Keymap wizardry: Typing out the Harry Potter saga
Typing out all the Harry Potter books would be crazy, right? What would be the point? Seems like a weird flex even by keyboard enthusiast standards. Yep, that's right. Typing it out once makes no sense. That's why I'm going to type out the books a few million times! For the benefit of humanity and especially of you, fellow keymap wizards. This is a demonstration of the power of alternative/custom layouts. Given the huge extent of this topic, we can barely scratch the surface here so consider this write-up a mere teaser. Imagine you are an aspiring writer with a brilliant idea, just about to start typing out your magnum opus, staring at a yet empty document on your screen. Cursor blinking, annoying orphan relatives locked up in the cupboard under the stairs. Your story, about a young boy who ends up saving the world, is quite complete. You "just" have to type out heaps of your manuscripts and notes: about 6.5 million keystrokes. Everything is prepared for the...
Jun 4, 2024
Oh well...I will have forgotten about this by the time the set comes out, but if anybody has an extra colemak set, I'd definitely be interested
Have you tried colemak? I haven't done Dvorak or colemak and wasn't sure which was more widely used?
As for price, I'll give you what you paid + shipping + some extra for being a pain in the ass. There's no reason you shouldn't earn a little bit of money for thinking ahead and being prepared haha. If nothing else, it'll at least make it worth the trip to the mailbox.
Personally been using Dvorak since July this year, so am coming on 6 months now. The first 2 months were slow. Having a job where typing is required, I became frustrated quite a few times over not being able to accomplish as much as I could in QWERTY. That's how things were initially. For the first couple of weeks, I'd switch back to QWERTY when I needed to quickly type something important. Remembering where the letters are in the Dvorak layout was easy. With the aid of GNU Typist, memorizing the layout took me just one day. The real challenge was intentionally battling my QWERTY muscle memory. Only practice made the muscle memory challenge easier. This could vary for you, depending on factors like overall dexterity, but for me, a it took 2 months before 1) Dvorak was more comfortable than it was awkward, and 2) I achieved the speed I had before with QWERTY - that was without extra practice / the same volume of typing I had been doing before. I'm not very dexterous, I don't use my fingers for anything fancy like playing an instrument, for example. I'll venture to say than Dvorak is actually for those of us who are less dexterous, because it requires less movement overall of one's hands. Maybe if I was more dexterous, or perhaps if I had practiced harder, it might have taken 1.5 months.
Also, I do play IIDX and I have a wpm of up to 150+, so I'm looking to switch to see if I can get blazing high speeds haha. I also have an office job and I do a TON of typing, so I'm just going to have to pick up a second board and practice at home for a few weeks before I try to switch
I don't know that I'd get any faster switching since I've already gotten over most of the stumbling blocks with sheer speed...But that's the exact reason I'd be more comfortable. Instead of learning good typing skills, I just kinda said "fuck it I'm just gonna use this hand all the time and I'm gonna move it really really fast so I don't ever have to use left shift"
Haha, so if I can get over that, I might enjoy it. I don't like that I would have to alter my registry or run a program for Colemak though, and I run both windows and Linux at work. That said, I think putting backspace in the place of caps lock is a fantastic idea. Caps lock is pretty much useless. I was going to buy the colemak set for Dasher SA just for that purpose, but I didn't think I could justify $25 just for the backspace key haha.
One other concern I have is that my boyfriend will be sharing my keyboard a lot, so I have to convince him to learn it. He and I both speak Japanese, and while we don't use the actual Japanese keyboard (where characters are mapped to keys), he is a linguist and speaks many languages and I'm not sure how this switch will affect him. I have been reading about it a little but not finding a whole lot on using Dvorak or colemak with foreign iso layouts. I guess that will be a defining factor for making the switch, whether or not he wants his own ISO keyboard (which would mean id have my own as well).
any experience using foreign languages or alternative layouts with an alternative layout?
And no, you don't need to fck the registry up to use it, just install Colemak from its official website and it will be accessible with just 2 clicks and you can change it back to any layout in another 2 clicks (via the cluster on bottom right on Win, there is an ENG icon). On Mac Colemak (and Dvorak) is already installed, you just select in language settings. So it doesn't matter when your BF using the PC, just switch it back to QWERTY.
About another language, I only ever type English and Indonesian and since both of them use latin alphabet and ANSI layout, I can't give any opinions regarding this, sorry 😐 .