I’ll never get tired of these old school keyboards. The greys give me such joy

I also have the Keyboardio Atreus which I love.

I learned Colemak-DH on the side, practicing a little bit every day, until I got to about 40% my QWERTY speed. I had a Ferris Sweep split keyboard that I set up next to my QWERTY keyboard at work, and started using that more regularly. I soon switched to a split Corne full time before getting the Keyboardio Atreus, both of which are configured with the Colemak-DH layout.

This recent 62 key variant of the Atreus is an experiment to see how I feel about having a row of numbers.

I can’t say that I am an expert on the science, but theoretically less finger travel might reduce repeated stress injury. I don’t know if it has been scientifically shown that Colemak helps reduce RSI in comparison to QWERTY.

From my personal experience, Colemak feels significantly more comfortable to type on. When I switch back to QWERTY, I feel like my fingers are all “spidery” in nature, stretching out and crawling all around the keyboard.

The design of the keyboards I type on in general also help improve ergonomics, but regardless if I typed on standard row staggered keyboards I’d still choose Colemak over QWERTY.

It took me about three months to reach my QWERTY speed on Colemak. I now type with Colemak full time as a software developer.

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.

Those caps are gorgeous!