These are the steps that you need to take to get Colemak keyboard layout fully working on your iMac or MacBook, including remapping Caps Lock to Backspace.

Installing the layout

Download Colemak.keylayout and Colemak-Mac-Icons.zip. Unzip and put them in your ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts

You will need to restart before they will be picked up by the system preferences.

Activating the layout

Having restarted, go to System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Input Sources and you should find Colemak as an available layout. You may want to tick “Show Input menu in menu bar” if you want an easy way to switch layouts. You can also play with the keyboard shortcuts for switching.

A tip for beginners: if you enable the “Keyboard & Character Viewer” at the top of the list then you can get a useful on-screen picture of the layout.

Mapping Caps Lock to Backspace

I found this is easily done with PCKeyboardHack. Download it, unzip it and install it. You will have to restart again, unfortunately. This is Serious Business we are doing here!

Having restarted, go to System Preferences -> PCKeyboardHack and tick the first option: Change Caps Lock to keycode 51 (Delete)

It feels slightly slow to respond and you can’t press and hold to delete many characters at once. I didn’t think i’d keep it, but just as i’ve been writing this blog post i’ve found i’ve got used to it extremely quickly (actually that says more about the number of errors i’m making at the moment!)

In any case my TypeMatrix has the backspace in the middle, which i think is an excellent place for it, and i don’t wish to annoy the people i pair with who like to have Caps Lock as an extra Ctrl key.

But there you go – that’s how you do it if you want to! :)

I’ve just had an email reply from TypeMatrix. Two things really excite me:

1. They are intending to get Colemak skins printed very soon, and when they do they’ll be advertising it on their site.

2. They are trying to get their keyboards into schools to get them in front of children from an early age. The intention being that they’ll give kids the skins and let them choose between Qwerty, Colemak or Dvorak as they wish.

What a fantastic idea! If anyone has any ideas for participating in the experiment, i suggest you contact TypeMatrix!

To quote Bob Marshall: “Security is always relative, never absolute”

When i started contracting, i thought it would be a good idea to make my macbook require a password on booting up or waking up from screensaver. For weeks i’ve been using it fine coming out of screensaver, but today i rebooted. I couldn’t log in. I think it must be something to do with the colemak keyboard layout. I entered the correct password, in colemak and qwerty, but it was having none of it.

Slightly flustered i turned to my phone and searched for “forgot osx password”. Very quickly i found a few articles on how to restart, hold down Cmd + s to get into single user command line mode, and then mount the filesystem for reading and writing.

Without entering a password, you now have superuser access to the whole system. You can reset people’s passwords. You can view and modify files. You can wipe the whole computer if you want to.

All i’m saying is, if you think an account password will protect you, you’re wrong. It may act as a deterrent, but if someone really wants access to your mac, they coud get it in less than 5 minutes.

It’s not just macs either: How To Reset Admin/Root Password gives easy to follow instructions for FreeBSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris and Windows. Ironically, Windows is the hardest one to crack on this point!

It’s a bit of a wake-up call for me.

Here is the start of a new series of questions that i get asked on twitter but the answer is too long for a tweet. It’s egocentrically called: “Ask aimee” :)

Ash Moran asks:

@sermoa When/why did you decide switch to Colemak?

To understand the context of this tweet, you need to know that Colemak is a keyboard layout, an alternative to QWERTY which is what most of the English speaking world uses to type.

A history lesson

QWERTY first appeared in about 1873, the result of several years’ work by inventor Christopher Sholes. QWERTY was designed for typewriters. The letters of word ‘typewriter’ are all in the top row. QWERTY separates common letters to reduce key jamming. Interestingly, this separation of common letters also makes it good for small touch screen devices with intelligent word guessing, so it’s not all bad!

Dvorak was designed in 1932 by Professor August Dvorak. Its intention was to improve the comfort of typing through several methods, notably by putting the most common letters on the home row and alternating hands as much as possible (all the vowels are in the left hand).

Colemak was released in 2006 and is the work of Shai Coleman. Colemak was designed with the aid of sophisticated computer software to work out the optimal position of the keys. It also minimises the moving of keys away from QWERTY, making it easier to switch. Actually, only 17 keys are different, and most of those are either in the same hand or on the same finger. Z, X, C and V all remain, as do all of the punctuation characters, which is a major win over Dvorak.

