Like countless others, I learned Ruby on Rails (and a great deal more) from Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial. Though I haven’t kept up with all the changes in the most recent revisions, I know that back in 2012 things were a bit different. In particular, I learned that it was The Done Thing to eschew the testing framework that came with Rails in favor of RSpec, and to toss aside the fixtures library in favor of something called Factory Girl (since renamed Factory Bot). Now I believe Hartl has since abandoned much of that in preference to using only the things that come with Rails by default. I’m not that surprised - I recall this being a lot to learn all at once, and it felt awkward to be fighting from the outset the framework I was trying to learn - whose very ethos is the following of conventions it sets forth - before I could even grasp the nuances of why I might be doing this.

As influential as Hartl’s tutorial may have been, this change in the tide it seems has failed to make much of a splash in the Ruby community at large. I’ve only ever once collaborated on a Rails project that followed all of the conventions. Almost every project I’ve worked on professionally has been of the Rails/RSpec/Factory Bot variety. In this post I want to expose some of the assumptions underpinning these choices, and to question if these assumptions are still valid. I’ll also suggest that the Rails defaults are not merely a better choice for beginners, as Hartl indicates, but may be better for everyone all round.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the relative merits of RSpec. I think it is a fine testing framework, I’ve contributed to it, and I especially love its extensive expectations library, which I’ve also written about before. I also love Minitest. Though I’ve used it less, I am now using Minitest for all my new personal projects. I won’t say that one is better than the other. Maintainer Sam Phippen describes RSpec as a tool that “excels at testing legacy code”¹ and this bears out at least in my experience. I’d prefer to use RSpec to retrofit a test suite to a legacy codebase because of the ease with which you can reach through objects that are tightly coupled using the full flexibility that Ruby provides. I’d prefer to use Minitest for greenfield development precisely because of the resistance it provides to creating tightly coupled code in the first place.

Factory Bot, on the other hand, I think invites some scrutiny. thoughtbot sold Factory Bot entirely on the basis of addressing the Mystery Guest problem ². It trades on allowing you to write clearer tests at the expense of having to create and rollback every test fixture you need every time, starting every test with a pristine, blank database. This can be a major cause of test slowness, and it is worth pointing out that test slowness in general has been a common complaint for as long as I have been using Rails. You would think then that the Mystery Guest problem had better be a significant one for this to be a good trade off.

For anyone unfamiliar, the Mystery Guest problem is defined as follows:

The test reader is not able to see the cause and effect between fixture and verification logic because part of it is done outside the Test Method. ³

In a vanilla Rails application, this problem commonly manifests in the use of Rails’ persistent fixtures:

RSpec.describe User do
  it "has a full name" do
    expect(users(:alice).full_name).to eq("Alice Anderson")
  end
end

To the test reader, it’s not clear where the user’s full name comes from, or from what data it is derived. To contrast, with Factory Bot:

RSpec.describe User do
  it "has a full name" do
    user = create(:user, first: "Alice", last: "Anderson")

    expect(user.full_name).to eq("Alice Anderson")
  end
end

In this example it is immediately clear to the reader the relationship between the data that was passed to the fixture and the derived outcome of the full name text.

The Mystery Guest is an XUnit antipattern, and the use of factories facilitates a better XUnit pattern, namely the Four-Phase Test. The idea behind it is that every test should tell a story - one that has a beginning, a middle and an end (and sometimes an epilogue):

RSpec.describe User do
  it "can change address" do
    # setup
    user = create(:user)

    # exercise
    user.first = "Alice"
    user.last = "Anderson"

    # verify
    expect(user.full_name).to eq("Alice Anderson")

    # teardown
    user.destroy!
  end
end

Not all tests require all four phases, and can frequently omit some of the steps:

RSpec.describe User do
  it "can change address" do
    # setup
    user = create(:user, first: "Alice", last: "Anderson")

    # exercise
    # nothing to do here....

    # verify
    expect(user.full_name).to eq("Alice Anderson")

    # teardown
    # nothing to do here - the test framework takes care of tearing down fixtures
  end
end

It is only natural then that thoughtbot feel strongly that you should also follow other XUnit test patterns when you write your specs.⁴ The big problem here is that RSpec is not an XUnit-style test framework, and it is my observation that most people do not follow XUnit best practices, preferring to write highly idiomatic RSpec code instead:

RSpec.describe User do
  let(:first) { "Alice" }
  let(:last) { "Anderson" }
  subject(:user) { create(:user, first: first, last: last) }

  # 100s
  # of
  # lines
  # of
  # test
  # code

  describe "#full_name" do
    its(:full_name) { should eq("Alice Anderson") }
  end
end

As you can see, we have now thwarted our attempt at addressing the Mystery Guest problem simply by writing idiomatic RSpec code. It’s a particularly egregious example that can be mitigated to some degree but it’s clear that the Four-Phase Test pattern does not map neatly onto RSpec’s DSL. RSpec is not an XUnit test framework and it is not its goal to facilitate use of all the XUnit patterns.

