THE BIG BAG THEORY

INTRO

My mission is to make your keyboard a lot more comfortable and powerful, even if you don't have an expensive programmable board. To this end, I use the Colemak layout with several ergonomic mods and additions that I and others have created over the years, on different OS platforms. These "tricks" are what this Big Bag is about.

If you're new to this, there may be a lot of unfamiliar terms and concepts! You may not be sure whether your board or OS layout is ISO or ANSI, row-staggered or ortho – or something else. And what on earth are dead keys, ergo mods or Extend layers?! Relax and take a deep breath please, because it's all here. I hope you find what you're looking for and then a lot more useful stuff!

If something is too obscure or hard, look up the community on the Colemak Forum and Discord. We're a right helpful lot! The BigBag is my go-to reply to many questions on the Discord and elsewhere, to the extent that a meme was created in my honor. Be warned...!

Meme:

Created by Poltergeist at the Colemak Discord, 2020-09-29

Colemak is a wonderful keyboard layout that I and many others use daily with great enthusiasm. It may – and in all likelihood, it will! – make you a faster typist, although you can get very fast with other layouts too. More importantly, it makes typing a lot more comfortable and optimal, and your fingers will thank you for the rest of your life for choosing it!

   (b￣◇￣)b

Since I started using using Colemak in early 2007 I've been fiddling with it, trying out ideas from the Colemak forum and adding some of my own. Colemak per se is to me only the letter block mappings. I've always ended up with that mostly intact and it has stood the test of time: Even though the Colemak-DH mod has a lot of traction these days, it's still just a minor adjustment to vanilla Colemak and I consider them the same basic layout at heart. If you look at the ergonomic mods described here you'll see that I'm somewhat flexible about geometry – but in reality that's about the physical keyboard design and a better hand position. The layout itself stays essentially the same.

And so, voila, here it is! Have a look inside the Big Bag and see what you'll find!

DreymaR  ~  ( のvの) c[_]

DREYMAR'S BIG(!) BAG OF TRICKS?!? HALP, I'M NEW HERE!

Welcome to the new BigBag pages! The old pages are still found in the BigBag topic at the Colemak Forum, but they are fairly outdated by now. These new pages should contain the important bits, in an up-to-date state, but if you're missing anything it may still be found by a stroll around the Forum Colemakum.

Inside this Big Bag there's a lot you can do in addition to learning Colemak! Some of it doesn't even require Colemak. So, this is a little beginner's introduction to the wonders of layout modding: What are your main options, and what's good to begin with?

If any of this interests you right away, click the menus or submenus to continue exploring the Big Bag!

• Tarmak Learning Layouts:
  • This is a set of learning layouts for learning Colemak in 2–5 smaller steps.
  • Tarmak allows a much smoother and less taxing transition from QWERTY, although it may take longer.
  • While you will lose speed at each new step, you'll regain it a lot faster because the step is small.

"Tarmak seems dumb. Isn't it both faster and less confusing to learn Colemak cold turkey?"

Tarmak Or Turkey, Sir?

If you have the time and energy for it, it's probably faster to learn Colemak cold turkey. But not easier, I think.

Tarmak is ideal for those who can't afford a huge hit to productivity, even for a week or so. But many others have been very pleased with it too, because as mentioned it is much less taxing to learn a small step at a time than to learn everything all at once. And the one letter (J) that gets put in the wrong positions is rare in English so it won't bother you much.

There are other tacks, such as QWERTY-by-day, Colemak-by-night. Or learning with Tarmak without installing it – see the Training page. Find the one that works for you!



• Extend:
  • This mod lets you navigate, edit and more without moving your hands.
  • It's every bit as brilliant as Colemak itself, and independent of your typing layout!
  • Please note that while Extend is technically "just" a layer with a modifier, it's a lot more powerful than your typical Fn key layer!
  • One of its greatest strengths is the possibilities arising from chording home row modifiers with navigation/editing and other keys.
  • If you want even more power, on some platforms you can add Extend-tapping for nearly endless possibilities.

"I think I'll learn <Layout-of-Choice> first, before I bother with layers like Extend...?"

Extending Can Wait?

Do yourself a favor, and start with Extend right away! Extend can be very useful with even a minimal investment, and it just keeps growing on you thereafter as you keep discovering new tricks.

You could learn to Extend before you learn a new layout like Colemak, during, or after; all platform implementations let you do that.

See the Extend Extra Extreme page if you still need convincing.



