Windows 10 primarily due to work requirements. I have a laptop with Xubuntu for personal use.
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.
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.
An Atreus 62.
More keys than I need honestly. Half of the lower keys aren’t actually bound to anything.
Oh wow you unlocked a memory I didn’t know I had.
I’ll never forget booting up Metroid Prime for the first time as a kid. That intro menu music still haunts me.
˙ʇı plǝıʍ oʇ ʍoɥ ʍouʞ ʇou op oɥʍ ǝsoɥʇ oʇ snoɹǝƃuɐp sı ɹǝʍod ǝuo ǝɥ⊥
Sorry y’all. I uploaded an upside down image. I can’t figure out how to delete the post on wefwef lol
Atreus keyboard by Keyboardio. Key caps are Susuwatari ortho set plus Colemak set by Drop.com
So, I never learned how to touch type on a standard QWERTY layout. When I got into ergo splits I need to learn how to touch type and decided to take the opportunity to learn an alternative layout. I chose Colemak DH.
Now I have two types of muscle memory. One that’s a janky peck style typing for QWERTY, the other pure touch typing for Colemak split keyboards.
I’m fucking stoked to see so many people like me (who are pissed at how corporations fuck their own product just to make more money) migrate over here. For once I feel like I actually have a way to “protest” corporations and their greed. I know the vast majority of Reddit users didn’t care, but I know many of us are here to break free from all of that tomfoolery. Just happy to be apart of it. Don’t know how long it will last, but I’m hoping that it does.
Looks great. Nice color choice.
I wish I could live in Switzerland. I visited before Covid and I could not get over how beautiful their landscape is.