If the authors of Factory Bot recommend that we discard parts of the RSpec DSL in the pursuit of more readable, XUnit-style tests, it is surprising that they did not recommend foremost the use of an XUnit test framework, such as Minitest, instead:

class TestUser < Minitest::Test
  def test_full_name
    user = create(:user, first: "Alice", last: "Anderson")

    assert_equal("Alice Anderson", user.full_name)
  end
end

This is arguably the most natural way to write this test in Minitest. Though it’s possible to muddle its readability there are far fewer opportunities to do so.

If then we find our test suites still rife with Mystery Guests in spite of using Factory Bot, we have gained nothing and only made our tests slower with all the extra overhead.

For this reason I recommend that if you want to use Factory Bot, to use it with an XUnit-style framework such as Minitest. It is much harder in my view to enforce the Four-Phase Test style in your organization when this goes against the grain of the RSpec DSL. I also recommend only using Factory Bot’s most basic features, avoiding for instance traits, which take details of the fixture setup away from the test body and abstract them into concepts defined in the factory definition - undercutting the original aim to eliminate the Mystery Guest problem.

Conversely, if you are not tied to using Factory Bot, consider using Rails’ fixtures instead. If you are already writing idiomatic RSpec and therefore most likely tolerating a certain amount of Mystery Guest pain, there is a good chance that you won’t feel any new discomfort by doing this alone. And your test suite will almost certainly be faster.

But honestly, why not Minitest and Rails’ fixtures? This is precisely the setup that Rails provides you with right from the moment you type rails new. It’s also the one that Michael Hartl teaches in his tutorial. It’ll make both learning Rails and onboarding people onto your project more accessible by reducing the number of things they have to learn just to get started. And it’s much simpler to be able to say that you follow all of the Rails conventions as you point to its documentation, than to have to explain all the individual choices you made when departing from the defaults. You’ll have faster tests, with less setup, because you won’t have to recreate the world for every integration test that you run. I don’t necessarily love everything about this approach. But that’s also true of other parts of Rails. And I still choose Rails because of the experience of ease I feel when I just follow the conventions that it has established. And that goes for writing tests too.

My experience right from starting with the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, through everything I’ve worked on professionally, has been that every project has had some variation of this complicated setup I learned back in 2012. If this is your experience too, I invite you to experiment in your next Rails project with the default test framework. Keep an open mind, play around with it, notice the differences, allow yourself to feel any of the pain points that come up (and perhaps any pleasant surprises) for yourself before evaluating. If you find yourself still preferring your bespoke setup, you may walk away with a richer understanding of the problems those tools were trying to address, and maybe you’ll write better tests for it. Or, like me, you may decide that whatever received wisdom we had back in 2012 doesn’t suit us as well in 2021, and it’s time for a change.

I turned the last page on the wonderful Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon last night.

I’ve been reading this for the best part of a year, and, in another sense, for over ten years (I was reading this book, stuffed with Greyhound tickets and other bookmark-shaped mementos, when I met my wife - though I lost the thread about 200 pages in, something I have done more than once before reading Pynchon - and I was approaching its final chapters on the day that she moved out).

This is the book that taught me how to read again, that demanded I slow down to take everything in, against the at times overwhelming feeling that I might never finish it, or that I was not smart enough to understand it. It’s been a hard lesson accepting my reading difficulties. Trying to change the way that I read has only done harm to my understanding and enjoyment of fiction, why I’ve barely read any in . . . the last ten years.

It’s hard too to imagine that a book could sustain my interest and stay alive in my memory and imagination for this long. But . . . it has. It’s frequently been hard work, and more than I could deal with at times, having no attention left to give it at the end of the day, sometimes for weeks at a time. But it’s always been rewarding.

Pynchon has the best prose of any author I’ve read that’s alive today (though please don’t judge that endorsement on the quality of mine), coupled with an indefatigable imagination, describing events both meticulously researched in historical detail yet somehow also populated with talking dogs, sentient chronometers, a golem, giant vegetables, ghosts, mechanical ducks, elves and gnomes and Popeye the Sailor Man. I thought it would never be over, and now it hurts to put it down.