My own history of keyboard layouts

I used to be reasonably fast on QWERTY. I’m a pianist, which i think helps a bit. I reckon i was probably about 70wpm (words per minute) on QWERTY, which is not too bad.

I switched to Dvorak in 2002. Colemak had not even been invented yet! I switched because a friend did. Some nerdy part of me thought it looked like fun, and i always enjoy a challenge! I spend a significant portion of my life typing, so anything that makes it easier or more comfortable is good for me! At my peak i got to 110wpm with Dvorak.

I think i heard about Colemak in 2009. I actually started to learn it back then, but i didn’t stick with it. The primary reason for that is the company i was working for started to favour pair programming at about the same time. Switching keyboard layouts on the OS is not a lot of fun. I had a TypeMatrix keyboard which can send Dvorak keystrokes from the hardware level, so with two programmers and two keyboards there isn’t a problem.

By then i already suspected that Colemak was a superior layout, and although i continued with Dvorak, i recommended Colemak to anyone who asked!

If only i had known then that the TypeMatrix could also support Colemak layout! For some reason they don’t publicise it, but you can get Colemak layout simply by pressing Fn+F5.

Switching to Colemak

I switched to Colemak in February 2011, after Tom Brand discovered the TypeMatrix supports it. Again, i was influenced to learn it because Tom was learning and i felt i would get left behind! But it was this keyboard layout analyzer that convinced me for sure. I pasted in some code, some emails i’d written, and some tweets, and in every case not only was Colemak superior to Dvorak, but it was also pretty close to the optimal layout if i had a custom keyboard designed just for me. That was my compelling reason to switch.

It has now been 5 months and i’m up to about 80wpm on Colemak. I want to get faster, i want to make fewer mistakes, but i am extremely happy with my decision to switch. Right from the first month i could feel that Colemak was more comfortable. I felt totally grounded in the home row. All my punctuation keys were back where they should be. I noticed faults in the Dvorak layout that i’d never noticed before.

I am now loudly and proudly #teamcolemak :D

As most of my followers are probably well aware, i’m a bit of a nerd on the matter of keyboard ergonomics and keyboard layouts.

For any Dvorak typists, the QIDO (QWERTY In, Dvorak Out) is a very useful device that converts any USB keyboard into a Dvorak one. It is a spin-off product of KeyGhost, a hardware keylogger, but in this case put to a completely different use.

They QIDO plugs between the keyboard cable and the USB port on the computer, and it translates all keyboard input signals into the Dvorak letters. Reminds me somehow of a Babel fish! :) Having a QIDO means you don’t have to switch keyboard input at the operating system, especially useful if you’re pair programming with someone who types on QWERTY.

A few months ago i wrote to KeyGhost, the makers of the QIDO, to ask for a Colemak version (or even better, a programmable version) of the QIDO. Theo Kerdemelidis gave this reply:

We have had a few requests for Colemak support, so we will look into it as soon as we have a chance.

I know they also sent the same response to someone else who asked for a Colemak QIDO at the same time. As far as i’m aware they are still sending out the same reply to people who ask.

So i have a task for you! If you could use a Colemak QIDO (or QICO as they might call it!) please email helpdesk@keyghost.com to let them know your interest. If you get any reply, please let me know here.

Dvorak might be more popular at the moment, but that’s only because it’s been around for a lot longer than Colemak. We know that Colemak has the edge, and it’s getting more popular all the time. Let’s give KeyGhost all the encouragement we can to get a Colemak version of the QIDO made soon! :)

I have my phone set to alert me when anyone mentions Colemak on twitter. It’s a fun one to follow, you get new people trying out Colemak at least once a week, and i love to encourage people.

One thing i see a lot is programmers talking about vim, and asking what you do about the h/j/k/l keys. Do you remap them or relearn them?

There is at least one person who has made a colemak-vim remapping plugin (see this discussion in the Colemak forum), but i can’t imagine it working well. If you try to put h/j/k/l back where you’re used to them then you have to find new homes for n, e and i. (h actually stays in the same place) As you may well know, if you’re reading this, n is next search match, e is end of word, and i gets you to insert mode.

So if you move those keys, where would you put them? Almost every letter in vim has some sort of significance, and many of them are chosen for the action they stand for, which is part of the power of vim.

