Wisdom is the prime thing

This is a great book for children, written by Susan Butcher and her husband David Monson. It tells the true story of Susan Butcher, four-time Iditarod winner, and her beloved lead dog, Granite. Definitely recommended. Or buy one for a child you know that would be touched by this heartwarming story.

The Colemak keyboard layout is a new layout designed to make typing faster and more ergonomic. From the webpage:

The QWERTY layout was designed in the 19th century to allow typewriter salesmen to easily type the word “typewriter” and to prevent typebars from sticking. We’ve been stuck with QWERTY ever since. Colemak is a modern alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English.
Learning Colemak is a one-time investment that will allow you to enjoy faster and pain-free typing for the rest of your life. Colemak is now the 3rd most popular keyboard layout for touch typing in English, after QWERTY and Dvorak.

The layout was built using a computer algorithm, unlike Dvorak.

Does it make sense for Dvorak users?

The Frequently Asked Questions page says:

The Colemak keyboard layout fixes all the issues mentioned above, and wins in virtually every criterion, but the difference will be less noticeable than the difference between QWERTY and Dvorak. The switch won’t be as easy for veteran Dvorak users. If you’re generally happy with Dvorak, you should probably stick with it.

What are the benefits of Colemak over Dvorak? The FAQ page lists a few, but the ones that matter the most to me are:

• ‘L’ and ‘S’ form a frequent same-finger digraph on the right pinky. Same-finger for the pinky is very rare in Colemak. In particular, Unix commands such as ‘ls -l’ are very uncomfortable to type.
• Some punctuation (in particular the curly/square brackets) is less comfortable to type on Dvorak. This affects mainly programmers and advanced Unix users.

So?

As a Dvorak, Linux user, I don’t see a strong enough incentive to switch. I use an alias (dir) for the ls command, and I’ve gotten used to the punctuation in the Dvorak layout. So neither of those reasons are compelling for me.

What about speed?

I played around with this handy typing test, and got a speed of about 100 WPM. The test results give you an idea of how many meters your fingers traveled during that test with different keyboards. For me, the distance was about the same with Colemak and Dvorak. The difference between QWERTY and Dvorak was huge, but there is nothing to be gained from moving from Dvorak to Colemak.

Had Colemak been available a few years ago when I switched to Dvorak, I might have chosen it instead.