Some years ago when I was living in an Ashram in rural Virginia, I met a wise, old man. I knew he was a wise, old man because he embodied certain stereotypes about wise, old men. First, he was a Gray-Bearded Yogi. Before this he was a New Yorker and a practicing Freudian Psychoanalyst. Sometimes he would say a lot of interesting and funny things, and at other times he would smile and nod and say nothing at all. I can’t remember if he ever stroked his beard.

One day he said to me, “Asoka,” (the name under which I was going at the time). “Asoka,” he said, “do you know what is the single driving force behind all our desires, motives and actions?” I thought about this for some time. I had my own ideas but, knowing he was a Freudian, suspected that the answer was going to be something to do with the libido.

“You probably suspect that the answer is going to be something to do with the libido,” he said. “But it’s not.” I listened patiently. “It’s the need … to be right.” I laughed. While I wasn’t totally surprised not to have got the right answer, this particular one for some reason blew me away. I wasn’t prepared. I had never framed human nature in those terms before.

I wouldn’t expect anyone else to have the same reaction. I suspect others would find this to be either obvious, banal, or plainly wrong, and if this is you, I don’t intend to convince you otherwise (there might be a certain irony in trying to do so). What I want to do instead is document what became for me a personal manifesto, and a lens through which I began to look at the world. As a lens, you are free to pick it up, take a look through it, and ultimately discard it if you wish. But I rather like it a lot.

What happened that day was really only the start of a long process. Eventually I would see that a preoccupation with being right was essentially an expression of power and that rectifying (from the Late Latin rectificare - to “make right”) was about exerting power over others. I would also see that this preoccupation had perhaps more to do with the appearance of being right, and that the cost of maintaining it would be in missed opportunities for learning. And I would also see that, while the rectification obsession was not a uniquely male problem, there seemed to be a general movement of rightness from that direction, and we would do well to examine that too.

I was the principle subject of my examination, and it has become a goal to continue to examine and dismantle the ways in which I assert “rightness” in the world.

A little bit about myself

Allegedly I come from a long line of know-it-alls. Unsurprisingly, it’s a behavior that passes down the male side of my family. Of course, I don’t really believe this is a genetic disposition, and it’s easy to see how this might work.

As a child I remember my family’s praising me for being ‘brainy’. They gave me constant positive feedback for being right. As long as I appeared to be right all the time I felt like I was winning. In actuality, though, I was losing. I learned to hide my ignorance of things so as never to appear wrong. I’ve spent most of my life missing answers to questions I didn’t ask. I became lazy, unconsciously thinking that my smarts would allow me to coast through life.

Once I left School, and with it a culture principally concerned with measuring and rewarding rightness, I had a hard time knowing how to fit in or do well. It would take years of adjustments before I felt any kind of success. Whenever something became hard, I’d try something new, and I was always disappointed to find that opportunities were not handed to me simply because I was ‘smart’. When I didn’t get into the top colleges I applied to it devastated me. I would later drop out of a perfectly good college, get by on minimum wage jobs when I was lucky enough even to have one, fail to understand why I didn’t get any of the much better jobs I applied for.

I stumbled upon a section in Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot that claimed that children who are praised for hard work will be more successful than those that are praised for correctness or cleverness (there is some research that supports this). It came as a small comfort to learn that I was not alone. More importantly, it planted in me a seed whose growth I continue to nurture today.

I still don’t fully grasp the extent to which these early experiences have shaped my thinking and my behavior, but I have understood it well enough to have turned things around somewhat, applied myself, and have some awareness of my rectifying behavior, even if I can’t always anticipate it.

It is one thing to intervene in your own actions toward others, to limit your own harmful behavior. It is quite another when dealing with the dynamics of a group of people all competing for rightness. What I’m especially interested in currently is the fact that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such a high concentration of people who are utterly driven by the need to be right all the time as in the tech industry.

Let’s look at some of the different ways that being right has manifest itself negatively in the workplace.

On Leadership and Teamwork

There is a well-known meme about the experience of being a programmer, and it looks like this:

There is some truth to this illustration of the polarization of feelings felt through coding. However, it is all too common for individuals to wholly identify with one or the other. On the one side we have our rock stars, our 10x developers and brogrammers. On the other we have people dogged by imposter syndrome. In reality, the two abstract states represent a continuous and exaggerated part of us all. Having said that, I believe that everyone is in the middle, but much closer to the second state than the first. All of us.

