I’ve been hearing a lot about Colemak recently. It’s a (relatively) new keyboard layout, specially designed for efficient touch typing in English. Any description of Colemak (including this very post) is accompanied by a story, how QWERTY layout was specifically designed to hinder fast typing, so that typewriter bars don’t get stuck. Ok, cool story, let’s try this silver bullet layout.

One of the advertised advantages of this layout is that “most” common QWERTY hotkeys are the same. Indeed, such hotkeys as select-all/cut/copy/paste didn’t move. Yes, this is an advantage for people who copy/paste text all day. But for us, coders, this is really a disadvantage, because some hotkeys are on the same keys, and others have moved. And worst of all, most hotkeys have changed their meaning.

Let me illustrate. Most (all?) browsers in Mac OSX understands the same hotkeys:

• Cmd-T - open new tab
• Cmd-F - find
• Cmd-G - find next
• Cmd-S - save

We’ve been using these hotkeys for years and now they are burned in our muscle memory. So, with Colemak, when you try to perform an action and you reach for the old key, you get completely different action instead.

• You tried Cmd-T (qwerty), you hit Cmd-G (colemak), action - “find next”
• Cmd-F, Cmd-E, “use selection for find” (chrome)
• Cmd-G, Cmd-D, “add bookmark”
• Cmd-S, Cmd-R, “reload”

This is very, VERY frustrating to try search page content and keep adding bookmarks instead. Combine this with a fact that when you switch to a Russian layout, the hotkeys are the same as in QWERTY. So, essentially, you have to learn a whole new set of hotkeys for every program you use and always keep track of the current layout, or otherwise you’ll get unexpected results.

Now, is it really worth it? Given the fact that programmer’s productivity is not based on how fast and for how long he can type, I’d say “Not really”. I average 370-450 CPM on QWERTY. This is far more than sufficient for everyday coding needs.

Goodbye, Colemak. Hello again, QWERTY.