Home-row typing is really great, aLMost all of the time.
This is a collection of hard-to-type same-finger bigram (and some trigram) words.
These are your primary enemies:
hj hk hl hm hn jk jl jm jn kl km kn lm ln mn
jh kh lh mh nh kj lj mj nj lk mk nk ml nl mn
sc cs fs sf fc cf rw wr rx xr qa za ue eu iy yi
The goal is to never use the same finger twice in succession … ’cuz that maKEs you slow (and uncomfortable!). And if you ever wanna beat Sean Wrona in a typing contest and tell him to his face that colemak rulez!, you gotta get that 1.52% down to 0%! (among other UNLIKELY things)
This even covers “shifting” as you might do on a piano. Eg, try typing some of these: helm, acknowledge, wrinkly. Not great, huh? Well, it turns out there are a lot of nasty colemak words LIKE these. But the good news is that it’s not that many! And you can train them all into your hands in probably a couple weeks until the patterns become automatic. And bam, you’re wearing the world-champion co-Wrona!
There are some particularly nasty words LIKE ploying and unkempt that just taKE a lot of practice of the shifts.
But a lot of the words are pretty easy and are natural “SCrunches”,
LIKE scriptwriter, featuring three! scrunches in a single word: sc pt wr. (Can you figure out how to SCrunch them??) Although
“slide-downs” sound nice in theory, I don’t find them possible, so I
thINK we should stick to vertical SCrunching.
The words in this file collection can be loaded into typing practice tools, LIKE https://www.keybr.com
Some diSCussion: https://forum.colemak.com/topic/2642-practice-with-altfloatingsamefinger-bigram-combos/
The words in these practice lists are taKEN from the OED (I thINK, but source really doesn’t matter).
All same-finger permutations with more than ~10 semi-common words are in files of the respective names. Others LIKE hk and jk are basically non-existent. You can get away with skipping tiny files LIKE ln.lst.
There is also a programming file of oddball names LIKE mkfs that
are tricksy.
The best file for training is best.lst, containting ~100 words that have multiple odd patterns in a single word, LIKE dEUtSCHMark (they’re mostly English :P). The file is sorted by patterns, so It’s probably best to take sections of 10-20 words at a time to load into your trainer.
❯ echo `shuf tb.lst`
hatbox eastbound outbuilding ratbag paintbox …That randomizes the list and puts them on a single line. Now you can load them into your favorite typing tutor.
Since fingerstyle guitar already has a convention for referring to index, middle, ring, and pINKY, let’s stick with it: “I M A X”.
The following might be all you need to practice to conqUEr all the trigrams. However, these are quite difficult to work though altogether; typing them as parts of words is easier.
ken
kel
kne
key
ink
enk
unk
ulm
uln
ulken
unl
unmi
uen
uen
fsc
mne
helm
enj
inj
enli
inme
dbr
onke
like
lunk
keu
lke
lumny
nly
It’s not obvious that like is a bad word. However, l and k are so
awkward/slow for your index that you can improve it with your first
full shift by typing: l(M) i(X) k(I) e(A)
helm becomes: h(I) e(A) l(M) m(I)
key becomes: k(I) e(A) y(X)
Don’t bother with the hm combo. It’s rare and requires lookahead.
What’s that, this is a total waste? You might be right. Most people probably don’t care about tuning an already amazing layout. But no layout can be perfect – without some hacks. And that’s what these are, but they should actually speed you up if you really wanna up your game (after you down it yet again).
But seriously, these are cool, and I don’t see any harm in using them. They don’t maKE otheRWise normal words worse. They actually maKE your fingers more comfortable and spry for a little more learning effort. Imagine a pianist never leaving C-position. That’s what you’ve been … till now.
ENJoy!