Learning Colemak Mod-DH

I bought myself a new keyboard recently. I plan to write more about it specifically in another post. It has a very non-standard design. The shape is so different from typical keyboards that it took me a several hours of practice to be able to touch-type on it at all. In those several hours, with my fingers not knowing where half the keys were, I stopped and thought, “There must be a harder way.” What if I also mixed up which letters are on those keys?

In college, a few friends abandoned the traditional "QWERTY" layout that most English speakers are familiar with, and migrated to the only other layout we had heard of at the time, called Dvorak. What I learned a few weeks ago is that that enthusiasm for Dvorak sparked interest into even better key layouts. Today it's practically a competition to create new, more efficient layouts. There are more layouts on offer than any one person could ever honestly evaluate thoroughly. And so there is a broadening set of metrics computed by automated analyzers to handle the evaluation for us.

After getting lost in the weeds of learning what all of these metrics meant to my own layout selection, and nearly giving in to the paradox of choice (by not choosing any), I settled on the most basic option: Colemak Mod-DH. The basis of this layout, the original Colemak, was the first new layout to gain popularity out of that Dvorak craze. The Mod-DH was added as the modern metrics era demonstrated how a few index-finger adjustments could improve it. It's not the most optimized of the modern layouts, but it's supposed to be better than QWERTY, and has a reasonable amount of built-in support in common operating systems.

I kind of remember what it was like learning to touch-type QWERTY … oh geez, nearly 30 years ago, if I'm remembering the context correctly. Sat in a classroom, in front of green-monochrome Apple II screens, with sheets of paper covering our fingers to deter us from slipping back into hunting & pecking, my classmates and I struggled to press the correct keys fast enough to pass the half-semester course.

I've switched keyboards dozens of times since that course, but the only time I had to think about a new letter layout was during a summer internship in Germany. They mostly use QWERTZ over there, which is almost identical letter-wise, but with the Y and Z keys swapped. I remember it catching me up so often that I finally switched the configuration software-side, even though that meant I had to remember (instead of look at) where the symbols were on the number keys, because that changed as well.

So learning Colemak (I'm going go drop the "Mod-DH" for the rest of this post, but I do mean that variant, if that's relevant to your read), was my first chance to relearn touch-typing. I used an online tutor, that I think is supposed to be more focused on improving your speed once you already know the layout, and not on teaching you the layout from scratch. Like that old school tutor, it started me with a limited set of keys, but that set was considerably larger - nearly the entire home row. No need to muck about with T N T N (the F J F J of the Colemak world), I was already expected to type SAID ONE TREES SNARE and other full words.

Something I noticed that was different from 30 years ago was that I had no temptation to look down at my hands while typing. There may have been a slight psychological trick going on here, because I didn't move the key caps on my keyboard until almost two weeks into the experiment. So I knew that even if I did look down, I wouldn't gain any additional information. But I think the stronger reason was that my fingers already knew what typing was like. They knew how to reach different keys, and what it was like to have a letter attached to each motion. It was a simpler matter of remembering which motion did what, and not also of learning the motions in general.

Remembering key positions was not hard, but remembering to remember took work. Something that is often said about Colemak is that it's easier for QWERTY typers to learn, because the differences between them are relatively small. Only two letters swap hands. Four letters on each hand (PBTV and JMNH), while on a different key, are still pressed by the same finger. Seven letters - QWAGZXC - are in the exact same place. Again, this is the first new layout I've learned, so I don't have a comparison to work with, but I'm not convinced these are the benefits people think they are. Those moments in words where I come across a letter that is in the same spot, and it leads into a common sequence - say that QU in the middle of sequence - reawakens my QWERTY muscle memory if I'm not actively thinking about it. My right index finger is poised over the key that is no longer U on the upper row before I've even pressed the Q. I don't think it helps that it's just the next finger over making exactly the same motion that I need to type U now.

So it's not the letter mapping I've had the most trouble with. It's the whole-words and sequences. I've learned that when I was typing QWERTY, I was not spelling words in my head. I was thinking the word, and my fingers were typing it. This keeps popping up in surprising ways. For example, I can complete the tutor's exercises at a faster pace if I think of the exercise only as a sequence of letters, and do not read the words. Unfortunately, I'm in an in-between state where my hands also really don't want to go back to QWERTY all the time, so I can't test whether this was also true in that layout, and I just never noticed. I rather expect not, though, because it feels like a lot more effort to consider each letter.

