Switching to Colemak Part 3

Lesson 5 brings 'p', 'l' as well as all the home row.

Current progress: Lvl 4, 134 cpm, 26 wpm, 88% accuracy; working on Lvl 5.

As my family needs to use my home computer, I can't just add Colemak to the xorg.conf like I have on my laptop, and I didn't feel comfortable using xmodmap due to the weirdness I got on the work computer. So, as a KDE user, I made a little shell script that sits in ~/.kde/Autostart/setxkbmap.sh that switches the mappings for me when I log in:

 

#!/bin/bash
setxkbmap -v colemak && xset r 66

Linux is so cool :-P

 

For the Gentoo Users

To configure Colemak in the console, you need to do the following:

  1. Copy the file colemak-1.0/linux_console/colemak.iso15.kmap from the archive to /usr/share/keymaps/i386/colemak/colemak.map
  2. gzip it
  3. Edit /etc/conf.d/keymaps and set KEYMAP="colemak"
  4. Edit /etc/conf.d/consolefont and set CONSOLEFONT="lat9w-16"
  5. Restart the keymaps service

 

# /etc/init.d/keymaps restart
 * Caching service dependencies ...                   [ ok ]
 * WARNING:  you are stopping a boot service.
 * WARNING:  you are stopping a boot service.
 * Loading key mappings ...                           [ ok ]
 * Setting terminal encoding to ASCII ...             [ ok ]
 * Setting user font ...                              [ ok ]

Shai Coleman thinks that 'lat9u-14' is a good font but /usr/share/consolefonts/README.lat9 suggests that lat9w- fonts are actually better, and the default font is 16 not 14.

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