Switching Keyboard Layouts
- About 10-years ago a friend of mine switched from QWERTY to the Dvorak keyboard layout. I thought it was insane. Fast forward to today and since reading The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman, I’m convinced to switch. I’ll be switching to the Colemak keyboard layout. A few metrics and my plan is below:
Typing
- By visiting Speed Typing Online I learned that I currently type at 86wpm at 98.2% accuracy (in highschool to pass keyboarding Freshman year with an A+ you had to type 90wpm with 100% which I achieved. I’m happy to see not much has changed). I then switched the keyboard layout using the same test to Colemak and took the test (after printing out the keyboard layout). I managed 6wpm with 92.2% accuracy!
- Following the details in the book, this is my current plan:
- All practice will be towards the end of the day.
- All practice sessions will be 1 or 2 sessions with a combined time of 30-45 minutes.
- Utilize keyzen until I’m reaching about 20wpm.
- Upon achieving 20wpm, move to Type Fu which does support the Colemak keyboard layout on the Mac. Stay with this until I get to 40wpm.
- Then move to amphetype and train on bigrams and trigrams.
- Once I’m doing well on the bigrams and trigrams, I’ll switch to the most common English words and continue using amphetype.
- My ultimate goal is to get to 60wpm+ with 98%+ accuracy. I code and don’t generally type in long-form, so getting back to 86wpm or so I don’t feel is required.
Status
- Sept 19
- 6wpm // 92.2% accuracy