# kbd: my experience with the ergodox keyboard with the norman layout

for a very long time i was using a very standard us keyboard with a us layout. it was a das keyboard with the cherry mx brown switches. i bought it about 10 years ago and it still works perfectly. i average about 80 wpm on it. i got the blank keycap version so that i forced myself to not look at the keys. i never learned proper typewriting, so my typing style was whatever that evolved from only using hunt and peck.

but one thing was bugging me: the qwerty layout wasn't designed with efficiency or ergonomics in mind. the staggered rows was annoying me most -- i was really inaccurate for the non-main row keys. so about 8 years ago i learned about ergodox and thought maybe i should try switching to that. the design of that had at least some thought in it. and if i switch i might as well ditch the qwerty layout for something that also had some effort in it. but i never made the switch. i think one of the big reasons was price. it's quite expensive and i would need two: one for work, one for home. but now that most of the tech world switched to wfh, my excuse sort of evaporated, and i could no longer resist the temptation. i got one from ergodox-ez since i didn't want to build my own.

then i had to pick a new keyboard layout too. there were many to choose from: dvorak, colemak, workman, norman, etc. i went with the norman one since that seemed the newest one. and has incorporated the lessons of the previous ones and improved on them.

so i got my ergodox and i installed norman on it. the first few days were miserable. i had less than 10 wpm with it. every keypress needed several seconds of deliberation since i didn't know where the keys were by instinct. i didn't have any muscle memory. it was frustrating to have my thoughts buffered up in my mind, yet i couldn't express them, just very slowly. that actually changed my thinking a little bit temporarily: i thought and coded in a way that required less typing from me. i don't remember how it was different though, i didn't make notes about this.

the nice thing about ergodox is that is super configurable. it has an online configurator where you can set up the keys to do whatever you want. if that's not enough, then technically you could build your own firmware, but i never reached that point. i played a lot with the settings and the key placements. first, i put space on those big thumb keys, but then later i realized it's better if it's on a closer key. i also moved the ; key away from it's default position in norman. i use that key surprisingly often in the vim and tmux context, often with a modifier (in tmux) so i thought it's better on a big fat key.

i also experimented with its autoshift feature. the idea is that if you hold down a key long enough (175 ms by default) then you get the shifted version. the downside is that you can't keep a key held down for an autorepeat. though this can be worked around by disabling autoshift in other layers. i tried using this for a while. i only enabled it for the number row and the symbols. i liked the idea i could type anything without the shift. but i never managed to get the timing right so i made a lot of typos and later i felt it was slowing me down, so i eventually disabled this feature.

but the idea of the autoshift still intrigues me somewhat. i wish there were tactile switches with two levels. if you pressed down harder, then the other switch would activate. so a light press would trigger '4', a hard press would trigger '$'. it's a bit tricky but i think it's not impossible to implement this. on the other hand it might be a be bad idea. one would need to watch their pressure this way too and thus it might end up just a net drag over the long term. but still, it's an interesting idea.

anyways, for reference, here's my current keyboard layout: @/kbdl. i'll keep this up do date as i further change my layout.

i started using a few online tools to track my wpm. every morning i measured my speed and looked at the improvement rate. i even used sites like keybr.com to improve my improvement rate. my improvement rate was about 10 wpm per week for the first 4 weeks. so i could reach about 50 wpm on a good day after a month. the progress since then is much slower. i'm still at around 60 wpm currently.

huge gains in wpm wasn't even my primary goal. i think at the 70-80 range, the typing speed stops mattering, since i can't think fast enough to go at it other than for short bursts. however my goal was to improve my accuracy. i had a feeling that i'm a bit inaccurate on qwerty, and i suspected it was because the illogical staggered layout. but i'm quite inaccurate on my ergodox too. well, it's partly because of the new layout, but even as i got familiar with it, i still make a lot of mistakes, and then i have to retype a lot. this is actually what currently tanks my wpm.

i was hoping the online tools could improve this. but all of them are super forgiving when it comes to typos. they let you go back and fix your mistakes. what i really wanted is something that really drills correct writing. i haven't found one so i started thinking of making my own tool. i wanted an interface that shows me one specific text, and keeps me practicing on that singular text until i master it. this reminded me of the trackmania game from nadeo. it's a car racing game where you get an elaborate track, and you have race through it in as little time as possible. you then get a bronze/silver/gold medal based on your performance. it can even show you your replay in the form of a ghost car. i wanted to have something like this just for typing. i tried searching for "typemania". it had a lot of results but nothing useful. so i decided to make my own html5 game and called it peckmania in order to bypass all the bad results in case someone else is looking for this too.

the resulting game is at @/peckmania.

although trackmania lets you make mistakes and has checkpoints i didn't add support for backspacing to delete the last character/word. i guess i could make something like that, but i didn't bother. i want to be able to learn to type long sentences without mistakes, so i want to make the game as punishing as possible. otherwise i won't learn to slow down to my still accurate writing speed. if i can master this, i could then write even with closed eyes!

i also liked the medal and the ghostcar features in trackmania, so i implemented ranking and typeline. the biggest rank is for 100 wpm. nobody needs to be faster than that anyways. for reference 100 wpm is about 8.3 characters per second. it's quite insane and some people can do even 150 wpm with ease. the typeline is a visualization of a typing run: it displays which key was pressed at which time on a horizontal timeline. you could technically see which sections or combinations were fast or slow.

