Switching To More Efficient Keyboard Layouts
For some years now, Google's default keyboard has not been very good at swipe input. It's way too often that I have to fix words that it guesses. Coupling that with concerns for privacy, it led me to search for an alternative.
After looking at the alternatives, I installed FUTO keyboard. When going through the settings, I noticed it had a KASROZ layout that has been optimized for swiping that's ideal for a one handed layout. This gets into another gripe of mine... Phones Should Be Made For One Handed Use, but I'll discuss that another time.
I started using it, and it hurt my brain quite badly at first, but after just a single day I'm already starting to pick up on it, and I can tell it's better than swiping on QWERTY. I imagine in about a month I'll be fluent with it and the pain will finally be over.
This got me thinking, why use QWERTY for my physical keyboard? I had tried Dvorak years ago but never stuck with it due to having to go muck with the keyboard settings when I was on other machines (which was often in my role at the time). But now that I'm a software engineer and pretty much only ever on my personal machine, all of this has changed.
Some research showed me that there were basically two well supported options, DVORAK and Colemak. Colemak keeps a lot of QWERTY keys in similar places, preserving common shortcuts, keeping them one handed. This was why I eventually decided to choose Colemak.
In the past I've had some wrist pain associated with repetitive injury from typing all day. I've worked on my hand positioning and that's solved most of the problem, but my hands do still get tired from time to time. I've been a heavy typist for decades, so the wear is adding up.
Colemak's layout lets you type 35 times more words without even moving your fingers from the home row. They also report that finger travel is ~46% of QWERTY, and same hand row jumping is only ~6%. It's also supposedly a bit faster, but that's not why I'm doing this.
Also, it's available on every major operating system by default, which is a huge win!