One year with Colemak • Hacker News Board

Re: One year with Colemak

#41

Post by axman6 » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 7:52 AM UTC

winslow wrote: post #34

I noticed an interesting gender stereotype. "Want to help someone out? She will probably use a Qwerty layout." I'm not perfect and guilty as well mistakenly defaulting to a user on the internet as a male. Let's try to welcome both genders equally :)

Some people are of the school that the term 'she' should be used by default, switching from the traditional assumption that people are male. I personally prefer 'they' but some people seem to take offence/feel it's incorrect to do so. There's quite a tradition in CS writing where people being spoken about are female (can't think of any exact references off the top of my head though).

Re: One year with Colemak

#42

Post by collyw » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 10:08 AM UTC

I have tried Dorvak (I can touch type with it, but a lot slower than my non touch typing on QWERTY).

One thing I noticed since then is that as a programmer typing speed or touch typing is not so important. On the command line I have tab completion, and in my IDE I also have the equivalent. It rarely takes more than three keyboard strokes before I can get a sensible list to choose from. Its a lot more efficient than tying top learn to touch type.

Re: One year with Colemak

#43

Post by holyjaw » Fri, Jul 18, 2014, 9:23 PM UTC

I made thi switch to Dvorak at the tail end of college, just to prove that I could keep learning new things. It was really difficult; work machines were shared so I was using QWERTY at work and Dvorak at home. This bit really struck me:

> After little more than a week, I got to a point where I started to make lots of mistakes typing Qwerty, but I could not type proper Colemak either. This was something I had not anticipated: I expected to learn Colemak in addition to Qwerty, not instead of it!

I felt the same way! Eventually I was 85% proficient at both. Finally, I left for a job where my machine is mine, so I’m 100% Dvorak and my WPM and accuracy has dramatically increased. Unfortunately, those times I -have- had to type in QWERTY, I find myself looking at the keyboard. (I wish there was some form of Dvorak + Kana keyboards for JP).

One upshot to this is that I learned Vim AFTER Dvorak. I’ve never had to worry about hjkl not being on the home row; they never have been for me! Big plus.

Also, I’ve found that most games don’t care about your input language, they tend to key off of the key signal so traditional wasd keys still function as expected.