My answer is to relearn them. Maybe it’s easy for me because i was on Dvorak when i learned vim, so i was never attached to the position of h/j/k/l in the first place. Curiously enough, in Colemak h/j/k/l all end up on the same finger: the index finger of the right hand. Some people complain that j and k feel upside down, and they do at first, but then you realise that Apple is busy rewiring our brains with “natural scrolling” (which i think is just awesome, by the way) and before you know it, Colemak and vim feel perfectly wonderful together!

So my advice: print out one of these Colemak/vim cheat sheets and just get used to it!

Look! i’ve even done a typematrix version for all you Colemak people who pair program and need a keyboard with a hard wired Colemak switch!

Of course, the other great thing to note about Colemak is one of its big advantages over Dvorak: that punctuation characters remain in their QWERTY positions. Which is very useful for vim users! :)

If you touch-type QWERTY you already half-know Colemak.

Many of the keys stay the same, which means many of your shortcuts remain the same. On a Mac, these shortcuts are Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Bold, Minimize, Hide, Quit and Close.

The keys that do move don’t go far, usually one or two keys away. Mostly we’re trying to get the common letters on to the home row and move the uncommon ones away. Many keys that move stay on the same finger, or at least in the same hand. Only E and P swap hands. In Dvorak, 22 keys swap hands.

The punctuation keys don’t move, except for the colon/semicolon (no way that gets to stay on the home row!) In the Dvorak layout, all of these punctuation characters move: fullstop, comma, question mark, single quote, double quotes, square brackets, curly braces, angle brackets, dash, underscore, plus and equals. It’s a nightmare for programmers!

If you were to scratch off the keys that have moved, look how many you’d have to remove for Colemak compared to Dvorak:

As if you didn’t know, QWERTY is inefficient. Dvorak is a lot better, but Colemak is by far the best. To prove this point, here is the heat map of typing this very blog post on QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak:

There are other reasons here to explain why Colemak is easy to learn.

With the holidays coming up, do your future self a favour and learn Colemak!

Update: so you’ve decided you want to learn Colemak and want to know how to go about it? AWESOME! I have just the post for you: How to learn Colemak.

This is going to be a long post, all about me! feel free to skip it! :)

Set the stage

This has been a very exciting year in many ways, and a challenging year in many others. I am interested to review what has happened this year, see what i can learn from it, and make decisions about what i should do differently next year, and what i should keep doing the same, or do more of.

Right now i have no specific plan of how this is going to go, but i am making a commitment to myself to be honest about what has happened this year, and see what insights and decisions that helps me to generate.

Gather data

At the beginning of the year i was still working at Eden Development. In January we welcomed Alberto Peña and Despo Pentara as apprentices and i became a mentor to the two of them.

In February Tom Brand encouraged me to switch to the Colemak keyboard layout. I enjoyed the challenge and have become a great Colemak advocate!

In March Eden Development closed and, rather than looking for another company to work for, i chose to become self-employed.

I began contracting at a medium sized software consultancy firm in London. The two-month contract mostly involved writing HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to help build the new Bestseller online store.

Whilst contracting in London i met Rohit Gogna, a software tester, who asked to apprentice to me.

In April i went to Scottish Ruby Conference and enjoyed it immensely. Not only was it good to be around so many Rubyists, but it was also an opportunity for me to relax and reflect for the first time since becoming self-employed.

At the end of May i finished my contract in London and did my first day of freelance work. It was only one day: i worked with Alanna to build aphroditesdesire.com. I really enjoyed myself, and it was fantastic to see what could be achieved with Shopify in a single day!

My next engagement was with boxedup.com. They had been working on a rebuild of their website for 2 years without any review from the userbase. I told them that we needed to get a beta version out to get feedback as soon as possible. It was hard work but we did it within 3 weeks. Two weeks later, after a lot of tweaking and bug fixing, the new site went live. I came back to work with boxedup again later in the year, to add more functionality.

In June I set up a study group to work through the book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. We met up on sunday afternoons on Skype and Google+ to discuss what we had learned each week. I got a lot from it and blogged in detail about my progress.

