Unconventional typing: part 1 - Colemak

Prologue: My Colemak Origin Story

It was dark out. The time was such that most people had already left.

Yet, he remained.

Sitting by himself on a dim-lit corner of the room, the strange man worked away. His weapon of choice? An old ThinkPad. His focus was so diligent one could mistake it for some sort of trance. As it often does, it intrigued me, so I approached.

“Hey, what are you doing here so late?” I asked.

Not for a second taking his eyes off the screen, he answered. Something to do with sys-admin work. I did not listen, for in that moment something terrible, hidden yet so blatantly out of place caught my eye.

“Why are your keycaps blank?”

The man looked up from his computer.

“I made them that way, for you see I have no need for them.”

I was stunned.

“How can that be? It is well known that even the most proficient of typers will sometimes look at their keys.”

“Ah, but alas I am not most typers. You are correct that looking at the keyboard would be of help for most, and yet for me it would only be a hindrance. You see, I don’t use QWERTY.”

This statement shocked me to my core. He does not use QWERTY? But for what purpose could that possibly be?

“Wha… What do you use then?” I asked, wearingly.

“Colemak” he answered “I use Colemak. It’s just a more efficient layout, you should look into it.”

It wouldn’t be for many months that I would again recall this event, and many more months would pass until I understood it. But for now, as I left, all I thought was:

“Lmao what a weirdo! Why would anyone do such a thing?”

How naive, how blissfully ignorant.

I use Colemak-dh, btw

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert, just a dude with opinions on typing.

I’ve now been using the Colemak-dh layout for more than one year and six months. It looks something like this:

What prompted me onto such a thing? Well, as with most life altering decisions in my life it started by falling into a YouTube rabbit hole. Also wanting to be a cool kid (it’s always that).

The Downfalls of QWERTY

There is not a consensus on the matter, but most sources agree that QWERTY layout is not particularly efficient, nor was it ever designed as such. It just happened to gain popularity on typewriters, through which it evolved to be the standard on pretty much every modern keyboard. That is QWERTY’s main advantage: it’s everywhere.

If it is perfectly fine for everyone else, why change the standard? One word: ergonomics. As it turns out people figured out that there was room for improvement long ago. And when I started feeling wrist and finger pain after long sessions of typing the YouTube and Reddit experts made a lot of compelling arguments for the switch.

Why Colemak-DH

Standard Colemak is supposedly more friendly to people wanting to switch than other popular options such as Dvorak, as it keeps most of QWERTY’s letters, particularly the bottom left ones ( Z X C V ) often used for shortcuts. The key improvement lies in repositioning the most frequently typed letters to the home row, making them more comfortable to type, along with a design that emphasizes rolling motions, where fingers move smoothly in quick, adjacent sequences across keys.

While I did try it for a bit, I ended up feeling the D and H keys were not really optimal, requiring stretching the index finger. I was not alone, and soon found Colemak-DH which fixes this issue. Perfect!

Muscle Memory: Learning not to think

If I was going to do this, it had to be done right: I was fixated on learning to type the proper way. I had dabbled on touch typing back in high school and gotten pretty good at it, but over time I found myself becoming lazy with it and adopting a mixed typing style, where sometimes I would just hit a key with whatever finger I felt in that moment. That was not going to be an option moving forward. Switching layouts was the perfect excuse to also learn touch-typing once and for all.

I used keybr.com during the first week or two to get the layout under my fingers. You can choose the layout you want to learn and the tool gradually introduces new letters after it feels you are up to it. I really liked it, very useful to learn touch-typing in general!

That sums up my positive experiences during the first few weeks. Let me tell you about the other part.

Painful Transition

Learning a new layout fucking sucks. I’ve never felt so digitally challenged as when I saw my typing speed go from around ~60wpm (words per minute) all the way down to under 15wpm. Typing messages was a struggle of herculean proportions, even searching the web was frustrating.

And coding? Fuhgeddaboudit. I distinctively remember doing a project for UNI that required peer-programming. I tried explaining I was learning a new, more efficient way of typing that was going to change my life forever, but to no avail. I was ridiculed by my colleagues, laughed at as it took me 2 business days to type a print statement in Python.

“Dude, what is wrong with you, why can’t you type?”

“Haven’t you heard? He’s trying a cOol nEW lAYoUt that will cHAnGe hIs lifE.”

