Switching to Colemak

Summary

I’ve always been a fast typer, easily reaching the 100wpm mark when doing a typing test, so I’ve never really felt like my typing speed was holding me back. What I never really learned to touch-type properly, and so I’ve accumulated some rather nasty habits that have been leaving me with aching fingers after a lot of typing. In partiular, despite being right-handed, I do almost all of my typing with my left hand, and basically only use my pinky in my right hand (honestly, it’s a wonder I ever managed to hit those speeds…) So I wanted to learn to touch type properly and get rid of these habits that were on track to giving me RSI. But despite how many times I tried forcing myself to use the “correct” fingerings for my keyboard, they never stuck, and I kept coming back to my awful keyboard posture. Looking more into touch typing and ergonomic keyboards, I decided to try switching to a better keyboard layout than QWERTY. I’d tried this in the past with Workman, but it never stuck, and I wanted to give it another shot. Looking through various reddit threads and blog posts lead me to the [Colemak-DH], which is supposed to be a better variant of the Colemak keyboard layout without some of the drawbacks of Workman. I am writing this blog post as a sort of diary as I get used to switching to this new layout, so let’s get started! Day 0 Typing speed: 22wpm So as to not go in cold turkey and leaving me unable to work until I got used to the new layout, I started out by using keybr.com, which teaches you the keyboard layout progressively by starting with the home row and unlocking the next letter once you’re accurate enough with the existing letters. It has the very useful features of emulating a keyboard layout, which meant I could try out Colemak-DH without having to install it on my computer. Another nice feature is that it shows the keyboard at the bottom, color-coded with the correct fingers, which is a great reference while I don’t memorize the layout. I found the progres...