The seven weeks taught me a lot. I gained a better grasp of Ruby metaprogramming. Io helped me to appreciate JavaScript better. Prolog was frustratingly pedantic but enthralling when you see it solving complicated logic problems with ease! Clojure was good but i think i prefer pure Lisp. Haskell was interesting but i didn’t get the kind of epiphany that made me want to study it more. Scala was my favourite: all the goodness of Java strong typing, combined with the sort of elegance that you get from Ruby. Plus concurrency and actor support, and XML being a top-level concept – i love it!

I had a 3-month contract in Edinburgh working with feusd.com on a highly customisable social networking platform. The platform was built in Rails with a strong emphasis on agile/lean techniques and behaviour driven development. I trained Tony Milne whom i got to know very well during my time there, who still works at Feusd, and still contacts me sometimes to ask my opinions and advice on various topics.

One of the products i’ve really enjoyed using this year is Buffer. I volunteered to work on an open-source Android app, mostly because i wanted to use it, but also to learn some Android programming. We released a very simple version that a lot of people used and appreciated. Joel later raised some money and paid me to build version 2 and to advise on the development of the API.

I was privileged to have Stuart Gale stay with me for a week in October to help me out with Buffer for Android. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot together.

From the success of Buffer for Android i was contacted by Alon Nir to build an Android app to send prayers to Jerusalem. I tried out Phonegap and Sencha Touch but wasn’t happy with the user experience, so i switched to native code. I was surprised how quickly i managed to build the app in Java, and how comfortable i felt doing it. I really like Android programming!

At the end of November i spent a week with a corporate client in Reading, converting their full text search functionality from Ferret to Solr. I was impressed by Solr, i meant to write a blog post about it but didn’t get round to it.

I helped to facilitate three code retreats this year: in Winchester, Sheffield and London. Sadly, i felt unable to participate in the Global Day of Code Retreat in December due to exhaustion and social anxiety.

I have really learned to embrace science, critical thinking and reasoning this year. Skeptics in the Pub has been awesome, i’ve listened to some great podcasts, i loved Uncaged Monkeys in December, and i finally came out to my dad as an atheist in October, which was a great relief for me. I’ve also really benefited from the Winchester humanist group that i co-founded.

This year i had some nice trips abroad. I went to Germany twice to visit relatives. I went to Madrid for a Path11 inception, and Brussels for a short holiday.

I have spent a lot of time on administration: scanning receipts and logging finances. I am grateful to freeagent for making this a lot easier, but it still takes up a lot of my time, usually a large chunk of every saturday. That said, i do quite enjoy doing it, i’m very careful with it and i think i’d rather do it myself than entrust someone else with it.

I really failed at Christmas this year. I didn’t have the motivation to even look for presents for people, i didn’t write any Christmas cards, and i felt rather overwhelmed at the whole idea. I am sure this was as a direct result of having been so busy during the whole year, and not taking enough time out for myself and my loved ones.

The Christmas holiday was great. I slept a lot and felt myself relaxing as a physical sensation. It felt quite odd to me at first: i had literally forgotten how it feels to relax.

Generate insights

It has been an amazing year. I have achieved so much, looking at all that data i’ve gathered, it’s almost impossible to believe!

But it has taken a toll. I’ve worked harder than i’ve ever worked before in my life, and although i’ve enjoyed most of it, i’ve found it incredibly stressful and it has affected my personal life and my relationships.

One thing that’s clear to me is i have not been a good mentor to my apprentices. Despo and i decided to end our mentor/apprentice relationship soon after we both became self-employed. I keep in touch with Alberto and Rohit, but not often enough, and the relationships are not as strong as i think they ought to be.

Something i’ve enjoyed a lot is learning new things. I really liked the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, i enjoyed learning a bit about Node.js and Backbone.js, i loved everything i’ve learned about Android.

Problems for me have been feelings of isolation, or making too many decisions on my own. I really enjoyed the time i spent in Edinburgh pairing with Tony, and the week when Stuart came to pair with me, but other than that i’ve done a lot of work by myself.

Oddly enough though, the stress of working alone and taking big responsibilities upon myself seems to have increased my social anxiety. I have problems being around too many people i don’t know. Unfortunately, Code Retreats, conferences and user groups fall into that category. I prefer to get to know people better on a one-to-one basis.

Something i didn’t do any of this year was develop my own pet projects. I had a few ideas, and i did a little research for them, but i didn’t find the time to put my ideas into action. I think this is largely because i spent most of my time either working, or looking for my next work.

