Colemak is a

keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. is the actua ...

for

Latin-script alphabets The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets. In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represe ...

, designed to make

typing Typing is the process of writing or inputting text by pressing keys on a typewriter, computer keyboard, mobile phone or calculator. It can be distinguished from other means of text input, such as handwriting and speech recognition. Text can b ...

more efficient and comfortable by placing the most frequently used letters of the English language on the home row. Created on 1 January 2006, it is named after its inventor, Shai Coleman. Most major modern

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s such as

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

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, and

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

support Colemak natively. A program to install the layout is available for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

. On Android and iOS, the layout is offered by several virtual keyboard apps like GBoard and SwiftKey, as well as by many apps which support physical keyboards directly. __NOTOC__

Overview

The Colemak layout was designed with the

QWERTY QWERTY () is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard ( ). The QWERTY design is based on a layout created f ...

layout as a base, changing the positions of 17 keys while retaining the QWERTY positions of most non-alphabetic characters and many popular

keyboard shortcuts In computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several computer keyboard, keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the ...

, supposedly making it easier to learn than Dvorak layout for people who already type in QWERTY without losing efficiency. It shares several design goals with the Dvorak layout, such as minimizing finger path distance and making heavy use of the home row. 74% of typing is done on the home row compared to 70% for Dvorak and 32% for QWERTY. The default Colemak layout lacks a Caps Lock key; an additional

Backspace Backspace () is the keyboard key that originally pushed the typewriter carriage one position backwards and in modern computer systems moves the display cursor one position backwards,"Backwards" means to the left for left-to-right languages. delete ...

key occupies the typical position of Caps Lock on modern keyboards. Coleman states that he designed Colemak to be easy to learn, explaining that Dvorak is hard for QWERTY typists to learn due to it being so different from the QWERTY layout. The layout has attracted media attention as an alternative to Dvorak for improving typing speed and comfort with an alternate keyboard layout.

Variants

A series of intermediate layouts known as Tarmak have been created with the intention of making it easier for new users to adopt the layout. The layouts change only 3–5 keys at a time in a series of 5 steps. Colemak has been criticised for placing too much emphasis on the middle-row center-column keys (D and H) leading to lateral finger stretches for certain common English bigrams such as HE. Some find these awkward. The Colemak user community developed a modified version of Colemak named Colemak-DH, to address these concerns. The Colemak community has created several other modifications and variants; some of these are not directly related to Colemak but would work on other layouts as well. The web site "DreymaR's Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks" holds info on such mods and tools and their implementations as well as other typing-related topics, centered around but not limited to the Colemak layout.

References

External links

Official Colemak website
(including community forum)
Community Colemak website

Colemak Mod-DH
{{Keyboard layouts Keyboard layouts Latin-script keyboard layouts