viduranga / ColemakDHJK

Sensible Minimum Colemak DH Fork for vim users

Colemak DHJK

Why?

Colemak DHJK is a sensible variation of the Colemak DH layout which makes two key changes.

1. The original Colemak DH layout places J key on the top row and K key on the bottom row. While this is completely fine for regular use, when you are a vim user, this feels very counter intuitive. It makes much more sense to have J key (which is line down key in vim) on the bottom row; and to have K key (which is the line up key in vim) on the top row. Colemak DHJK does exactly this by swapping the J and K keys on Colemak DH layout

2. Most developers favour snake_case_variable_names over kebab-case-variable-names. Because of thes, _ character is much more utilized than - character. So Colemak DHJK swapps these two key invocations. _ will be triggered on a normal keypress and - will be triggered when Shift + _ is pressed. This has the added benifit of + key and - key being on the same Shift + layer.

Why not?

Why not change the keybindings in Vim instead of inventing a new layout?

It's not just Vim, lot more power user apps like LazyGit, LazyDocker, NNN uses JKLH keybinding for navigations. It becomes a real hassle and in some situations impossible to change all these app configs

Why not change a lot more and bring JKLH keys back to the home row?

If we change the layout a lot, it will lose all the things that make Colemak DH such a perfect layout.

How to install?

1. Download the Colemak DHJK.bundle file from the repository
2. Copy the file to /Library/Keyboard Layouts directory
3. Open System Preferences -> Language and Region. Click the Keyboard Preferences button at the bottom.
   • Click the Input Sources tab at the top.
   • Click the + (plus) sign at the bottom left to ‘add a keyboard layout’.
   • Find the Colemak DHJK layout from the right hand side and click add.
   • The layout is now ready to use.
4. To access the layout, click on the flag icon in your menubar. Select the Colemak DHJK layout from the list.