Back to: Keyboards, Colemak, English, QWERTY,

Colemak is better than QWERTY

Colemak is an alternate keyboard layout to QWERTY. It has both ANSI and ISO flavours among other modifications. I use Colemak over QWERTY and have done for several years because I think it is better and I think you should try it too.

Warning

This opinion applies to physical keyboards, not phone keyboards. Small typing surfaces have different requirements.

QWERTY is outdated

QWERTY was designed before keyboards and therefore had different design constraints. As we are no longer working with typewriters, hammer collisions are an irrelevant consideration for modern keyboard layouts. This allows us to focus on ergonomics and efficiency.

The main pros of QWERTY is that it is familiar and default and most of us have been using it since we were bairns. Changing to something else requires friction and we don't like friction.

You should switch to Colemak anyway

Most folk can't touchtype

Let's be honest: most folk cannot touchtype. I mind doing some classes at school in S1 and I literally never got any better (Motor skills require frequent repetition to become automatic) and plenty of other kids didn't either. When I watch the people I know type, the majority of them are looking at the keyboard. Some of them even use the dreaded two-pointer method. shivers.

If you can't touchtype to begin with, you're losing nothing by switching to Colemak. You could learn on QWERTY first, but then there's more friction involved with learning Colemak. But genuinely, if you use a computer regularly, you should learn to touchtype (even if you choose QWERTY).

Colemak is more ergonomic

Colemak was designed to be an improvement on QWERTY. I found it while searching for a way to reduce the joint pain I was experiencing from Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) while typing. The frequency of row jumps on QWERTY was absolutely fucking murdering my fingers.

You can find the actual statistics on the Colemak website, but subjectively, it massively reduces my pain and I can type for significantly longer using Colemak than I can QWERTY. The reduction in little finger usage by itself is an improvement.

You don't need caps lock

You can literally just use shift. I promise it is less annoying than you think it is. Colemak remaps the caps lock key to backspace. If you're anything like me and make frequent typos and transpositions, this is a massive timesaver.

Even if you don't use Colemak, do this.

(Caps lock escape supremacists can fight me out the back).


Ideas that stand in opposition

Further reading

References