Colemak keyboard layout

Colemak key by key, with the finger for each key, what changes from QWERTY, how to switch your computer to it, and free lessons from the home row.

Start the Colemak lessons

• Little
• Ring
• Middle
• Index
• Thumbs

The home row is A R S T D H N E I O, with your index fingers on T and N. Q, W, A, H, Z, X, C, V, B and M keep their QWERTY keys, so undo, cut, copy and paste are where your left hand expects them. D and H sit in the two middle columns, the part that Colemak-DH and Workman later changed.

Why Colemak exists

Shai Coleman released Colemak on 1 January 2006. Dvorak had shown that a layout could put most of your typing on the home row, but it moves 24 of the 26 letters, undo, cut, copy and paste included, so a QWERTY typist starts again almost from nothing. Colemak goes after most of the benefit for much less relearning.

It changes 17 keys and leaves the rest of QWERTY alone. Q, W, A, H, Z, X, C, V, B and M stay where they are, and so does the punctuation, apart from the semicolon. Only E and P change hands, and most other letters are a key or two from their QWERTY spot; E, P and Y travel furthest. The home row reads A R S T D H N E I O: the eight commonest letters in English, E T A O I N S R, plus D and H. About three quarters of the letters in ordinary English text land on it, against about a third on QWERTY.

Shortcuts and Caps Lock

This is Colemak's best practical argument. Z, X, C and V are untouched, so undo, cut, copy and paste stay under your left hand, and so do Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W. Colemak's FAQ says this was deliberate: the left hand works the shortcuts while the right holds the mouse. Save, find and print do move, with S on the key QWERTY calls D, F on E and P on R, but all three stay on the left hand.

The official layout also turns Caps Lock into a second Backspace. You need Backspace far more often than Caps Lock, and your left little finger reaches it without moving your hand. On a Mac this takes an extra step, which colemak.com explains.

Is it worth switching?

colemak.com says your fingers travel 2.2 times as far on QWERTY. That measures distance, not speed, and the site itself warns that a few very fast Colemak typists prove little. The speed case rests on calculations and on individual typists, not on controlled trials. The stronger reasons are comfort and cost. If you already touch type on QWERTY and want most of your typing on the home row, Colemak asks you to relearn fewer keys than Dvorak or Workman, and your shortcuts survive.

Switching your computer to Colemak

The first weeks

Colemak's FAQ is frank that the first few days are frustrating. You can switch in one go, or ease in with Tarmak, a set of in-between layouts from the Colemak community: four steps, each moving three or four more keys, before full Colemak. CamelKeys has no Tarmak setting, so its Colemak lessons fit best once you have made the full switch. Either way, practise a little every day, keep your accuracy high and don't look down. The keycaps still say QWERTY, so looking only misleads you.

Practising Colemak on CamelKeys

Switch your computer to Colemak first, because CamelKeys does not remap keys. Then choose Colemak under Keyboard layout in Settings, or use the button on this page, which opens the lessons with Colemak already chosen. The lessons, the keyboard drawn under each test and the finger counts in your results then follow Colemak.

The lessons take the same 26 steps as on QWERTY: T and N under your index fingers first, then S and E, R and I, A and O, and finally D and H in the middle. After those five you can type “there”, “other”, “street” and “and” without leaving the home row. Typing tests are the normal ones, in any language; choosing Colemak changes only how your keys and fingers are counted. When the home row feels easy, take the English typing test and look at which keys slowed you down.

Sources

• colemak.com: the home page, “Easy to learn”, the FAQ, and the Windows and Mac pages.
• Microsoft, “Windows keyboard layouts”, which lists Colemak for Windows 11.
• Colemak forum, the Tarmak transitional layouts.
• P. Norvig, “English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited”.
• Google, Chromebook Help and Gboard Help; Android Police on Android 14 keyboards, 2023; xkeyboard-config, the keyboard layout data used by Linux desktops.