ABOUT Colemak

What's wrong with the QWERTY layout?

What's wrong with the Dvorak layout?

, pronounced /'ko:lmæk/ (Coal-Mac), is a keyboard layout designed for touch typing in English. It is designed to be a practical alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard layouts. It was released on January 1, 2006.- It places very rare letters in the best positions, so your fingers have to move a lot more.- It suffers from a high same finger ratio that slows down typing and increases strain.- It allows for very long sequences of letters with the same hand.- It was designed to prevent the keys on a typewriter from sticking together, without any consideration to ergonomic or efficiency aspects.- It was designed so the word "typewriter" could be typed on the top row to ease demonstrations.- It suffers from an extremely high ratio of home-row-jumping sequences.- Placing 'L' on the QWERTY 'P' position causes excessive strain on the right pinky.- 'F' is on the QWERTY 'Y' position which is a difficult stretch on normal keyboards.- 'I' is very frequent but isn't on the home position.- 'R' is very frequent but isn't on the home row.- The right hand does too much work.- Even though the design principles are sound, the implementation isn't optimal because it was designed without the aid of computers.- 'L' and 'S' form a frequent same-finger digraph on the right pinky.- Some punctuation is less comfortable to type on Dvorak. This affects mainly programmers and advanced Unix users.