Alternatives to QWERTY

Colemak is one of the alternative keyboards to QWERTY, which supposidly is more efficient and less prone to typos. For instance, it seperates letters such as S from D preventing you from making a typo where you mistake present-tense with past-tense or vice versa. (e.g. Simulates and Simulated) Where a spell-check may not detect an indescrepancy.



Using this tutorial, http://www.usnetizen.com/fix_capslock.php, I am arguing whether to convert all alphabetic keys to the Colemak counterpart, and additionally remove and replace these keys in their newly assigned alignment.

Features such as replacing the caps lock key with backspace intrigues me. Efficincy would be increased. Currently I type at 90 words per minute. With a more efficient keyboard layout I may be able to surpass 100 on average.

The only problem I have with this idea is that in the event of using a computer that uses the traditional QWERTY, I would be confused, but perhaps it is possible to be fluent with both keyboards, as people can be with languages. What do you think of this crazy idea?

It will help. Not only for faster speed, though that would take a while to get, but also for preventing RSI. Less effort into typing is less of a strain on your fingers. Going to a keyboard other than QWERTY/AZERTY is a very good idea for everyone.

I've never used colemak myself, but it looks rather good, although I have to question the placement of that U.

I use dvorak myself, and I'm very happy I switched. My typing is not always ideal yet, but it's definitely already faster than it used to be. It has become very hard to type on anything but dvorak though, but having it both ways is impossible. You HAVE to do a hard switch, or you'll find yourself switching back when you're having difficulties, which will ruin your learning curve.

Dvorak IS good, but it does have some things I don't always agree with. But I could be wrong on some of those, especially when it concerns letters.

Well, QWERTY has been embedded in you since you've started to use computers, you don't just change that in a couple of weeks. If you have a good typing rate, you definitely will not see an improvement in the first couple of weeks. But it will get there.

Honestly, in QWERTY you use the top row >50% of the time, in Dvorak, the homerow is used >50% of the time. That's a nice statistic to keep in mind.

Having to switch is annoying though, I can't blame you for that, but I still find efficient typing more useful than the ease of not having to adjust the keyboard. Then again, my typing was pretty bad before I began using Dvorak.