#vortex core

what a night!!!!

About two weeks ago, I decided to learn the Colemak keyboard layout cold turkey. I thought to myself that there probably won’t be another window of downtime where I can take a productivity hit to the tune of touch typing at a mere 20 words per minute (wpm).

Before making the switch, I was comfortably touch typing on Qwerty at about 80 - 100 wpm. I still remember the clicking and clacking from keyboarding class over 25 years ago. Exploring alternative keyboard layout seemed like a wonderful idea. I wanted to determine for myself whether Qwerty is as poorly designed as they say it was and whether alternative layouts (such as Dvorak, Colemak or Workman) is really “better” in terms of comfort, amount of time spent on home row, etc. To compound on the chaos, I also found a wonderful 40% mechanical keyboard on kijiji.

It has been quite an adventure so far and here are my thoughts. As of this morning, I am down to 50 wpm on Qwerty with many mistakes while averaging 30 to 40 wpm on Colemak on keybr.com.

Touch typests with a reasonable wpm should be thankful. 20 wpm is very painful especially if one is not particularly patient.

I was quite surprised to learn how much we type by feel. Thinking back to my Qwerty experience, individual letters were rarely considered and words were mere patterns of a few flicks of the finger. I now have to spell out each word by thinking o-n-e  l-e-t-t-e-r  at  a  time.

Logging into anything is especially a nightmare as combinations of caps and new location of numbers and special characters on the Vortex Core makes it virtually impossible to touch type correctly.

There’s been moments where I almost panicked about my inability to communicate on the computer and gave up on this experiment.

The letters R, S, I, E, and L have been quite difficult to remap to. I think it’s because they often appear together and the finger have been somewhat swapped from Qwerty. F, P and Y are simply difficult to adjust to.