Colemak Day 2

Nothing like relearning a skill to make you recognize how maladapted some of your practices are.

I learned to touch type as a kid of the late 80s. By the time I took typing in Grade 8, in the 2.5 months allocated to that endeavour, I was already typing at 80+ wpm. I finished Keyboarding 8 in about two days, and also completed Keyboarding 9 and 11 in what was left of those two months. Suffice to say I’ve got reasonable typing skills.

As I’m coming to this Colemak endeavour, I’m looking at how my fingers handle the typing on a QWERTY keyboard, especially as they relate to how I suspect my hands will adapt to using an ergo mech keyboard when I finally get around to getting one.

My focus so far in Colemak is economy of motion, which is leading me to some collisions in my head for how my fingers are supposed to move. I’m noticing that the way that I type is greatly influenced by my own personal ergonomics, in that my hands and forearms are generally more at a 30-degree angle to the keyboard, and a lot of the typing that I do particularly with my left hand, is done with my middle and ring fingers. Of note too is that I tend to reach greater spans with my left hand than I do with my right on a QWERTY keyboard, frequently reaching for the Y key with my middle finger on my left hand. My home row in QWERTY seems to be more like AERG JIL; instead of ASDF JKL;

Colemak’s forcing me to take a look at where the positioning of my hands are, and probably in a good way. It’s undoubtedly a more streamlined approach to typing, I just need to do more of it.