I learned to touch-type when online chatrooms were all the new rage and type now fast enough to transcribe live speech nearly error-free. QWERTZ is what I’ve been taught, the standard layout rooted in the type-writer era, not made for humans, but for machines. After more than 20 years, it’s time to take care of the human.

Bone Training

In daily life, I type German 40 percent, English 60 percent of the time or vice versa, depending on the context, and do a lot of coding. Trained on DE-CH QWERTY, I therefore wanted a keyboard layout based on German. I quickly found the Neo layout and decided to go for the Bone layout, since it’s an improvement on Neo.

Training on the new layout required some research, since Bone is not widely known and targets German-speaking regions. KTouch is a freely available touch-type trainer that also includes the Bone layout. Unfortunately, I’m frequently on the road and do not have my Linux machine on hand, so I quickly abandoned the idea.

Fortunately, there’s Tipp10: It’s an online service to learn all sorts of keyboard layouts, including Bone. It’s free, donation-based, and has a great range of trainings. If you ever need to learn a new layout, go for Tipp10 - it works perfectly, even while tethering on the train, and offers all you need. Consider a donation if you use it, since it’s free and running such a service requires a tremendous amount of work.

I’ve been now devoting around ten to fifteen minutes a day practicing the new layout for roughly a month and estimate it will take another month to use it fluently. Practice, as always, is key, and I force myself to write as many blog posts with the new layout as possible, until my patience runs out. Some observations:

Typing English and German require different practice. My Tipp10 exercises are in German, and as soon as I start typing English, I’m back a couple of squares.
I love the Bone layout, it fits my linguist sense and helps memorizing key positions:
- Vowels all in one place (left)
- Some consonant families are neighbors: f and v (frikative labio-dentals), d and t (plosive alveolars), k and g (plosive velars)
- Mirroring of common pairs on fingers: s and t on right and left ring fingers
Common (German) words can all by typed with minimal effort
Good balance between left and right hands
Works for English as well

All in all the switch requires time and patience, but I’m glad I’ve started this journey into mechanical keyboards and new layouts. My hands, wrists and arms perform the equivalent of athletic high-performance sports typing roughly 42 hours a week. It’s time they are treated better than by way of QWERTZ and a run-of-the-mill keyboard.

Last modified on 2022-06-29