lucentbeing.com

On alternative keyboard layouts.

Revealed by sykora within linux on August 3rd, 2008

I’d been planning to switch from the qwerty keyboard layout for sometime now, but I never really did anything about it until yesterday.

It’s been established that the qwerty layout was designed specifcally to slow typists down, in order to prevent typewriter jam. With the advent of electronic keyboards, this line of reasoning went out the window, but the layout stuck, because it cost too much to change to something else — even if it was better.

For a long time, the only other available iayout was the dvorak layout, which was built based on a careful study of letter frequencies, and the like. dvorak now has good support on all major operating systems.

One of the most recent, and the 3rd most popular after qwerty and dvorak is colemak. This layout was designed with a view to remove the deficiencies of both prior layouts.

You can try out all the layouts in linux with a fairly simple, but incredibly useful hack :

That should go, as should be obvious, in your xorg.conf. It will allow you to cycle between qwerty-colemak-dvorak by holding both shift keys at once. Please note that all your shortcuts will go haywire.

Nobody who uses a computer for more than casual stuff shouldn’t be using qwerty — but that’s too much to hope for. I strongly suggest you pick up colemak, and take it for a spin.

And yes, I did type this in colemak.

Tags: colemak, dvorak, linux, qwerty, typing, xorg

Leave a Reply

Me, but not here.

Recent Posts

• Amphetype, a typing analyst.
• Creating Presentations with Beamer
• Wikiwarp (or) 6 Degrees on Steroids.
• The J Programming Language.
• Greetings from Wordpress 2.7, and Quickpress.

What I'm Doing...

Archives

• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008