How I Taught Myself the Colemak Keyboard Over a Weekend
The first step was to make little stickers, one for each key that had a different placement, and attach them to the keys on the keyboard. Then I went to Google to search for a typing program that could help me remap the muscle memory I already had established using qwerty for all those years.
I found a site that let me type sequences of strings that at first had only a few different characters but slowly expanded to include more and more as I progressed through the lessons. This worked well enough in the beginning and let me quickly get a feel for how different the Colemak layout would be. But it had a number of flaws.
Encountering some problems
The first of these problems was that due to the way the tool worked, as a user I was forced to choose between progressing to the next level before I was ready or not going back to correct my mistakes. This was because mistyped characters did not lower the accuracy score if they were corrected before moving on. So in order to get the correct accuracy rating, I had to leave the mistakes, making it very difficult to reinforce the correct key after making an error, because the feedback loop was so long.
The second problem was I was typing characters as they appeared on the screen. I began to start associating seeing letters on the screen with pressing the corresponding buttons, which sounds great until you realise that this is quite far removed from what typing actually is. It more closely resembles dictation than copying out letters as they appear on the screen. This was made apparent when I later tried using an instant messaging client with auto-correct and the wrong word suggestions would appear only to have me start typing what I saw on the screen instead of what I intended.
Finally, the program also had a sound component that I found very distracting. For every error that was made a deterring sound would play that often ended up shocking me and taking me out of my concentration. Again, this did not map closely to the skill I was trying to acquire and the real feedback mechanism that I normally rely on to identify a mistype (a disconnect between what I thought I was typing and what appeared on the screen).
Changing direction
So, I changed tactics and decided to take stock of my progress so far by running through the alphabet and attempting to type each letter. I made notes on how easy each was to type on a scale of one to three. From this I was able to find which keys I was still really struggling with and focus on them for a while.
Although I had stickers over the keys, I was careful not to look at them any longer than I had too. I ended up removing some of them a couple of hours in because they began to peel away. And the rest a couple of hours after that. I didn’t want to develop the crutch of having to look at the keyboard all of the time.
Noticing my progress was slowing considerably, I took a nap to consolidate what I had learnt so far. After waking, I turned my focus to technique and found that I had adopted the stiff hand placement that typing diagrams often demonstrate, where all your fingers are on the keyboard and your fingers are kept stationary except for the one being used to type the next key. I got around this by trying to bounce my fingers between key presses to relax them and achieve a configuration that was more like my day to day hand placement. It also allowed me to focus on pressing the right keys rather than having my hands in the right placement.
I found it helpful to regularly change levels of focus: first concentrating on individual letters, and then switching to think in terms of whole words and sentence fragments. Each time I jumped ahead my accuracy plummeted and often my brain would change gears and revert back to typing in qwerty. Nevertheless, it helped to maintain focus and push towards my intended goal rather than just getting really good at typing programs.
I noticed I would quickly feel fatigued and my accuracy would drop dramatically, so I started shortening my sessions and adding more breaks which helped with my perception of progress and kept me motivated.
Progress at last
As I continued to practice, I found myself beginning to add syllables to muscle memory and soon my hands started to type some of the smaller words by themselves. While there were whole syllables that started to flow from my fingertips, there were others that would always give me pause and really strain my concentration. It was particularly frustrating when these syllables had been easy to type using qwerty. I tried to identify these when they occurred and practice them separately.
The next breakthrough happened when I realised I was thinking in terms of finger placement: mapping keys to which finger should I place where when instead I should have been thinking in terms of the space the keyboard occupied. When I started to think about where the key was on the keyboard and not how to place my hands, my brain automatically did half the work for me and I saw another jump in progress.
I also became aware of how delicate my rote learning seemed to be. After a session of practicing using a program for improving my typing speed (which had me looking at the centre of the screen with no distractions) my accuracy would go up. However, when I then switched to a word processor where the cursor was more towards the bottom of the screen, I would struggle to find the keys that were so easy only moments ago. When I rearranged the word processor window to be positioned more like the typing program, then some of that difficulty dissipated.
At the end of all things
By the end of the weekend I am back to being almost as fast as I was with the qwerty keyboard. I can find each of the keys without consciously thinking about it, but not all of the little shortcuts for common letter combinations that I developed using the qwerty system have returned yet.
Although I have yet to see the speed improvements Colemak boasts, I am already aware of how much less my fingers are moving and can see with a little more work on reducing the time to recall key placements, this will probably become my preferred and most efficient method of typing.
Related
- [Improving Typing Speed](/blog/2014/09/08/improving-typing-speed