To summarise, in terms of finance and reputation, this has been a very successful year. In terms of personal wellbeing, and personal relationships, it has not been very good.

Decide what to do

It is clear to me now that my number one priority in 2012 is to focus on my personal life. I enjoy my work, but my whole life should not be about the work that i do. I need to make more time for my partner, for my friends and family, for my apprentices, and for myself. I really do need to make time, not just hope there will be some time left over.

Working with Alon in Israel for two weeks, i was really touched by the Jewish concept of Shabbat, a whole 24 hours per week where you put everything stressful aside and take time to relax. I think that’s something that i could benefit from.

I will take more time to communicate with friends and family. I want to revive the art of letter writing, to keep in touch with people better. Maybe it would be good to disconnect from the internet one day per week and write letters to people instead.

I will contact my apprentices and see how we should proceed. I want to be a better mentor, but i also need to assess what they want from the relationship, and how we can make it better.

I want to do more Android development. I actually want to make my own app rather than just building apps for other people. Even during this retrospective, an idea has come to mind that i want to try out.

I want to continue learning. I bought a book on learning Python last year, and i haven’t even opened it. I will learn Python this year.

In order to make these changes, a few things need to happen. I need to not spend so much time working by myself making big decisions alone. That is to say, i need to be part of a bigger team again where decisions are made collaboratively. I also need to spend less time on administration and looking for work.

This fits very well with a long-term contract that i have arranged … but the contract is not signed yet so i don’t want to say too much until it’s absolutely definite. But with this contract in place, i should be better placed to achieve my other goals and feel less stressed.

Close the retrospective

This has taken a long time but i feel it has been extremely beneficial. To me. Probably not to anybody else. I’ve actually been debating with myself whether i really want to publish this, or whether it’s just something that i needed to do for myself. But part of the benefit of doing this sort of thing is the accountability: this is where i’m at, this is what i want to achieve, and i’m making it public so that i’m more likely to stick to it.

I want to close by giving appreciations.

I am hugely grateful to my mentor, Enrique Comba Riepenhausen of Path11 who has been a never-ending source of encouragement to me. In my early days of being self-employed, i needed a lot of encouragement, and Enrique was always there for me. Sometimes we’d speak on a daily basis, when i needed it. Thank you, Enrique, for never tiring of me.

Another person who encouraged me a lot was Steve Tooke of Heavies. It was Steve (tooky) who first prompted me to think about going self-employed, assured me i could do it, and gave me a lot of advice on how to get started. We’ve met up on several occasions since, it’s always good to catch up, and tooky also encouraged me to keep going when i was struggling and thinking of quitting a particular project.

I am thankful to Tim McMillen of Alniro who took a chance on me and recommended me into my first contract. I was very nervous in those days and i’m grateful to Tim for that important start.

Thank you to Drew Jones and James Griffiths for being hugely supportive in my first contract, telling me everything i needed to know about contracting, and reassuring me that it wasn’t as scary as i imagined.

Many thanks to Marc Johnson for meeting me at a crucial moment when i felt totally alone and isolated, and sharing some great advice, along with delicious pancakes! You made me feel like there were people who cared about me, who could replace the security i lost from being part of a company.

Thank you to the people i met in Edinburgh who befriended me when i was feeling homesick. Special thanks to Will Cumming who provided some much needed support when i needed it. Thank you also to Kate Ho and Tony Milne, it was great to get to know you, and i’m really glad we’ve stayed in touch.

I must thank Hallam Smallpeice of boxedup. I spent a lot of time living in Hallam’s house this year, enjoying wonderful vegan food and the amazing Bedfordshire countryside. Hallam is a great project manager, and someone i consider to have become a friend. Although i am not vegan, thanks to Hallam’s influence, i now eat much less dairy produce than i used to. I am also addicted to Portal, for which i think i will always be grateful to Hallam!

Immense thanks and gratitude to Chris Parsons who first gave me the opportunity to follow my heart and do what i love. Eden Development was a truly wonderful place to work, i learned so much in such a great working environment. I couldn’t possibly do the work that i do now, without the things i learned from Chris and others at eden.

Ah. With the retrospective over, i am now ready to go and make some party food and some mulled wine, get the television on and have a nice relaxed evening to see in the new year!

