Type Colemak

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.