Motivation

It all started six months ago when I felt a tingling sensation in my fingers. My wrist bones were snapping with each keystroke. Each typed word made my hand stiffer and closer to breaking up.

The more I typed, the more I hated it.

And my co-workers hated me too. I wouldn’t answer any message—instead, I called them back because I didn’t want to text. The bad thing was that people didn’t reach out to me anymore, and the good thing was that people didn’t reach out to me anymore.

Until one day I cracked.

My hands stopped moving. My fingers were no longer responding to my commands.

Then I knew it—I had to do something. I had to make typing more comfortable somehow.

I visited doctors, I’ve seen witches. Nothing helped.

But then I read a puzzling article about some alternative keyboard layouts.

“It can’t be”, I said. Qwerty is the only keyboard layout.

I got hooked on the idea of an alternative layout so I started practising Dvorak. I spent nights in front of the computer typing random sentences. All the gibberish I was typing was slowly melting my brain.

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that my hands didn’t hurt anymore.

I enjoyed typing again.

Just kidding…

This is probably the story of how most of the people decided to move away from Qwerty.

But me—I just wanted to be cool.

I kept on thinking about the possible dialogues I could have at work while struggling to type on my co-workers' machines.

But in reality, this never happens.

It only halfway happened once during a demo I held for a client.

I was share-screening my iOS Simulator and I had to type one of the simplest passwords you could imagine. And as you could imagine, I was not able to do it because the iOS Simulator uses Qwerty regardless of my machine’s layout.

So there I was, mumbling something that hardly resembled the experience of a professional developer mindful of his own hands' health.

So yeah—trying to be cool didn’t work out well for me.

But there is no turning back now. I can’t type Qwerty anymore.

How It Felt At Start

My first attempt with Dvorak was disastrous. I felt like a newborn trying to say its first word.

Just imagine an old lady getting her first computer and searching for recipes. That was me—but worse.

And the worst part is not that I couldn’t type Dvorak—I was just starting after all. The worst part is that my hands were still typing Qwerty, as much as I would’ve tried to stop them.

So there I was, looking at the layout above and trying to put together a full, complete word.

I had a staggering speed of almost 4 words per minute.

How I Started To Improve

Just looking at the layout and trying to type didn’t work out for me.

I was still not able to write anything without the layout in my face.

Then I found some websites such as https://learn.dvorak.nl/ that made learning easier.

The idea behind them was that you could learn Dvorak gradually—the home row keys, then the first row keys, and so on.

This made it infinitely easier than just jumping into the full layout.

But even then, I couldn’t get past the 10 words per minute speed. My issue was that my hands were still trying to write Qwerty—and Dvorak was completely different from it.

So I searched for other layouts, more similar to Qwerty for a smoother transition, but still having the ergonomic benefits of Dvorak.

I found Colemak—and I started practising it.

But now I didn’t have one, but two problems. I wanted to type Colemak, but my right hand still wanted Dvorak—and my left hand Qwerty.

I read the experience of others that tried to switch and I thought that if they succeeded, then I could too—so I continued practising.

I was slowly getting better on Colemak, and slowly getting worse on Qwerty.

My issue was that I couldn’t just switch out to Colemak completely because I had to still work 8 hours per day. And yeah, they say that programming is 90% thinking and 10% coding—but thinking involves a lot of Google searches, and Google searches involve a lot of typing…

How I Couldn’t Type Anymore

One month in, I got to the point where I couldn’t type anymore. I reached a reasonable speed on Colemak, and around the same on Qwerty.

Both were low.

My productivity drastically decreased. I was answering messages in short sentences, and calling people whenever possible to avoid typing.

I wanted to give up, but I was already halfway there. And even if I would’ve given up, I had to re-learn Qwerty—so I continued practising.

How It Clicked

I decided to switch completely to Colemak. Not because I got to a decent speed, but because having to switch layouts all the time made it harder.

I kept on practising—in the morning, at the night, in the meetings. Until one day I realised I don’t even think about the keys anymore…

I’m just typing—I’m typing Colemak.

Even at work, I could Google at blazingly fast speeds as I used to do. Everything got back to normal eventually.

So in the end, I just had to make the full commitment of switching. Constantly switching layouts impaired my muscle memory and made it significantly harder.

Conclusion

As I said in the beginning, I didn’t have any wrist pain. So I can’t say “Wow, Colemak saved my hands!”.

But it made typing more comfortable. It’s a soothing feeling to only slightly move your fingers while typing. Everything is just there.

I also gained around 10 to 20 more WPM speed compared to when I was typing Qwerty.

So trying to be cool was worth it eventually.