When I was down to just a few letters left to learn in the tutor, I started trying to use Colemak outside of that environment, in regular typing scenarios. It was brutal. That in-between step of spelling out the word I'm thinking takes way too much extra brain power to be practical. I could barely get a chat message typed out before three more arrived. After persevering for some time, I finally switched back to QWERTY, and reached my lowest emotional point in this experiment. I couldn't do it! I'd type away on the sentence I was thinking about, and what would appear on the screen would look like a scene in a movie, where the hacker has the message "50% decrypted". My fingers had actually gotten used to some of the Colemak layout, and were now prefering those positions on autopilot.

I wasn't in a very good mood the rest of that day. My ability to communicate was offline, and I was frustrated. Luckily, for whatever reason, I slept really well the next night. This is something I've found true time and time again: major progress happens while sleeping. They told us this in college, when we were all staying up late to cram for exams. But it has been most obvious to me since then any time I'm learning a new motorskill. The first day of learning to ride a motorcycle was hard, the second day was much easier. The second day, a guitar riff feels more natural. And my second day of typing Colemak for myself, and not copying onscreen text, while not QWERTY speed, was far smoother.

At that point, I decided to dive further in. I made Colemak my default key layout (instead of one I had to remember to switch into), and moved the key caps on my keyboard to match. I still don't feel the urge to look at my hands when I type, but at least if I do I'm not getting bad information.

I have also switched my method of interacting with the typing tutor. It was important to type letters as fast as possible to "unlock" the next one early on, so I made sure to see the lesson as a string of letters (and spaces), and not a string of words. Now that I have the letters basically down, I make sure to treat the lesson as I would my own thoughts, as a string of words. The upside of this is that I'm actually retraining my hands for the thing I need them to do. The downside is that errors in my typing are far more expensive, speed-wise. Because I'm thinking of a whole sequence of letters, my fingers are moving to press future letters before the first one is typed. If I mistype that first one, I may already have three more on-screen before I realize. That "moving" two sentences ago was "moding " before I knew to press backspace.

It's still the strangest sort of mind games sometimes. Occasionally, I'll get really in the zone and just speed away typing in Colemak. Then my brain will hiccup and be surprised that it's seeing the words it is, even though it's pretty sure it didn't feel my fingers make the motions it's used to them making for those words. Other times the zone is too strong, and my fingers float back to QWERTY as my attention to them drifts. These sensations are fading though, even over the time I've been typing this post, and starting to be more of an indication that I should back away from the keyboard and go to bed.

I'm not sure where this experiment will end up. I don't particularly need the faster typing rate that it seems most folks in the alternative layout world are chasing. I would like to reduce the repetitive stress on my hands, but while the new key layout may eventually do that, it was probably a bad idea to learn it while I'm recovering from the worst flare up of carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms I've had in years. Learning a new key layout is literally repetitive stress. Luckily, my symptoms have continued to improve while I've been learing. I've been careful to stretch and take regular breaks (and to wear a good brace overnight), but I'm also hoping this is a little bit of proof that this new keyboard is also the ergonomic revelation I was hoping for.

Afterward: Emacs

Oh! I should answer the other question that I asked my social network before starting this: how are the emacs bindings? One of the nicer things about Colemak is that many of the OS-level shortcuts (undo, cut, copy, quit) we're all used to are in the same place as QWERTY. This is … mostly not the case for emacs. With X in the same place, a lot of commands start the same way, but quickly veer off afterward. I've chosen to leave the bindings on the same letters anyway (as opposed to moving them back to the same finger/key). This was not the decision I expected to make, since every time I've told someone about a keybinding in the last twenty years, I've first had to think about what my hands would do to activate the command, and then work backward to what key that was. But I have to admit that I like having next-line (C-n) under my right index finger all the time. Having transpose (C-t) under my left index finger where forward-char (C-f) used to be is giving me the most trouble, but I hope it's going go help reinforce F's new location. Basically, my emacs control has also slowed, and I've appreciated this keyboard's ability to give me an easy-to-reach macro key where I've bound undo (C-_), but I'm leaning into it as another source of layout reinforcement.

After-afterward: vi

Believe it or not, I also use vi/vim occasionally. I'm by no means a power user, but I will say that default keybindings here seem like a bad idea in Colemak. Colon is no longer on the home row - it's now a top-row reach for the right pinky. I'm undecided about cursor movement. On one hand, it's all on the right index finger, which seems fine. On the other hand, J is on the top row, and moves the cursor down, while K is on the bottom row and moves the cursor up. Right-L and Left-H are also top and bottom row, but that shouldn't feel any weirder that up and down being on the same row in the original layout, right?

Categories: Miscellaneous