Colemak - Popular Alternative

Colemak - The Popular Alternative

The Colemak layout is one of the more popular alternatives to QWERTY and Dvorak. It has its ZXCV keys in the classical QWERTY position and the only punctuation key that it relocates is the ; which is moved to make the right pinky service a letter key.

Figure 1. The canonical QWERTY layout.

Figure 2. The Colemak layout. Note the relocation of the ; key to allow O to be serviced by the right pinky. Key positions (17 keys) where Colemak and QWERTY differ are marked in red.

Colemak - typing effort

Below are the typing efforts of Colemak, Dvorak and QWERTY. QWERTY comes out as the big loser here, with a huge increase over Colemak in the base effort (+193%), a large stroke path increase (+36%) and a significant penalty increase (+16%). Dvorak is already an improvement over QWERTY, so the difference between it and Colemak is smaller.

model	keyboard	total effortrel%	effort contributionsrel%
			base	penalties	path
mod_01	colemak	1.842	0.34418.7	0.76341.4 R0.158 F0.487	0.73539.9
	dvorak	2.098 (+13.9)	0.39718.9 (+15.4)	0.93744.7 (+22.8) R0.171 (+8.2) F0.638 (+31.0)	0.76536.5 (+4.1)
	qwerty	3.000 (+62.9)	1.00033.3 (+190.7)	1.00033.3 (+31.1) R0.408 (+158.2) F0.408 (-16.2)	1.00033.3 (+36.1)

Colemak - detailed statistics

Colemak makes even greater use of home row (74%) than Dvorak (71%). This leaves QWERTY's 34% far behind. Bottom row use is low at 9%, like Dvorak.

Colemak is more balanced in hand use, with a 6% preference for the right hand (Dvorak has 14% for the right and QWERTY 15% for the left).

Cumulative run statistics for Colemak are worth looking at. The rh_l(0) and rh_r(0) are nearly both 50% (0.55 and 0.49, respectively). This means that half of the time successive keystrokes use the same hand and that this characteristic is symmetric with respect to the left and right hands. In other words, Colemak is very good at maintaining hand alternation for both hands. Consecutive uses of the home row is also favourable in Colemak, with 85% of runs having a length of <=5 strokes (compare this with 4 strokes for Dvorak and somewhere between 1-2 strokes for QWERTY).

Both Colemak and Dvorak make greater use of the pinky. Colemak uses the pinky 16% of the time (18% for Dvorak and 10% for QWERTY). Colemak does a good job at loading the stronger fingers (index and middle) and uses them 67% of the time. This is better than Dvorak which uses these fingers 60% of the time, but not as good as QWERTY which uses them 69% of the time.

carpalx effort optimization	keyboard name	statistics					effort
		rowh	rowb	hand asym	finger freq	cumulative run distribution	mod_01
none	Colemak QWFPGJLUY;[]\ ARSTDHNEIO' ZXCVBKM,./	0.74	0.09	-0.06	0.16 0.17 0.26 0.41	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 rhl 0.55 0.85 0.94 0.98 0.99 1 1 1 1 rhr 0.49 0.77 0.90 0.96 0.98 0.99 1 1 1 rh 0.52 0.81 0.92 0.97 0.99 0.99 1 1 1 rrt 0.79 0.97 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 1 rrh 0.26 0.46 0.60 0.71 0.79 0.85 0.89 0.92 0.94 rrb 0.95 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rr 0.57 0.73 0.81 0.86 0.90 0.93 0.95 0.96 0.97 rf 0.93 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rj 0.83 0.95 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 1	1.842 0.34418.7% 0.76341.4% 0.73539.9%
none	Dvorak standard ',.PYFGCRL/=\ AOEUIDHTNS- ;QJKXBMWVZ	0.71	0.09	-0.14	0.18 0.21 0.26 0.34	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 rhl 0.76 0.94 0.98 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 rhr 0.47 0.81 0.96 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 rh 0.62 0.88 0.97 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 rrt 0.80 0.97 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rrh 0.33 0.54 0.67 0.77 0.85 0.90 0.93 0.95 0.97 rrb 0.96 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rr 0.60 0.77 0.84 0.89 0.93 0.95 0.97 0.98 0.98 rf 0.93 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rj 0.84 0.96 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 1	2.098 0.39718.9% 0.93744.7% 0.76536.4%
none	QWERTY standard QWERTYUIOP[]\ ASDFGHJKL;' ZXCVBNM,./	0.34	0.15	0.15	0.10 0.21 0.27 0.42	1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 rhl 0.42 0.69 0.83 0.91 0.95 0.97 0.99 0.99 1 rhr 0.61 0.83 0.94 0.98 0.99 1 1 1 1 rh 0.51 0.76 0.88 0.94 0.97 0.98 0.99 1 1 rrt 0.55 0.78 0.91 0.96 0.98 0.99 1 1 1 rrh 0.68 0.91 0.97 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 rrb 0.94 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rr 0.68 0.88 0.95 0.98 0.99 1 1 1 1 rf 0.89 0.99 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 rj 0.68 0.83 0.94 0.96 0.99 0.99 1 1 1	3.000 1.00033.3% 1.00033.3% 1.00033.3%

Colemak - word difficulty

Using the typing effort model described in Carpalx - Typing Effort, I ranked 6-12 character words by their corresponding effort (effort is normalized to word length) using a dictionary of 480,000 words (/usr/share/dict/words, Red Hat 4 Enterprise). Below is a table that shows sets of words representing effort percentiles.