itherese.com/blog

Been using Colemak for almost 2 months. Have got used to it and no desire to switch back. I like being able to touch type.
I still make a lot of mistakes though, since I didn’t pay much attention to accuracy while learning. Getting more fluent in vim’n, which had been quite annoying.

This post put an end to the Colemak series, unless there’s something really worth blogging.

Switched to Amphetype from KTouch for the training. KTouch was very good for initial learning since it helped me to memorize the key positions. But once the positions have been memorized, what I need now is practicing it on true typing, which Amphetype is a better tool.

I’m at home today and using a pretty different keyboard from one at work. In fact, I use two different keyboards at home. One is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, which is what I’m typing on right now. The other one is the built-in keyboard on my Lenovo x61 laptop. Typing experience on these keyboards are all different. Fortunately all of them are in US layout.

I’m still trying to find the correct way of shifting and controlling. If none exists, I’ll look for the best way.

It is the forth day into Colemak. I’ve just memorized all the key locations and I’m trying to get to the correct habit of shifting and controlling. In fact, I don’t even know what’s the correct way. My weak key is o, often press i instead. Then it’s s, often press it’s “old”(QWERTY) position, which is now r.

Now I’m trying to use it regularly, the first problem I’ll need to solve is remapping those vi keys, otherwise it’s unusable. I realized that it’s actually not as straight forward as doing it for vim.

Ok. After some chatting with my boss, found out that the development server defaults to nvi (means that it’s what I’ve been using the whole time) which doesn’t allow me to remap the keys the way I want. I’m switching to vim. So long, nvi.

Someone talked about typing speed at last cell group meeting. I type slow. No, I can’t touch type. I then realized that I wanted to learn touch typing.

Boss and I talked about tennis one day at lunch. He’s a tennis player, I mainly did the asking and he the teaching. He said though we were wired to do things (e.g. control a tennis racket) better with one hand than with the other hand, it doesn’t mean that we can’t train the other hand to do the things. Some people learn faster, some slower. Still, we can learn.

Yes, I can learn.

I decided to officially train myself touch typing, and typing right (using the right fingers for the right letters). I researched online for tutorials and trainings. I went to some websites that taught touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard, tried on some.

I have been using the wrong fingers and developed the habit, yet I couldn’t type precisely without peeking the keyboard. I learned about the correct finger usage for QWERTY on those websites. I came to work and tried to ‘type correctly’. Then I encountered this problem: using vi editor is awkward. My four right-hand fingers always standby on the ‘hjkl’ for the movement of the cursor. I especially don’t want to unlearn these four muscle memories. I then searched online to see if there are other people with the same problem. There, I encountered Colemak.

According to its website (http://colemak.com):

Colemak is a modern alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English.
Learning Colemak is a one-time investment that will allow you to enjoy faster and pain-free typing for the rest of your life. Colemak is now the 3rd most popular keyboard layout for touch typing in English, after QWERTY and Dvorak.

It is supposed to offer these advantages:

• Ergonomic and comfortable – Your fingers on QWERTY move 2.2x more than on Colemak. QWERTY has 16x more same hand row jumping than Colemak. There are 35x more words you can type using only the home row on Colemak.
• Easy to learn – Allows easy transition from QWERTY. Only 2 keys move between hands. Many common shortcuts (including Ctrl+Z/X/C/V) remain the same. Typing lessons available.
• Fast – Most of the typing is done on the strongest and fastest fingers. Low same-finger ratio.
• Multilingual – Allows to type in over 40 languages and to type various symbols, e.g. “pâté”, “mañana”, €, em-dash, non-breaking space.
• Free – Free software released under the public domain. You don’t have to buy a new keyboard, just install a program.

Okay. Is it that good? Since I’m learning touch typing from the ground up, why don’t I pick the good one to learn when I have choices?

Here started my Colemak journey.

I use KTouch for my training.

By the way, Colemak doesn’t solve my vi-habit problem either, and I found none could. I’ll deal with this later, either change my habit (this is hard! But I guess not as hard as changing the general typing habit) or to re-map the keys on the vi editor. Later.