Not as good as this! https://www.charachorder.com/ 500wpm apparently!
500wpm for a few seconds to type in a single massively practised sentence. Big discussion from a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29827461
An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
71–80 of 147 posts
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#72I am planning to switch to Colemak soon. I would love to know experience reports of users who use this layout as their daily driver.
I've done Colemak for 2 years and have switched to Colemak-DH since, which is a rather small change. It is not a problem.
The only problem is that if you also use a non-latin layout, it will do a remapping to the latin one for shortcuts. This latin layout was always qwerty under macOS. So, in the end, I've built with Ukulele a custom layout and that was it.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#73why does it not use the thumbs
Because it's designed to be used on existing hardware, where the spacebar is really big and taking up the space where thumb keys would be, and where there's no row of keys below that.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#74I am planning to switch to Colemak soon. I would love to know experience reports of users who use this layout as their daily driver.
I learned QWERTY in high school, and by the end of college was up to around 100wpm. As I started getting older, I had some wrist trouble, mostly from mouse, but also from keyboard, and decided to switch to a more ergonomic layout. It took me a month or so (not full-time use) to get my Colemak speed up to 40wpm (minimal usable), and a couple more months to get it up to 80wpm. I've never really regained my 100wpm speed (been using Colemak for 8 years now), but my wrists thank me. I'm still able to touch-type QWERTY, but I have to look at the keyboard to give me the "context" for it, and my QWERTY speed is today only about 40wpm.
Lately, I sometimes think about going back to QWERTY just to simplify my life; mouse avoidance has been more important to me than keyboard layout switching, I think. But at this point, it would be as much a pain to go back as it was to switch in the first place.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#75The problem with any non-QWERTY keyboard layout is that all app and web shortcuts go out the window. You want to save an image for the web? Good luck growing a third hand. Want to open the quick menu on a site using ⌘+/, but your / key is only accessible using the shift key? Tough luck. Need to change the font size in your editor? Just navigate down these 3 easy sub-menus, because the keyboard shortcut for that is al…
> Want to open the quick menu on a site using ⌘+/, but your / key is only accessible using the shift key? Welcome to the wonderful world of everyone whose countries native layout doesn't have a dedicated key for /, like most of europe.
Issue is amplified by every additional key needed for the shortcut. Some shortcuts that require 3 keys on US keyboard, may require 4 on non-US and some are downright impossible, because keys cancel each other.
For example I can't do Ctrl + ] because I need AltGr to produce ] and that won't work with Ctrl. Also I cant do Ctrl + ` because ` is dead key for me (it appears only after I type space or any other character).
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#76AI decides that ctrl is still there? Look at many Japanese made (ANSI) keyboards: they simply put ctrl where caps lock locates. This is a life changer to me, and inspires me to change all my keyboards: no new layout required.
Even though they can claim movement is decreased, having little finger hitting ctrl at the original location for hundreds to thousands of times is never a fun. It’s ergonomically bad.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#77I'm three months into colemak now, together with learning touch typing (and switching to vim as main editor).
I've managed to get up to around 50 wpm coming from 75 wpm with normal qwerty without touch typing (just 6 finger freestyle). I've still some time to go to get over my initial typing speed. A really cool thing about colemak for me is replacing caps lock with backspace, which in itself is getting rid of so much finger/hand-travel, but that can obviously also easily be hacked into qwerty as well.
To this point, I don't know if I would recommend switching to anyone for the following reasons:
- You will slowly use muscle memory of normal qwerty, which can become quite awkward whenever you forced to use another computer. It's not like you cannot type it anymore, but you will be quite slow and inaccurate when typing. However, these situation barely exists for me in everyday life.
- Learning the new layout is quite a feat that takes time and daily dedication. I decided early on to use the new layout in my job (frontend dev) which definitely speed up adoption for me but also slowed me down considerably for some days. Even then it will take quite some time to get back to your initial speed.
- Depending on your profession, typing speed may not at all be a bottle neck. This is true for me as a software developer, where you spend the most time thinking about how to solve problem before typing them in small chunks.
- Wrt touch-typing, I weirdly found out for myself that it can actually cause some wrist and hand strain rather than protect from it. To me it feels that by using a lot more muscles to type it also increases chance of wear-and-tear. This is especially true for the pinkies for me, which I never used much for typing before.
Good thing about colemak wrt keyboard shortcuts is that it only changes letters (no symbols, punctuation, etc.) and then as few letters as possible to still achieve the best finger travel. In practice that means that many shortcuts stay the same, e.g. the common ones as CTRL-Z/X/C/A/Q/W etc.
I sort of did the switch as a self-experiment after being intrigued by all the science behind optimized layouts, and also to challenge myself to learn a new skill for the new year. I wanted to learn touch typing after decades of freestyle typing which I increasingly noticed was very error-prone. I figured that learning a new keyboard layout at the same time is a very good opportunity.
Not sure if I will stick to colemak permanently but so far it's still fun to try to gradually improve on it.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#78The problem with any non-QWERTY keyboard layout is that all app and web shortcuts go out the window. You want to save an image for the web? Good luck growing a third hand. Want to open the quick menu on a site using ⌘+/, but your / key is only accessible using the shift key? Tough luck. Need to change the font size in your editor? Just navigate down these 3 easy sub-menus, because the keyboard shortcut for that is al…
I’ve been an emacs user for more than 40 years and have used almost every combination of bucky keys with glyph keys. This just isn’t a big deal in practice.
In addition: I see you’re a Mac user. The kind of person willing to try this layout is probably willing to reassign all those keystrokes, which is easy (but tedious) on the Mac.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely programmers start counting from 0 and use 0 more often than 8. So interesting that me and you are using the same argumentation for different positions of all even digits. Maybe it is just a matter of habit, for example my layout for my mother language is heavy modified for some reasons I do not want to put on debate.
Not sure what you mean, but don't you agree that, if we take 0 to come before 1 and not after 9, there's an asymmetry between the left and the right hand?
Both yes and not. There is some asymmetry in wrist's angle but there is kind of a symmetry that you have two keys left from our 7 and two keys right from my 8 (your 6). If I understood your POV correctly then you seems to consider the position of [ and ] symbols in Programmer Dvorak as symmetric for you.
Re: An AI designed keyboard layout (2021)
#80Alternative keyboard layouts are fascinating, but always raise a couple of questions for me and I wonder if anyone here can come up with actual experiences regarding the following topics: - I have been using standard german QWERTZ for about 42 years now, in average certainly not less than 3 hours every day. I was originally educated in proper 10 finger blind typing in a dedicated typing school as part of my typesette…
About 12 years ago, I quit qwerty cold turkey on an unlabeled das keyboard ultimate for Dvorak and my typing speeds went from about 102wpm to 5. I printed out a label of the layout and put it on a wall a good distance from my chair and referenced it to find the correct keys. It took me about 2 weeks to get back up to 40wpm and another year later I was typing at my normal speed. I still think it’s one of the best layo…
That approximately describes my switch to Dvorak. It is so important to leave the keycaps qwerty or blank, and have the Dvorak reference strictly external.