Sunday, 28. February 2021
A lot of people never bother to learn touch-typing and get along ok. Those who did it surely don't want to go back (at least I've never heard of anybody who would have regretted it). But once you learned to type properly (and nothing really bad happens to you) you can do it for the rest of your life. So what could be a sane reason to re-learn touch-typing?
Have you ever thought about why the keys on the keyboard are arranged the way they are? They obviously aren't arranged alphabetically which would have been the most natural choice. And in fact with some of the early typewriters they were! What is known as the QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1870's (only minor adjustments were made later). He got there mostly by trial and error: Any layout that made the typewriter jam less often was considered an improvement.
Most people (except hipsters for example 😉) don't type on mechanical typewriters anymore, though. And this simple fact is what turns the whole idea behind the most well-known layout from a once sensible choice into an _anti-pattern_! The classical layout was designed to stop you from jamming the machine all the time - at the cost of effectively impeding you. And while this has once been a very sensible tradeoff, it no longer is. But change is hard.
Probably the best known alternative layout was proposed by August Dvorak in 1936. It was meant to be faster to type with, easier to learn and more ergonomic than QWERTY. There are various studies that provide evidence to support these claims while others indicate that there are no mayor benefits. I've never learned the Dvorak layout and thus won't judge it either way. It's a fact though that we are highly adaptive beings: Lose a finger and after a while you will notice that you found a way to mostly compensate for the loss automatically. Have you heard of people who were born without hands and learned to type with their feet? With enough practice you'll be able to type quite fast even using a pretty bad layout.
There is this other point however: Ergonomics. And this one has become very important for me. I typed using QWERTZ (the standard German variant) for about two decades. During the later half of that time I was experiencing pain that only grew in severity. Eventually I was forced to wear a medical splint on most days. Let me assure you that this really is not fun (especially during summer). I'm not thin-skinned or anything but in addition to the pain, my wrist wouldn't work as it should, up to the point where I would all of the sudden drop heavy things because my hand simply couldn't hold them any longer! When I stopped typing for a while (on the weekend) things improved slightly - only to fully return the next workday, of course.
I wanted to believe the promise of ergonomic layouts putting less strain on fingers and hands. So in late 2014 I began learning Neo², an ergonomic layout optimized for my language. I also bought a somewhat expansive special ergonomic keyboard, hoping that both together would at least help a little. It took a while, but the situation improved. And improved further. Thinking back to the pain, I'm still baffled by the fact that it eventually went away _entirely_. That was way more than what I had even hoped for!
While the only thing that I can say for sure is that this combination proved to be extremely successful, I do attribute the larger part in it to the keyboard. Still I do have the feeling that switching the layout did also have a positive effect. It hadn't been easy for me to switch (I've written about it on Eerielinux) but after getting used to the new layout, typing at least felt more pleasant than before.
Keyboards, layouts and ergonomics (pt. 2)
The standard German keyboard has three layers: The default letters, digits and so on are layer 1. Layer 2 is accessed by combining any key with _Shift_ and mostly consists of upper case letters and special characters. And then there's layer 3, accessible via _Alt Gr_ + some key - it offers additional special symbols that didn't fit into a lower layer. Neo² has *six* layers, several dead keys (that don't do anything on their own but modify the glyph outputted after the next key is pressed) and the compose key (to e.g. combine 'a' and 'e' to the æ letter used in Scandinavian languages).
I've come to rely on some of these features. There's no way I'd go back to the old QWERTZ layout, not even if you'd pay me money for it!
My oldest daughter is finally old enough to start doing more things with the computer. So recently I thought about whether to teach her touch-typing - and if yes: how. I've used the Open Source software Klavaro in the past and that had worked well. Quick check: Yes, it's still available.
Then I visited the Neo homepage (which used to be available in English, too, but right now isn't) to download the nice images with the layers that they offered for download. But what was that? The site had been re-designed. And not only that, there was new content, too. This is where things really got interesting!
I knew that there were other layouts inspired by Neo that promise even better ergonomics. However, back then I chose Neo over those for the simple reason that it was the most popular and thus the most widely supported one. But now even the official Neo homepage recommends a variant over classic Neo for newcomers to learn! This *Bone* layout has received further optimizations and has been designed with additional insights taken into account.
Tere's also even a layout called _NeoQwertz_ for QWERTZ users who don't want to re-learn all the keys but would still like to use the additional layers. Nice idea!
I've been a happy Neo typist for more than half a decade now. Neo works really well for me and I don't actually have any good reason to switch again - except for curiosity. Two days ago it struck me: What if this "Bone" thing was really even better? And what would "better" even mean in this case? Eventually I decided to install Klavaro (which supports Bone since the latest version) and just see for myself.
That evening I invested just short of an hour to do the lessons 1 to 10. The lessons involving more than 2 keys (and especially the more complex lesson 10 that is for practicing the whole middle row except for 'q') took me pretty long to complete: Over 6.5 minutes for the latter alone! This did not come unexpected, though: Before each and every key press I had to actually _think_ about the new position after all. After completing that lesson, I stopped and wasn't really sure if I should continue.
The next evening (while waiting for some packages to complete compiling) I did lessons 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 again - and was surprised that without any additional training in the meantime it now felt much easier than yesterday. Lesson 10 took me less than 6 minutes wile I made fewer mistakes. I had really already memorized all the key positions for the keys in the middle row without looking at the layer 1 graphic again that day!
This impressed me enough to continue. That second evening I did the lessons 11 to 20. It was arduous work again but as this had caught my interest, I struggled through. Then I went to bed.
Day three was a Saturday. I found some time in the morning to redo the interesting lessons from day 1 again as well as 15, 16, 18, 19 and 20 from day 2. Once again my results had improved: Now I was down to about 5 minutes for lesson 10 and I found that the observation from the day before repeated itself: I already knew the upper row by heart, too! It's totally fascinating how highly adaptive our brain is! Obviously it had been busy forming new synapses, making me gain new skills literally while sleeping. One funny thing that I noticed is that my right hand does have a slightly but noticeably easier time to adapt to the new layout. I'm right-handed - does this have something to do with it? Probably, but I don't know.
It was still Saturday, and I had completed all lessons up to 31 (the latter, involving all three rows, a couple of times over the day). Now the question was: Should I continue down this road and aim to actually switch? It had been a pretty exhausting journey last time after all! But for some strange reason I felt almost ready to start typing actual meaningful text instead of the garbage that Klavaro makes you type to practice (like “äzkzf xurev h,npc” and so on). Last time it took me _weeks_ of continuous training before I was ready to even type short texts.
This time it's different: The article that you've been reading has been entirely written after switching the layout to Bone! I'm impressed myself: Yes, typing this took me probably more than 4 times as long as it would have if I had typed it in using my familiar Neo layout. Also backspace really is my friend right now. But 1.500 words written in a new layout on day three after only a couple of hours to practice? Wow, this is not something that I would have thought to be possible. Yet here we are!
In this article I've written down my first impressions. I think that I will just continue on with Bone and some time in the future write another post about how it went.