ten years of colemak
the keyboard layout that saved my wrists
2024-12-04
I think it was sometime around 2013 I quit using the US standard Qwerty keyboard layout and started using Colemak. So now that it has been 10 years more or less, this article is about why I decided to do that, and how I did it.
Why
My wrists hurt real bad. A constant kind of almost burning ache. Typing made it worse. Much worse. I often wore braces to immobilize my wrists, which helped some. I also eventually get a split keyboard, which helped a lot. But nothing helped quite as much as switching away from qwerty to something more ergonomic.
I had read plenty questionable articles about how Qwerty was designed to slow typists down by moving the keys farther apart. This isnât really true. They layout was designed to prevent jammed keys.
I decided that I wanted to try a different keyboard layout. The only alternative layout I had really heard of was Dvorak. I was a little scared of it because it is so alien to Qwerty. But then I learned about Colemak, and it looked a lot more appealing because a lot of is very similar to Qwerty. Namely the âzxcvâ run, the âcopy/pasteâ run, is the same. And it seem to minimize finger travel even more than Dvorak does.
Also, it is available nearly everywhere. iOS, Android, MacOS, and Linux all provide it out of the box an English keyboard variant layout. So thatâs comforting.
At the time, I was using Windows. Which is the only major OS not to natively support colemak. No worries though, there is a great AutoHotKey program for it that provides the keymapping, and also shows a little image of the layout if need be. I saved the program to a shared drive, because I had a job where I floated from workstation to workstation. And I warned my coworkers how to disable it if I ever wandered off with the program still running, which happened every once in a while.
Now I have almost no wrist pain. Sometimes I have to get the old wrist brace out once every 12 - 18 months if I have been doing extended amounts of typing on the laptop. But colemak, and especially colemak on a split keyboard, has pretty much fixed my repetitive stress injury. Now if I ever have to switch back to Qwerty for some reason, I feel like my fingers are flying all over the place!
How
My strategy was to practice for a little bit just enough to get familiar with the basics. And then to switch over cold turkey. And thatâs what I did!
It was very challenging to go from typing 80 - 90 wpm to typing ~20 wpm. I was working in tech literacy at the time and it was a huge level up in humility and empathy for my patrons who had no experience with computers at all and didnât know how to type.
For years afterward, my typing tended to top out at about 60 wpm and I was fine with that. I donât really need to type any faster than that really. And for a long time, I wondered whether my pain got better just because I slowed down. At the time of this writing, typingtest.com says my speed is 77 words per minute. Plenty fast enough as far as Iâm concerned.
The first tool I used was keyzen:
https://wwwtyro.github.io/keyzen/
This does âkk ff kk ffff kkkkâ type drills just to teach you where the keys are.
After doing that each night for an hour or so for a couple days, I switched to type-fu.
type-fu gives you full words and sentences to type. Youâll have to go into settings to set the layout to colemak and to disable sounds.
Finally, I used amphetype which allows you to provide your own text to type.
https://pypi.org/project/amphetype/
I downloaded a book from project gutenberg and typed it out.
It was about halfway through this step that I quit qwerty entirely.
I let all my coworkers know that I was going to be very slow to respond to email for the next couple weeks.
I had to refer to a visual reference quite a lot throughout each of these steps. When I wasnât using AutoHotKeyâs little heads up display, I kept an image of the layout as my computer desktop wallpaper so I could quickly glance at it with a gesture.
Mobile
For a while, I was typing colemak on desktop and qwerty on mobile.
But once I really realized that qwerty wasnât necessary, preferable, or efficient most of the time, I really got the alt-keyboard bug. I wanted to use a keyboard specifically designed for mobile.
I used MessagEase for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase
But then I decided to unify my typing experience and just use colemak everywhere.
Initially I was skeptical of the typing experience using colemak with a swiping keyboard. Colemak is so home-row oriented, wonât swiping just be a bunch of linear left and right? Turns out, in practice, yes it is! And itâs not a problem! Swiping keyboards are good at what they do.
Now
Like I said earlier, I went from terrible wrist pain to almost none at all.
The downside is that I have lost almost all of my Qwerty typing ability. This is less of an issue than you might fear because as I said earlier, you can easily pull it up almost anywhere.
Currently I use googleâs gboard on iOS, and macosâs native support.
I have successfully convinced one other person that I know of to try colemak. They started using it shortly after I started, and are also still using it today.