When you are drilling new keys but you absolutely do not want to look at the layout map that shows the keys you are supposed to know already.
mod-DH is the best invention ever.
I’m really loving it. Something clicked when I started adding the top row to my drills and now its actually fun. I’m deliberately taking my time so I don’t pick up any bad habits. My QWERTY typing is fast but atrocious in terms of form.
I honestly think that touch typing on QWERTY is a bad idea, those contortions you need to go fast will just give you RSI sooner or later.
I also learned touch typing with colemak mod-DH and that kind of works, but now I’m running into the fact that standard keyboards are very asymmetrical. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a split board with an F row.
I almost feel like my piano training has kicked in with my QWERTY technique. I almost move my left hand above my right sometimes to hit certain keys. It’s definitely a lost cause and you are totally right: we know so much more about ergonomics now that if you are going to learn to touch type at this point, you might as well learn an alternative layout.
I have never understood it. Reaching one key left or right is such a small movement to me. What I hate is reaching for g or j in colemak
It is not so much about relative distance to the home position. The more important measure is if there are lots of bigrams to be pressed by the middle finger on the same hand right next to the index key – it is believed that a lateral stretch, meaning having to press a key on the central index columns, right next to another key on the same hand middle finger column (e.g., a qwerty ‘gd’), is more uncomfortable than if the index key is on the home column (a qwerty ‘vd’). This is the logic behind the dh mod.
Personally I think both ‘d’ and ‘h’ are of too high a frequency to be placed on the index finger non-home position, so neither the vanilla nor the dh variant of colemak is good in that regard.
d is the 11th most frequent letter [1], so there are many other letters vying for the 8 main home row positions. However h is 9th, it’s a good candidate for a better position, since it occurs in the two most frequent bigrams (th and he).
Since backspace is used far less than frequent letters by competent typists and enter is also relatively infrequent, it is probably best to put something like e on the thumb cluster, so that h can be on the home row.
What’s really annoying me right now is that I’m learning on a row staggered keyboard and I know fine well that the V and K should not be there, but, for the purposes of the exercise they are and I have to kind of bear with it and hope that my new muscle memory will correct when my little Ferris Sweep arrives.
I’d recommend you to only practice a new layout on a column stagger keyboard if you have to use a row-stagger keyboard occasionally (type on someone else’s computer, laptop, etc.). For me at least it was much easier to retain QWERTY muscle memory doing that, because they are completely separate for me now QWERTY-row stagger, Colemak-DH-column stagger.
(Though I am planning to move away from Colemak-DH, so my column stagger memory is going to be a bloody mess for a while.)
