I remember like it was yesterday when I bought my first mechanical keyboard. I must have been around 10 years old and was excited to finally be a real gamer. I would use it to play Minecraft all the time and started to love typing on it.

My interest in typing grew from seeing my brother play a typing game called Nitro Type. My interest only grew and grew while I was practicing my typing on Nitro Type or I was trying to type in the Minecraft multiplayer chat as fast as possible.

My progress when I was 10, in 2014. (dip is letting family type on my account)

As you can see from the graph, not only my love for typing increased but my speed as well. I was starting to get the hang of it. I was racing people and trying to get faster all the time, but there was one problem; my typing technique was not efficient.

As I was typing so often, I eventually developed a perfect touch typing ability and reached speeds of up to 130 wpm. However, I was still only typing with about 6 of my fingers on average. Sometimes, depending on previous letters typed, I would use a different finger than usual to type a letter because that previous character caused my hands to slightly shift along the keyboard. This was because I had no set position which will later cause me some problems as you will find out. I was really good at this adjustment though and got used to it, but this caused me a major headache for my future typing.

I was ready to keep on increasing my speed. I would occasionally come across videos seeing people type above 200 wpm. I wanted to be able to do that too! Unfortunately, whenever I tried to increase my speed, my accuracy took major hits because of my unique typing habits. I was unable to progress my typing speed.

There was another problem I had as well which may have been the tipping stone for me. Typing was becoming uncomfortable, especially for longer periods of time. I could not type long papers for school without having to take breaks due to serious discomfort. I believe this was caused mainly because of my bad typing technique, but also by using the default qwerty layout on my keyboard. I read a lot about this topic and watched several videos gathering opinions and came to the conclusion that my layout can be one of the main causes of my discomfort in typing.

When comparing the qwerty layout to more modern typing layouts designed for maximum home row usage and efficiency, the results are obvious that typing on the default keyboard layout only makes your fingers have to do more work. This is when I decided that using the Colemak-dh layout would be the best for me because it keeps a lot of the essential shortcuts in the same positions of the qwerty layout like cut, copy, paste, and undo and redo while making the adjustments of other commonly typed characters to be in more ergonomic positions.

• foostan's crkbd design files
• typeractive for providing a build kit