If only they could see me now (they do not care).

But the worst part was not the loss in speed or the constant spelling mistakes. Oh no. The worst part was how much I was having to think. Every letter of every word was first thought and only then clicked. That was exhausting!

The tricky thing here is that you are not teaching your brain the new layout, that’s the easy part. You can memorize it in minutes! Rather you are training your hands to translate letters (or more often whole patterns/words) into typing motion, the real goal being not having to think at all.

Sadly, that level of mind-muscle connection is only achieved through use, diligent and deliberate practice, which can take a lot of time.

Here are some of my favourite online tools to practice typing:

Bliss

Eventually, I started seeing the light.

As my speed and accuracy improved, I began to appreciate the thought that went into each letter positioning.

• Most common letters in the home-row
• Vowels on the right hand all feel nice and accessible.
• Uncomfortable letters in QWERTY like T, Y, P and B move to more sensible positions.
• The rolls (oh my the rolls!)

Around the three month mark I once again became as fast as I was originally with QWERTY.

Typing had finally become as effortless as breathing or talking.

Or had it?

Home-row Mods

Truth was, while typing words was indeed more comfortable, everything else still didn’t feel quite right. All the modifiers, special symbols, Enter and Backspace keys still required significant stretching.

In fact, it was so much so that at around the year mark, after a particularly long and last minute report typing session, I got a terrible pain in my right wrist. After close inspection, I figured it was due to repetitively rotating my hand to hit the Backspace and Enter key, to the point the whole joint cracked when doing said motion.

Something had to be done. Down another rabbit hole.

That was when I found home-row mods.

What are they?

Home-row mods aim to bring more functionality closer to your finger-tips, on the home-row of the keyboard.

How can that be when there are already letters there? Through a mechanism called “tap-hold keys”. Here’s how it works:

• When tapping a key, i.e. (duration pressed < timeout) → register as letter.
• When holding a key, i.e. (duration pressed > timeout) → register as modifier.

Usually, the timeout duration is around 200ms. This allows dual functionality on the same key, neat!

I recommend reading this fantastic guide to get started with home-row mods. It goes through all the details, even how to set it up on different machines and keyboards. Massive props.

What I use

To achieve all this I use KMonad, an awesome tool for keyboard customization! I also recommend reading the KMonad section on the home-row-mods article. Check out my config file here.

I ended up settling for the GACS order. In layout agnostic terms, that means:

Note: This layout is mirrored for both hands, with the left-hand modifiers corresponding to Left Super, Left Alt, Left Ctrl, and Left Shift, and the right-hand modifiers corresponding to Right Super, Right Alt, Right Ctrl, and Right Shift.

Finally, to make Enter, Backspace and the Arrow keys more accessible, I took advantage of the concept of custom layers. You can think of it as switching to a new keyboard layout without physically changing your keyboard — just activating a layer. For example, the Shift key already does this, switching to an Uppercase keyboard when pressed.

So, I made my Caps-Lock key a tap-hold:

• When tapping Caps-Lock, it behaves as Escape, useful for Vim workflows.
• When holding Caps-Lock, it activates a custom layer:
  • F becomes Backspace.
  • Space becomes Enter.
  • I, J, K, and L function as arrow keys, enabling navigation without moving your hands away from the home row.

Finally, control over my own keyboard!

These mods were a huge improvement! They made all my standard modifier keys useless, as I now only use the ones right on the home-row. They also enabled a lot less strain on my hands from rotating. Amazing!

Conclusion: was it worth it?

In all honesty, regarding Colemak (and others), I think that the learning pain is way too high for the benefits. While it is undoubtedly a better layout, it won’t significantly improve typing speed beyond what can already be achieved by learning touch typing, with the added downside of not being translatable into random keyboards.

However, if you have a lot of time to spare, go for it! Reject mindless tradition, embrace ergonomics! Most of all, it is an incredible flex in the right spaces (source).

Now, if there’s one takeaway from this article, it’s that home-row mods are amazing! For real, like a sculptor releases a statue locked inside a block of marble, home-row mods, and by extension layers and all other customizations, allow your keyboard to finally become an extension of yourself.

Typing is our prime interface with all that is digital. Why should we want to stick with what is known and not put in the effort to make it our own?

This is just the beginning,

— José Duarte Lopes