Messed Up

Well, I've been blogging lately, (Says Paul as he glances through the past three days' worth of posts) and one thing that occurred to me to write about is my typing style. Many people have asked me about why the keyboard on my laptop is so crazy, messed up, or weird. I am posting this to alleviate any confusion on that part. I use a style of keyboard called Colemak.

What is the Colemak keyboard? The Colemak keyboard is a change in the layout of the keys based on the location of easy access of the individual letters. Basically, all of the most commonly used keys are moved to or close to the "home row" where your fingers rest while typing. When the keys are re-arranged in this way, it allows for two things: first, your fingers move nearly 2 times less than they do on a qwerty layout, not tiring your fingers out quite as much, and second, it allows you to type faster because of less movement.

The Colemak keyboard was developed because of the deficiency of the Qwerty keyboard. Qwerty was actually designed to slow typists down. Back when these ancient things called "typewriters" were popular instead of computers, the users were becoming so fast with typing that the hammers which applied the ink to the page would jam. To alleviate jamming, a man named Christopher Sholes gave birth to Qwerty, slowing typists down since 1874.

My math teacher (a wonderful individual, that likes to challenge and monologue to his students), was ranting in class one day about the inefficiencies of some things in math and culture in our society. For instance, the United States has refused to switch to the obviously more efficient Metric System. Another thing he mentioned that day was keyboard layouts and how we are slowed down by the Qwerty keyboard. I took his innocent lecture as a challenge, went home, downloaded it, and began to learn.

This is why my laptop keyboard is so "messed up,"
Colemak