Switching to Culemak (not Colemak)

I promised myself I wouldn’t do it but I have. I’ve modified the layout to suit my typing style better. And to make it easier for Gentoo users, I have made some ebuilds for Colemak and my slightly modified version: Culemak. This was going to be a long winded rant about the silly way you have to turn your left hand out while using a computer keyboard. Instead, I’ll leave it to your own good judgement to work out what feels comfortable.

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Switching to Colemak Part 4

Is the colemak layout really optimal for what I need to do? Today I went looking for some cold hard facts. sorenk’s post on the colemak forum got me thinking. One of the things that’s been bugging me about colemak is the digraph ‘cd’ – as I mentioned before, my typing style doesn’t use the recommended fingering for the letters ‘zxcvb’ on QWERTY. To me, the left hand has always felt a bit odd, reaching in the same direction as the right hand does, which is lateral to the direction the finger normally points.

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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 UsersTo configure Colemak in the console, you need to do the following: Copy the file colemak-1.0/linux_console/colemak.iso15.kmap from the archive to /usr/share/keymaps/i386/colemak/colemak.map gzip it Edit /etc/conf.d/keymaps and set KEYMAP="colemak" Edit /etc/conf.d/consolefont and set CONSOLEFONT="lat9w-16" Restart the keymaps service   # /etc/init.d/keymaps restart * Caching service dependencies …

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Switching to Colemak Part 2

Three days in and I’m using the full home row. I just graduated to Lesson 4 in KTouch so now I’m using all the keys on the home row in lessons. Typing speed in general is improving too. Today I didn’t look at the new layout once and was able to visualise the location of most of the keys in my mind. It feels like I’m making real progress. Things that still catch me: The colon ‘:’ key Emacs key bindings like ‘ESC-F’ (move forward one word) now switches the preceding 2 words The ’S’ key having moved one to the right, and therefore CTRL-D to logout of a shell now sends an XOFF ‘hjkl’ locations.

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Switching to Colemak

After a failed attempt to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout, a recent posting on Slashdot has got me looking at alternative layouts again, this time at Colemak. I don’t need to go into the virtues of Colemak – http://colemak.com/ already does that quite well. Instead, I want to share my own experiences. This will probably end up being a series of posts tracking my progress. Glaringly obvious problem No. 1 was that the finger memory for my password was all wrong.

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Upgrading TWiki

The perils of upgrading TWiki on Gentoo. One of the really cool things about Gentoo is it’s webapp-config tool that allows you to run concurrent (or slotted) installations of different versions of the same web based application. For example, from one single instance of Apache, you can run numerous virtual hosts, each with a different version of TWiki. It does this by installing to /usr/share/webapps then linking or copying files according to what is defined in the ebuild(5).

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Blogging with TWiki

I’m taking Michael Daum’s BlogUp application for a spin to see what full markup blogging feels like. While I’ve been a fanboy for TWiki for a number of years, I have only really used it as a CMS type of application. That is, I write stuff in pages using TWikiMarkup (called TWikiTopics) and attach other files to the page. I even developed a couple of plugins to aid in the publishing of content but never really felt comfortable using TWiki as the foundation for another application.

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