvorak are unanimous that you need to go cold turkey from day one if you are to have any hope whatsoever of switching. Unfortunately, this is rarely, if ever, possible. Chances are, you have a full time job, and a very large desire to avoid having your boss blow his stack at you. “Sorry, boss, I can’t get this report out by the end of the day because I’m learning a new keyboard layout” doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you would say if you want to remain gainfully employed, does it?

No wonder most people who try to learn Dvorak give up in frustration pretty quickly.

Now the official recommendation for learning Colemak also says that you should go cold turkey. However, this is incorrect. With Colemak, it is perfectly possible to adopt a “qwerty by day, Colemak by night” approach until you are up to speed.

With Colemak, only seventeen keys change position. The most infrequently used ones such as Q, W, Z, X and V, and all the punctuation (with the exception of the semicolon) stay put. This makes it vastly easier to switch from qwerty.

In the earliest stages of learning Colemak, I only used it in the evenings. Granted, I’m a computer geek and I spend far too much of my spare time in front of a PC, but by day I was typing merrily away on qwerty, then in the evenings I would come home and start blogging, programming or whatever on my laptop in Colemak. It took me only three evenings to pass the “painfully awkward” stage and get up to about 25 words per minute.

I reckon that most people should be able to get enough speed up with Colemak to be able to use it at work in less than two weeks, with no more than two hours practice a night. If you are already a fast qwerty typist and your work relies on speed, it may take a bit longer, but it is still doable. Once you are fast enough at it to be able to avoid getting shouted at by your boss — and only then — you can ditch qwerty altogether, and the rest is plain sailing.