KeyZen Colemak-DH

About

This project was inspired by KeyZen Colemak, which was implemented by Josh Kaufman, and featured in his The First 20 Hours book (one of his personal challenges is to learn Colemak in 20 hours in which he succeeded).

Kaufman's project is based on KeyZen which has numerous changes since he cloned it. So, I've used the original KeyZen repo and based my fork from it and added features/improvements that I think were lacking. Personally, I use this everyday upon waking up to strengthen my grasp of the entire alphabet since most of the time I practice on common letters only (i.e. bigrams, trigrams, Top 200 words, etc).

Aside from my added features, I modified also the default sound files for correct/incorrect keys for better user experience, and updated the jQuery library to latest version since the bundled version is 10 years old already. This will make it easier for others to extend the code.

Features

• Character sequences are generated randomly, new letters are introduced as your level increases. Home row, top row, then bottom row.
• If you commit mistakes, the letters will be reintroduced again to maximize training.
• Characters could be reset/skipped by clicking on it.
• Intensity/rigor could be adjusted.
• Speed/accuracy stats are displayed.
• There's a timer once you start typing to keep track your progress, or for better planning.
• Useful for beginners to familiarize the keys.
• Useful for experienced ones to strengthen their weaknesses (e.g. specific letters, capital letters, punctuations, etc).
• Keyboard layout could be chosen. Colemak-DH (angle mod) is the default/recommended.
• Keyboard layout images are displayed accordingly as a handy reference.
• QWERTY is included for legacy purposes and for promoting touch typing to people.
• Custom layout/limited set of characters could be specified (specific punctuations, numbers, capitalized letters, etc).

Hosted Version

If you're online, you could access it here: https://ranelpadon.github.io/keyzen-colemak-dh/

Local Version/Installation

If you're offline, or GitHub Pages is not accessible, or want to modify some parts and run it locally, you could easily do that using a local web server. Here are samples using the mainstream Python/PHP utilities:

1. Download the repo and unzip it in your local.

2. Go to the unzipped folder, and start the local server.

   • Python
     • Python 2
       • python -m SimpleHTTPServer
     • Python 3
       • python3 -m http.server
   • PHP
     • php -S 0.0.0.0:8000

3. Go to http://0.0.0.0:8000 in your browser.