• Angle/Wide ergo mods:
  • These ergonomic mods are also basically layout independent. QWERTY-AngleWide is definitely possible.
  • They make your standard row-staggered keyboard more like an ergonomically designed board.
  • The Angle mod is simple, especially on an ISO keyboard:
    Slide ZXCVB one step to the left, keep your fingering but straighten your left wrist. Comfy!
  • If you have an US/ANSI keyboard, you must make a tradeoff:
    Moving the Z key back to the old B position ("Angle-Z") is the most common solution.
  • The Wide mod is quite simple on any standard keyboard:
    Slide the right-hand keys one step to the right, improving hand distance and thumb/pinky reaches. Neat!
  • These are "hard" geometric mods. You could even change the physical key caps to Angle/Wide positions if possible.
    My partner typed QWERTY-AngleWide without trouble, without thinking about it.


• Colemak-DH alias the Curl(DH) ergo mod:
  • A Colemak-specific mod. Moving the common D and H down makes them easier to reach with lightly curled, relaxed fingers!
  • Some dislike the lateral index finger stretches to the "middle trench" so much, they made new but inferior(!) layouts to change this.
  • As an example, the very common HE bigram requires such an inward stretch followed by a rapid repositioning.
  • Colemak-DH achieves the same as these layouts without losing any of Colemak's excellent performance stats.
  • There is a tweaked Tarmak progression for Colemak-DH if you want to learn it step-by-step.


• Colemak[eD]:
  • This mostly affects you if you'll be using the AltGr key (RAlt as a layer key), as it's about the extra mapping layers on each key.
  • Vanilla Colemak has several AltGr mappings, but they seem incomplete, unintuitive and not really practical to me.
  • My [edition DreymaR] mappings place useful symbols and letters quite intuitively.
  • Further symbols/letters are on dead keys that all reside on symbol keys with AltGr.
  • EPKL for Windows has a huge bunch of glyphs/symbols in its dead key layers!
    Linux DKs are generally quite well populated but not to the same extent.
    For other platforms, I haven't got any rich DK solutions I'm afraid.
  • If you use any of my Big Bag files you'll mostly get Colemak[eD] AltGr mappings, or VK mappings without any shift states added.
  • The [eD] mappings and dead keys can of course be used with other layouts too! But some placements may be less intuitive then.


• Compose:
  • There is another awesome input method called Compose that I'd like to mention!
  • Defining a key as a Compose key lets you input advanced stuff using sequences, such as a then ' with Compose for á.
  • I didn't stop there though, and realized that pretty much anything can be made with Compose sequences.
  • Example: It's easier to compose the mnemonic sequence "work" than to figure out where I put a string of glyphs like
      🕘 🏢 🕔.
  • The Compose method is native to Linux/XKB, and EPKL for Windows has a powerful and readily modifiable Compose method.


• Locale/script layouts:
  • If you use other languages than US English, you may want certain special letters, accents and symbols readily available.
  • I've devised lots of Locale Colemak layers. For some languages, there may be several different solutions.
  • Also, there are several layers for non-Latin scripts like Greek and Kyrillic letters, with Hebrew and Arabic coming up.
  • The script variants are for the most part phonetically mapped to Colemak, with clever solutions for the special ones.
  • The different platforms don't all have the same selection available. You could try asking (nicely) if you're missing a variant.


• Typing training:
  • If you're interested in learning the Colemak layout or just getting faster with it, check out the Training page!
  • It contains various learning/training methods and tools, and useful tips from the experts.
  • Whether you want to focus hard, type-read books or simply play your way to layout proficiency, it's covered here.

HOWS

I use my own edition of Farkas Máté's excellent Portable Keyboard Layout – EPKL – to implement the Big Bag for Windows. For Linux, I've hacked up a bunch of modifications to the X.Org XKB files. Then I got me a USB-2-USB "QUICKIE" converter and implemented much of my tricks for that too; they should work for most programmable controllers. I'm pretty proud of it all, I must say!

To see platform-specific implementation info, select a platform icon from the menu above or from the purple lines/boxes themselves. Try it on the one below!

An advantage with my implementation is that in most cases you can pick and choose most of the enhancements as modules:

• The Angle/Wide ergo mods are models/remaps so they work with any layout you choose (including QWERTY or Dvorak ones) and may be chosen per user
• The Extend layers and their switch key are options that should work with nearly any existing layout
• The locale/phonetic, Mirrored and Tarmak layouts are separate layout layers

Freedom of choice through modularity is an ideal in the DreymaR world, as it is in Linux.

My Unicomp SpaceSaver Buckling Spring (IBM Model M ISO type) keyboard with "American/Ninja" caps, splendidly sporting the Colemak-CAWS layout.

LASTLY:

Best of luck with Colemak and its many marvelous mods!    ♪～╰(＊°▽°＊)╯～♪
If you do get stuck, here's a little light entertainment to hopefully Shift your mo(o)d.