The Changeup

I don’t know why, but I am really drawn to niche, non-standard practices.

For instance, and I will expand on this in other posts, I’ve switched up the tuning on my double bass from fourths to fifths. I extol the virtues of fixed-gear bike riding. For some reason, I don’t mind increasing the degree of difficulty in some of my tasks in the hopes that it might actually go the other way and decrease the difficulty long-term.

I also have ADHD, which means I get drawn to shiny new things and obsessions. A recent obsession, again, for another post, is ergonomic mechanical split keyboards. With this has come a deep dive into switches, PCBs, soldering, etc. What it has also done is give me a bit of light on alternative keyboard layouts.

Today’s obsession is related to the ergo keeb situation and exploring alternatives, specifically the Colemak layout. Billed as the easiest layout to switch to, I’ve taken this on as a challenge.

There is something humbling about having your proficiency as a touch typist being completely annihilated. I’ve gone from over 100WPM with 100% accuracy down to 11WPM and 70% accuracy with my first attempts.

I’m now on day two, and clocking in north of 20WPM at about 90% accuracy. Slow as it may be, I am typing this post in Colemak. Commit to the bit, right?

Colemak keeps a lot of the letters from QWERTY in the same place, and definitely seems to optimize the use of the home row. I’m also really trying to be diligent about my finger placement so I don’t adopt any bad habits along the way.

Will it be the be-all-end-all for me? No, and that’s only because of the mappings I have to use in other workflows, but I do see a solid case for use for general typing.

I’ll be curious to see how this goes…