Note that the keyboard in the picture above isn’t mine, it’s just one using Colemak-DH that I think is pretty cool.
You can find the original post here.

If you weren’t aware, I’m quite a big fan of typing! I really enjoy seeing all the different methods of typing that people have (even if some are extremely unorthodox).

As such, I stream typing sometimes on Discord with my friends, but when I type, they see a layout that looks nothing like QWERTY. Since I get asked about it so frequently, I thought I’d write a little something here to redirect people to.

“mulfok…what on EARTH is that?”

This is Colemak-DH (ISO). It’s a mod of the popular Colemak keyboard layout, making only four changes from the original layout. Additionally, this specific mod is designed to make use of the ISO keyboard’s backslash (\) key, leaving the QWERTY B position (an uncomfortable key to press) as the backslash.

The Benefit of Alternative Layouts

If you’ve ever been told about alternative layouts (not JUST Colemak), you may hear a lot of people say stuff like…

  • Higher comfort…
  • QWERTY was designed to be slow…
  • It’s faster…

…And the likes. None of these are necessarily untrue, but you should know the full meaning behind these words to build your own thoughts on the layout.

“Higher Comfort”

First, higher comfort. When people talk about higher comfort with Colemak specifically, they’re usually referring to the insanely low percentage of SFBs: Same Finger Bigrams.

SFBs are when you type bigrams using the same finger (assuming home row technique). There are… way too many on QWERTY. If you can’t think of any, here are a few…

  • ed: education, sophisticated…
  • ol: old, colonise…
  • fr: fraction, infrastructure…

With the key arrangement on Colemak, SFBs happen around 340% less of the time, and that barely scratches the surface. Another thing that we can look at are the frequency of letters typed on a QWERTY keyboard.

With QWERTY, the common keys are kind of…all over the place? This makes it pretty annoying to type fast, as your hands practically dance from one end of the keyboard to the other to reach the common keys to press.

One of the design philosophies of Colemak is to have the most commonly used keys on the home row of the keyboard with the goal being to have your hands move much less.

Note that this heatmap is vanilla Colemak.

That already looks a lot nicer. When typing on Colemak, your hands are usually rested comfortably on the home row. You can type words like “tenderheartedness” without your hands leaving the home row.

“QWERTY Was Designed To Be Slow”

Yeah, this statement is pretty much a misconception. QWERTY wasn’t designed to slow you down, it was designed to separate common letter pairings in English. On a typewriter, pressing keys adjacent to one another in quick succession can cause the typewriter to jam, so this was done to prevent that.

Common letter pairings in English on a typewriter.

In other words, QWERTY was designed to solve a problem that we no longer have, as today, we don’t type on mechanical typewriters.

“It’s Faster”

While this isn’t really true (typing is a skill that you improve), you could argue that you can go faster on Colemak due to the increased comfort. Some people say that they find it easier to go faster on a Colemak keyboard since their hands move less, saving time.

Why Do I Use DH ISO?

Colemak-DH is a mod that was created to tackle an issue with Colemak that some people had. In vanilla Colemak, you use the middle two columns of the keyboard to type the D and H keys quite a lot. Since the aim of Colemak is to keep all commonly used keys on the home row, this makes sense. However, some people dislike this lateral finger movement a lot.

As such, layouts such as Workman have been created to attempt to decrease the usage of the middle two columns. However, the attempts at this seem to always result in a much-too-high SFB percentage, and other strange repercussions.

Colemak-DH ISO in my experience, is the most comfortable mod with this design goal in mind.

Vanilla Colemak heatmap on left, Colemak-DH ISO on right.
Note the lower usage of the middle two columns.

It moves the D and H keys to where the C and M keys are on a Colemak keyboard, puts G and M where D and H were, moves B out of its uncomfortable position, and uses a mod called the Angle Mod to make the way the fingers move on the keyboard more ergonomic by cycling the Z, X, C, V keys to the left. This results in a Colemak layout with very comfortable hand movement, and the same fantastic stats as vanilla Colemak.

I like Colemak-DH ISO a lot for these reasons basically. This is the end of my little rant, but you can learn more from the following websites.