200 WPM - Final Reflection on Semimak

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Style Pass

2024-10-08 20:00:03

In less than a year of using Semimak, I hit 200 words per minute on it. On my previous layouts the highest I had gotten was 160 wpm, so this is a big achievement for me. It also means that I'm the first and only person to have achieved 200 wpm on their own layout!1 Given this milestone, I thought I should write a little bit about my experience getting here and my final thoughts on the layout.

Semimak is a great layout… well, for me at least! This definitely makes sense, given it was designed around problems that I identified with my experience in other layouts, and it was closely modeled around my personal finger dexterity. If there is anything we should be able to agree on in keyboard layouts, it's that what is "good" is entirely subjective. People have different hands. They have different ideas of what is comfortable, and different physical limits. My ring and pinky fingers are more capable than many, while my middle fingers can be considered pretty slow. Therefore, it's likely that my layout won't be the best experience for a lot of people, despite being great for me!

This idea probably could have been communicated better given that in August of 2020, we held a month-long tournament with an $850 prize pool to see who could learn the layout the fastest.2 This likely gave many people the impression that Semimak was the "best layout", despite such a thing, of course, not existing. Be skeptical of anyone who claims their layout to be "objectively" better than other layouts. I will not name names, but if someone claims that their layout has 130% higher "efficiency" than another layout, they probably don't know what they're talking about. And it's not a meaningful metric that you should pay attention to.