initially i wasn't sure how will i implement the typeline. i was thinking of a fancy graphical rendering logic using the html5 canvas. but one needs to be very careful to make that look good on all resolutions. after a lot of thinking on how to make it all look nice, i decided i should just stick to black and white text. that's super simple to deal with. implementing fancy graphics can take ages and i'd never finish then. but sticking to a barebones ui allowed me to actually finish all the important features, even if they are all presented in a somewhat non-traditional interface. but at least i completed something.

i'm glad i stuck to black and white text because i can now easily use the whole thing on a monochrome monitor. yes, i'm using a special monochrome eink monitor right now and i have lot of pent up sadness about the state of accessibility on the web, but let me save those for a later post.

when i started on peckmania, i still had two keyboards connected to my primary machine, hence i added support for "save slots". so if anybody else is in a similar situation, they can switch between the slots to track their progress on the different keyboards or layouts separately.

i also wanted to make it easy to experiment with different texts, so i made it easy to import a completely custom level set. i even included a few default ones like german, hungarian, programming. but one can just simply change the text after the hash in the url bar and can train on any text they can enter there.

peckmania saves all the results locally. just like how in old games it was easy to move savedata around, i wanted to have a similar usability feature here too. in the old days the games put things into files but that is a bit hard in the age of the browsers. i realized that one could just simply use the clipboard for this. so i just added event listeners for the clipboard events and manipulated those for the export/import features. i think it's quite neat, maybe this sort of pattern should be more common in the world. i ensured that all the data is simple text, so it's very easy for the users to move it around, or even track it in a version control system if they wished so. if they do that they could even build some custom stats over time.

anyways, my point is that i think i added all the important features i wished and now i can pretty much consider this little game as done. all i need to do now is to practice with it and see if my accuracy improves over time or now. we'll see.

anyways, back to ergodox. initially i experienced some slight discomfort in my thumbs. that lasted quite a few weeks as i was using it. but now that i got used to the keyboard, it's not really there anymore. i think moving the spaces to closer keys helped. that thumb block is really not for such a common key like space. i also feel that on a standard keyboard some keys are easier to reach. the middle fat keys still feel a bit unnatural to press. but maybe with time this will also improve. otherwise, now that i'm getting used to it, i start liking my ergodox. i wouldn't really recommend it for average users, but if you spend all your day in front of a computer in a static corner, i think it might worth a try. but don't be discouraged with the few weeks of reduced productivity until you reach back the same throughput as with an ordinary keyboard. just keep practicing with it.

as for the norman layout: i think it's a good layout once i got the hang of it. more stuff on the main row makes it easier to type english text for me. and i didn't lose all my qwerty skills either. after a few minutes of qwerty typing my brain switches back into qwerty mode and i can type the same as before, maybe with a bit higher typo rate. i don't do qwerty on the ergodox though. i think having two completely different keyboard helps with this switching. but one needs to regularly practice the switching otherwise one is likely to forget about the other layout.

however i still have a lot of trouble when it comes to writing symbols. i guess that's partly because i didn't practice those as much as english. but hopefully with time i'll catch up on those too.

i also didn't remap any vim, tmux or i3 keys. navigating in those became a bit painful but i sort of got the hang of it eventually.

in summary: currently i'm experiencing lower speed and higher typo rate, but at least my curiosity is sated, doesn't bug me anymore. so overall i'm glad i tried the switch and looks like i'll be using my norman ergodox for a while to see if i can get back to a similar performance long term. but this is just my stockholm syndrome speaking so take it with a grain of salt.

and remember, if peckmania is something that you'd like to try, it's at @/peckmania.

edit: i keep some progress data at @/kbdlog.

# update after 8 months:

after 1 month i've reached 50 wpm. after 3 months i've reached 60 wpm. the progress is very slow after that. after 10 months i'm still around 70 wpm with an accuracy about 98%.

what i did is that every morning i measured my speed on these two sites:

but the text was quite random and they were very forgiving when it came to typos. i decided to ditch them and focus solely on peckmania. now i even uploaded a full short story into it, press d1 to switch to it. i'll be typing one line a day and see how that goes. i think that will give me more value over time because i can practice on the same text over and over again even over multiple days if deem that i type a line too slow. i almost managed to finish all the main english lines at 80 wpm with perfect accuracy, some taking multiple attempts over multiple days. there's no point rushing this: i did notice that i can type the same text much faster the next day. i just need to give each line one or two decent attempts each day. i think the text randomness was slowing my progress down. we'll see. in any case i'll no longer track my speed so my morning ritual becomes simpler. the tracking overhead was annoying me anyways.

another edit: i've pretty much reached a plateau and can't seem to reach my normal qwerty keyboard speed on my norman ergodox. even if switch back to qwerty, i become faster and more accurate on it.

i think on a non-split keyboard i'm more efficient at combos. both of my hands can reach any key so it's not uncommon that i use both of my hands to press keys on the same half to type in some harder expressions faster especially when coding.

but still, i think speed is not that important to me. i really like the splitness of the ergodox so i might stick with it even if i'll never reach my old wpm and accuracy.

# update after ~4 years (2024-07-01):

i give up. i'm switching back to my good old qwerty keyboard from daskeyboard.

it's time to quit, sunken costs be damned. :(

published on 2020-10-07, last modified on 2024-07-01

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