So I’ve probably had my split for a little over a month by now and got back to my general typing speed – probably a little faster – not too long ago. Before switching I wasn’t a traditional touch typist and was switching fingers for certain keys and mainly sweeped the keyboard by kinesthetic memory. I realised I was using the “wrong fingers” due to it being more naturally ergonomic and efficient in your trad stock board.
After getting used to my corne with your standard qwerty it really bothered me how unbalanced the typing experience feels. I realised for the English language at least it was predominantly left board clustered. I had heard of the general design history of colemak and saw the home row focused heat maps and thought “alright well this is literally designed for a moder…
So I’ve probably had my split for a little over a month by now and got back to my general typing speed – probably a little faster – not too long ago. Before switching I wasn’t a traditional touch typist and was switching fingers for certain keys and mainly sweeped the keyboard by kinesthetic memory. I realised I was using the “wrong fingers” due to it being more naturally ergonomic and efficient in your trad stock board.
After getting used to my corne with your standard qwerty it really bothered me how unbalanced the typing experience feels. I realised for the English language at least it was predominantly left board clustered. I had heard of the general design history of colemak and saw the home row focused heat maps and thought “alright well this is literally designed for a modern typing experience”.
I can’t even begin to truly fathom the process of designing a new layout. I’ve rearranged the keycaps to reflect colemak and have just had my boards disconnected and turned off just to casually have it to the side to practice without a screen; just looking at the keys and feeling letter combinations to ingrain the typing “shape” of words.
I’m blown away at every second or third word. The way that the layout shapes prefixes and suffixes, common lettering combinations, even down to alternating hand combinations. I heard the phrase “roll” once on a random YouTube split board video and thought it was cool, but to intentionally design for them to embedded as a feature of a keyboard layout...
I knew the history of the qwerty layout with the staggered rows, the intention to ensure that keys have minimal chance at jamming on a conventional typewriter. This is what happens when you change the design brief to focus on not just ergonomics of typing experience but of rhythm and cadence within a language as well as its semantically relevant distribution curve (obviously there are plenty of words that are uncommon in the English language)?
This designer looked into not only the feel of the experience but also the most commonly used chunks in the language. The word “interest” is like a 3 step combo on the board, all common “chunks” became intentionally shaped and considered.
I feel like I’m starting to talk in circles here and this is the first alternate layout I’ve ever tried. Coming from a movement, design, linguistic, ergonomic perspective; I am undeniably blown away. Still barely on day 2 and won’t say my speed is anything close to fluent, but it’s hard when I have to take a break with every few words I test to type because I’m still imagining what the hell was going through this geniuses mind when they set out of this quest.