this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Mechanical Keyboards
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Are you addicted to the clicking sounds of your beautiful and impressive mechanical keyboard?
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Here you can discuss everything about mechanical keyboards (and only mechanical keyboards).
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What is the advantage of key layout like this? Is it faster to type?
This layout is called Colemak-DH, which is a slightly optimized variant of the original Colemak layout.
It was designed to make typing more efficient for your fingers than QWERTY. If you were to analyze the top ten thousand words or so in English, you’d start to notice lots of common bi-grams and tri-grams (two and three letter combinations). Colemak looks to optimize the position of the keys such that these n-grams are typed by “rolling” your fingers from one side of the keyboard to the other. In addition, it places a lot of other common letters in intelligent positions to reduce finger travel. Over longer periods of typing, your total finger travel across the keyboard is greatly reduced in comparison to QWERTY.
In theory, you can type faster on this layout, but in my experience that’s not necessarily true (I type the same speed on Colemak vs QWERTY). But it does feel so fucking good to type on. That alone should be reason enough to consider learning it.
Hey this is interesting to me! I've only ever known/learned qwerty. How long did it take you to learn a new typing variation? Is it hard not to type the wrong letters when you switch back and forth?
It took me about three months to reach my QWERTY speed on Colemak. I now type with Colemak full time as a software developer.