Here’s to 2012 – may it be a happy and successful year for us all!

A few days ago Javier emailed me asking how to get started learning Colemak. I wrote quite a long reply (uncharacteristically long for me who likes short emails) and i thought it might be worth turning it into a blog post.

Let me assume that you’ve already made the decision to switch to Colemak. If you need convincing, may i refer you to my previous post: Colemak is easy to learn.

This is roughly how it worked for me. Feel free to try it out, let me know how it goes for you, tell me if i need to tweak anything.

Preparation

Step 1: print out the keyboard layout. No really. Do this! You’ll thank me when your computer locks and you can’t figure out how to type your password!

If you’re on an Apple or TypeMatrix keyboard, you can use one of these that i made:

You can also find some generic layout diagrams on colemak.com

You’ll be tempted to put stickers on your keyboard, or pop the keys off and remap them. Most people discourage this, as do i. The reason is, you’ll be tempted to look at your keyboard, which is counterproductive. You’re trying to train your fingers. So look at the diagram until your fingers know their way. Also, if you move keys around they won’t fit quite right, and the useful bumps for your index fingers will be moved.

Unless you have a TypeMatrix or another hardware keymapper, you’ll need to change some software settings. On Linux and OSX Lion this is easy as the layout comes built-in. On Windows and OSX Snow Leopard you need to install something. Follow instructions from the colemak.com download page

Day 1

Find a typing tutor that knows Colemak. On Linux i recommend ktouch, and on OSX i like aTypeTrainer4Mac. Other suggestions are on the colemak.com learn page.

This is aTypeTrainer4Mac. It’s puke green and Comic Sans, but it’s really clever at how it progresses you through the levels at a sensible pace. It also provides nice reports and charts showing your progress.

You’ll need to practise little and often for the next several weeks. Grab five minutes here and there, every chance you get. Consider screencasting yourself, as a way of recording your progress. If you know someone else who is learning, it can be good fun to practise together, taking turns. Don’t do too much at once: when you get tired and feel your mistakes increasing, it’s time for a rest.

Day 2

The nice thing about Colemak is that after the first day of training you should already know the home row, which can be up to 70% of what you’ll type! So get your print-out diagram, and have a go, whenever you need to type an email, or tweet, or whatever. Go very slowly! Focus on using the correct fingers. Try not to hunt and peck. If you make a mistake, delete the whole word and try again.

This will soon become unbearably frustrating, at which point, switch back to your familiar keyboard layout. When you feel ready for another try, take a deep breath, and get your brain into that hyper concentrated mode where you focus really carefully, thinking about every letter before you type it.

For some reason, i found it helped if somebody dictated an email to me, and i typed it. Perhaps because then all i had to think about was typing.

This will keep you going for the next few weeks, along with your training which you should still be doing every moment you get.

Week 2

As you enter your second week you’ll probably be gaining a little bit of confidence. It’s a good time to measure your progress. Sign up for an account at TypeRacer and either practise by yourself or even better, get some other people to race against. A good way is to select “Race your friends” and put the URL on twitter, inviting people to join in. I always like a couple of races, if i have time! :)

The more you type real text, you’ll start to feel new pathways forming in your brain and in your finger movements. It’s an amazing feeling; i’ve never felt neurons moving so tangibly as when i’m learning a new keyboard layout. Common letter patterns like “and”, “the”, “you”, and “ing” become familiar and you start to think of them as a single unit rather than individual letters. It’s as if you give your fingers the “ing” command and they do it!

Week 4

At some point, maybe in your third, fourth or fifth week, you’ll be typing Colemak more and more, and feeling less of a need to revert back to your old keyboard layout. In fact, you’ll probably feel yourself forgetting it altogether. This is the pivot point. There’s no going back now. So this is the moment to switch full time over to Colemak.

You’ll still be slow, or at least you’ll think you are slow. In fact, by now you’ll probably be around 40 words per minute, which is about the average speed for someone who never makes a conscious effort to learn how to type well. Remind yourself that you’re getting better all the time.

If you happen to use Vim, you may want to print out a Colemak Vim cheatsheet. I’ve done a standard layout and a TypeMatrix version:

Keep up the practise with your typing tutor for as long as you feel the need. Now that you’re full-time Colemak, you’re getting a lot of real-world experience of course, but the tutor can help you to build up the speed.

