Entry
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It's been months. A record long break from my random core dumps here at clux.org. I have been busy - doing cool and very unnecessary things. First on the list is something entirely unnecessary; my change to the colemak layout.
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Feast your eyes on this. Then find something to fix your haemolacria.
For the first time in my life, I feel QWERTY is weird to use (and comparatively hard to type as well). Why, would I do this? I was reading first about the benefits of DVORAK (a similarly crazy layout) which aimed to reduce the number of awkward finger movements using analysis of language and layout experimentations. My problem with DVORAK is that they moved important shortcut keys like X, C, W, Q, S and T so far away from left CTRL that the benefit disappeared. That was a deal-breaker.
Brothar has been taunting me with his DVORAK wpm (a huge improvement on his dyslexic QWERTY speed), and while I wanted to change, my attachment to passwords kept me out for a bit. A few months ago, I figured out that I could bind Alt-Shift (in both Ubuntu and W7) to change back to QWERTY for passwords (because I have some ludicrously long ones that are pattern based). Anyway, this was a triumph. Albeit hard initially, I am now close to my old qwerty speed, but it feels much more effortless. Also, I get the added bonus of annoying everyone who wants to type on my computer to show off their skills. They will type in a few cool commands with their complete control of QWERTY, but it will of course come out as gibberish, soothing me greatly. I may not know a whole lot about debugging C yet, but at least I can use this really annoying keyboard layout.
So, how good is it? Take the 2 minute typing test (post you QWERTY scores please). I used to get around 85 before the switch after years and years of use. I am inching very close to that now, almost hitting the 80 mark, but I have a lot of improvement left in me. For the first time in my life, I am actually using some proper variant of two handed touch, not some 2x3 finger self-taught hybrid. As I wanted to properly learn that, one might as well go all the way. Colemak consistently beats Dvorak (by a little), and QWERTY (by loads) in the least number of finger repeats, and the least meters travelled metrics, and you will feel it eventually. But you might have to use it for a month before you can get the benefit of it.
Aim for 60wpm in the first two weeks
