11/20/2023 0 Comments Mechanical keyboard cowboy analogyThat might make the transition easier, but it could be one of the reasons switching between them is hard. Colemak is a change from qwerty, but it's not as overtly different from qwerty. In your case however, the subjects are quite similar. With language, the rhythm and intonation are usually a dead giveaway. For typing, triggers are anything with a 'd' in qwerty including the word 'dvorak' ironically, 'the' in dvorak. The only real obstacle has been slowdowns from going 6+ months without using one or the other which isn't all that hard to work around. There was certainly a lot of weirdness at the moment the two sides reached the same level– if I froze up for a second, I might start mixing in French words or reaching for Command-Q with my left pinky. Switching to dvorak lifted my speed on it as well as qwerty, and my Japanese has only helped my French. That's quite interesting, as I've had an opposite experience (substitutions ahead). Colemak didn't make me a significantly faster typist (maybe it would have had I done it for more than 9 months) but it was way more comfortable. It made me sad though, because now typing QWERTY feels idiotic. Seems like a way different thing, but it felt the same, because it was like an unconscious activity being supplanted by another, and thus becoming something I had to think about. The same thing happened when I learned Japanese I used to be conversant in Spanish, and after I got to roughly the same level in Japanese (from living in Japan) one day I noticed that the Spanish wasn't there anymore - I would have to think about what I wanted to say in my native English and convert it to Spanish. (I couldn't avoid QWERTY because part of my job these days entails showing people how to do things on their own computers, which aren't using Colemak.) So I ended up having to look, which is extremely inefficient and finally I abandoned Colemak. I had to think about where the keys were in QWERTY, and I realized I don't even really know, because typing is a doing-without-thinking activity. I just couldn't do it after I became acclimated to Colemak, my QWERTY was just destroyed. I am very jealous of you - my inability to maintain QWERTY after I switched to Colemak was what forced me to grudgingly switch back. Having commonly used keys on the home row on a small touchscreen means that it's much more error prone, as you're hitting the same area on the screen consecutively. One other interesting thing I learnt is that using Colemak on a smartphone completely sucks. I may end up just biting the bullet and switching to Colemak on that laptop keyboard anyway, though missing the thumb cluster is killer. So even though I have maintained my Qwerty skills, the only reason I need them is because I can't get a laptop with a columnar keyboard. I also feel like I have a lot of room to get faster than I currently am with Colemak. When I type with Qwerty now, it feels like my hands are flying all over the place. My current maximum speed is roughly 70 wpm in Colemak, so I am almost at my Qwerty speed after 6 months, although now I can touch type so it's more useful. This means I have maintained my Qwerty skills. What's interesting is that because of the physically different keyboards, I actually cannot type in Qwerty on my Kinesis, and I also cannot type in Colemak on my laptop keyboard. I also liked the idea of a columnar layout so I changed to a Kinesis. (Or maybe I was too stubborn - I also have a strange way of holding a pen.)Īnyway, I decided to change to Colemak, and to learn to touch type properly. By the time someone tried to teach me how to type properly my habits were too ingrained to change. Also I couldn't touch type - I never learnt to type properly with Qwerty I just started typing when I was young and developed lots of bad habits. My Qwerty speed was only 75 wpm and my accuracy was terrible. In January I moved from Qwerty to Colemak, and also from a staggered to a columnar keyboard layout (on a Kinesis keyboard). I'm not sure how relevant this is to anyone, but this post is as good excuse as any to talk about my transition to Colemak.
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