On Switching to Colemak

There’s this thing many people will probably go their whole lives and never know about. A ton of alternative keyboard layouts exist other than the default “QWERTY” (named for the letters along the top row of the keyboard). There is a subculture obsessed with this.

The two most common ones are Dvorak and Colemak. Last Saturday I started learning where the letters on Colemak are located. By the end of Sunday, I had them memorized. This meant I could type very slowly (3-5 wpm) with near perfect accuracy.

It didn’t take long to learn at all. Now, a few days later, I no longer have to think about where the letters are, but it will probably be another week or so before I get back to full speed.

Let’s talk about the burning question in everyone’s mind: why would anyone subject themselves to such an experience? I type a lot. For the past year or so I’ve experienced some mild pain in my wrists. I’ve never had it diagnosed to know if it is repetitive strain injury, but my guess is it’s a bad sign if you experience any pain, no matter how small.

I tried to alleviate some stress by tilting my keyboard and giving my wrists something to rest on:


[Yes, that’s Aristotle’s Poetics under the front of the keyboard.]

This helped a little, but the more I looked it up, the more I realized there was a fundamental issue with the keyboard layout that could be part of the problem. Most people probably think the layout has a purpose because of how strange it is. But we’ve outgrown that purpose.

The history of this is long and somewhat interesting, but it basically boils down to making sure hands alternate and common digraphs (two-letter combinations) have large distances separating them, so that when typing quickly on a mechanical typewriter it will be least likely to jam.

If one were to design a keyboard to minimize injury, one would put the most common letters on the home row, minimize long stretches, and make sure common digraphs use different but nearby fingers. This is almost exactly the philosophy of the Colemak layout.

The Colemak layout allows you to type around 34 times the number of words on the home row than QWERTY. It’s sort of insane that “j” is on the home row and “e” and “i” are not for QWERTY. Colemak also distributes workload more evenly. It favors the right hand slightly more at 6%, unlike the massive favoring of the right hand for QWERTY at 15%. You can go look up the stats if you want to know more. I won’t bore you by listing them here.

You will definitely lose a lot of work time while making the change due to slow typing, but the layout is provably more efficient. So in the long run you’ll end up more than compensated for these short-term losses.

I’d like to end by reflecting on what a surreal experience this has been. I think I first started learning to type around the age of eight. I’m now thirty. That’s twenty-two years of constant ingraining of certain actions that had to be undone. Typing has to be subconscious to be effective. We don’t even think about letters or spelling when doing it. Most words are just patterns that roll off the fingers.

This is made explicitly obvious when I get going at a reasonable speed. I can type in Colemak without confusion letter-by-letter, but I still slip up when my speed hits that critical point where I think whole words at a time. At that point, a few words of nonsense happen before I slide back into correct words. It’s very strange, because I don’t even notice it until I look back and see that it happened.

I’ve never become fluent in another language, but I imagine a similar thing must happen when one is right on the edge of being able to think in the new language. You can speak fluently, but occasionally the subconscious brain takes over for a word, even if you know the word.

If you’re at all interested, I’d recommend checking into it. I already feel a huge difference in comfort level.


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