So... about Colemak

I thought I'd follow up real quick on a previous post about buying a new keyboard and switching to the Colemak layout. I still really love the Moonlander keyboard. I'm a big fan of the columnar layout and split keyboard design. I like the tilting and thumb keys and the fact that you can program various layers and such (even though I'm not a heavy user of layers or macros or fancier features).  It was an extravagant purchase to be sure, but it's something I use all the time and I really like it, so I'm glad I got it.

I've officially thrown in the towel on the Colemak layout though. I gave it a good try. Pretty much since that post nine months ago I've been using Colemak, and by the end I was close to my qwerty typing speed. But somehow my brain never fully made the switch. I kept slipping up on certain keys, I got frustrated that I was still a bit slower in spite of the layout advantages, and I never got over the fact that Vim (a terminal editor that I use) feels weird and clunky with the h, j, k and l navigation keys in odd places. Also, even though it didn't come up very often, it was annoying that I was back to hunting and pecking whenever I needed to use anyone else's computer or switch to Windows. There were some posts on the Colemak forums where people said they'd swap back and forth without a problem, but I was never even close to being able to do that.

I did use Colemak enough to feel like I understood some of the advantages of the layout. Now that I'm back to qwerty I can tell that my fingers do move around a bit more, but it's very subtle, and I don't really think that it offsets the disadvantages that I mentioned. Ergonomics was a key reason for me switching and I think that's mostly taken care of by the split and tilted design of the keyboard. It may be that I didn't stick with lessons long enough, or that if I'd taken the time to install Colemak on Windows it would have been less annoying. Or maybe if I was typing exclusively versus coding I would have felt the benefits more, but either way I'm happy being back to the regular layout.

It was an interesting journey either way. It didn't feel like a waste of time even though I suppose it was. It felt like a fun diversion during a gloomy time–like a hobby. I had fun working on the typing game, and it was neat seeing myself go from barely being able to type out a sentence to being fully productive. At the start it seemed like I would never make it that far, but it's amazing how our brains can rewire something that's so second nature.