Week 8

By now, your fingers and your brain should be really comfortable in Colemak. You’ll be able to type without really thinking hard about it. From now on, and for the rest of your life, it’s all about minimising mistakes and increasing accuracy and speed.

For typing, i really embrace the sentiment “Take your time and go fast”. TypeRacer tells you your accuracy as well as words per minute. I’ve found that every mistake costs me about 5 words per minute. Don’t rush, don’t try to go faster than you’re able. You will trip up. If you want to increase your words per minute, focus on minimising your mistakes per minute.

If you find yourself forming bad habits, correct them. For years i had a dreadful habit of only ever using the left shift key, no matter which letter i was typing. That habit gave me bad RSI in my left hand. The same thing goes for the Cmd+C / Cmd+V pattern on a mac. I frequently see people making painful contortions with their left hand. You have another Cmd key on the right! Use it!

Unfortunately, the mac keyboard doesn’t give you a Ctrl key on the right. TypeMatrix does, but it has no right Cmd key. Swings and roundabouts, hey!

Other thoughts

While you’re learning, you’ll probably want to put Colemak on your other devices, for additional practice. I believe iPhone and iPad have Colemak available since iOS 5 … can anyone confirm? It’s easy to get Colemak for Android, using AnySoftKeyboard or my preferred one: MultiLing Keyboard.

I have written a few times about colemak keyboard layout, its benefits, how i switched, and advice for other people wishing to make the switch. This is not going to add anything new; i just want a place i can point people to, and they can find all the information.

When i add new colemak-related posts in the future, i’ll also add them here, use it like an index.

Ask aimee: When/why did you decide to switch to Colemak?
Includes the history of QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak, and my own personal typing journey so far.

Colemak is easy to learn
An encouragement to newcomers that Colemak is not so different from QWERTY. Also highlights the advantages of Colemak as compared to Dvorak.

How to learn Colemak
If you’ve made the decision to switch, here are my tips for how you might go about it.

Colemak and vim: “But what about h/j/k/l?”
For vim users, a common question is how you deal with the direction keys when switching to Colemak. Here is my answer.

QIDO for Colemak please!
A campaign to get a Colemak version of the QWERTY-In-Dvorak-Out USB keyboard adapter.

I love to help people make the switch to Colemak. So if i can encourage you, talk to me on twitter! @sermoa

I have just had a very interesting conversation with Kajarii where we discussed keyboards ergonomics, alternative keyboard layouts, and typing tutors.

Kajarii is blind and touch types on a QWERTY keyboard, having learned by trial and error from a young age. Kajarii would like to learn colemak keyboard layout, but made a really good point: how do you learn a new keyboard layout when you can’t even see what the layout should look like and you have no feedback from what you’ve typed?

Once i thought about it, i realised that every typing tutor i’ve ever seen has relied heavily on being able to see. You have to look at what you’re meant to type, there is usually some kind of layout diagram that highlights the key, and quite often the use of colour for feedback if you have typed correctly, and the cursor moves on to the next letter. They are no good at all for somebody without the privilege of sight.

I think i could quite easily teach a blind person to touch type if we sat down side by side. I’d start with the index fingers on the home row, tell them what the letters are, give instructions of short bursts of letters to type, and give verbal feedback on what they typed. Like most typing tutors do, i’d gradually introduce new letters and form words to type using the letters learned so far. I can see this working well with one-on-one human interaction.

So can that be translated to an accessible typing tutor program? I think it probably could be. I would like to try. What would it be like? A terminal based app? A web app? A native desktop app? Would it rely on screen reader technology, or use pre-recorded instructions? I need the input of visually impaired people to know what would be most useful.

Is there anyone out there who would like to help write an accessible typing tutor? Anybody who would like to help test one?

Could we do an open source effort? Something that is extensible to adding different keyboard layouts? There are accessible typing tutors and there are typing tutors that support colemak, but i don’t think there is an overlap.

Please leave a comment if you are interested in helping to create something, or have some ideas about how it could be.

I guess i will never understand just how privileged i am to be blessed with both sight and hearing, but i am interested to learn more about accessibility issues, and i at least *want* to care more about the kind of difficulties i hope i will never have to face.