In my personal experience I have felt a strong feeling of camaraderie when I’m working with people who all humbly admit they don’t really know what they’re doing. This qualification is important - nobody is saying they are truly incompetent, just that there are distinct limits to their knowledge and understanding. There is the sense that we don’t have all the answers, but we will nonetheless figure it out together. It promotes a culture of learning and teamwork. When everyone makes themselves vulnerable in this way great things can happen. The problem is that it only takes one asshole to fuck all that up.

When a team loses its collective vulnerability as one person starts to exert rightness (and therefore power) downwards onto it, we lose all the positive effects I’ve listed above. I’ve seen people become competitive and sometimes downright hostile under these conditions. Ultimately it rewards the loudest individuals who can make the most convincing semblance of being right to their peers and stifles all other voices.

This is commonly what we call “leadership”, and while I don’t want to suggest that leadership and teamwork are antagonistic to each other, I do want to suggest that a certain style of leadership, one concerned principally with correctness, is harmful to it. A good leader will make bold decisions, informed by their team, to move forward in some direction, even if sometimes that turns out to be the wrong one. It’s OK to acknowledge this and turn things around.

On Productivity

A preoccupation with being right can have a directly negative effect on productivity. One obvious way is what I will call refactoring hypnosis - a state wherein the programmer forgets the original intent of their refactoring efforts and continues to rework code into a more “right” state, often with no tangible benefit while risking breakages at every step.

Style is another area that is particularly prone to pointless rectification. It is not unusual for developers to have a preference for a certain style in whatever language they are using. It is interesting that while opposing styles can seem utterly “wrong” to the developer it seems that this is the area of software development in which there are the fewest agreements over what we consider to be good or “right”. In Ruby there have been attempts to unify divergent opinion in the Ruby Style Guide but it has been known to go back and forth on some of its specifics (or merely to state that there are competing styles), and the fact that teams and communities eventually grow their own style guides (AirBnb, GitHub, thoughtbot, Seattle.rb) shows that perhaps the only thing we can agree on is that a codebase be consistent. Where it lacks consistency there lie opportunities to rectify, but this is almost always a bad idea if done for its own sake.

Finally, being right simply isn’t agile. One of the core tenets of the Agile Manifesto is that while there is value in following a plan, there is more value in responding to change. This seems to suggest that our plans, while useful, will inevitably be wrong in crucial ways. An obsession with rightness will inevitably waste time - accepting that we will be wrong encourages us to move quickly, get feedback early on and iterate to build the right thing in the shortest time.

On Culture

As I’ve asserted above, none of us really knows what we are doing (for different values of “really”), and indeed this sentiment has been commonly expressed even among some of the most experienced and celebrated engineers. I think that there is both humor and truth in this but, while I believe the sentiment is well-intentioned, words are important and can sometimes undermine what’s being expressed here. I’ve seen people I look up to utter something of the form, look, I wrote [some technology you’ve probably heard of], and I still do [something stupid/dumb] - what an idiot! This doesn’t reassure me at all. All I think is, wow, if you have such a negative opinion of yourself, I can’t imagine what you’d think of me.

Perhaps instead of fostering a culture of self-chastisement we can celebrate our wrongness. We know that failure can sometimes come at great cost, but it’s almost always because of flaws in the systems we have in place. A good system will tolerate certain mistakes well, and simply not let us make other kinds of mistakes. A mistake really is a cause for celebration because it is also a learning, and celebrating creates an opportunity to share that learning with others while simultaneously destigmatizing its discovery. I am happy that my team has recently formalized this process as part of our weekly retrospectives - I would encourage everyone to do this.

One of the most harmful ways I’ve seen the rectification obsession play out is in code reviews. The very medium of the code review (typically GitHub) is not well set up for managing feelings when providing close criticism of one’s work. We can exacerbate this with an obsession with being right, especially when there are multiple contenders in the conversation.

I have been on teams where this obsession extends into code review to the point where, in order for one to get one’s code merged, a reviewer has to deem it “perfect”. Ironically, this seems less an indicator of high code quality in the codebase and more of the difficulty of ever making changes to the code subsequently. Having your work routinely nitpicked can be a gruelling experience - worse so when review take place in multiple timezones and discussions go back and forth over multiple days or even weeks. Personally, I’ve been much happier when the team’s standard for merging is “good enough”, encouraging iterative changes and follow up work for anything less crucial.

It is hard to overstate the importance of language when looking at these interactions. There has been much talk recently about the use of the word “just” (as in “just do it this way”) in code review, and I am glad that this is undergoing scrutiny. It seems to suggest that not only is the recipient wrong, but deeply misguided - the “right” way is really quite simple. This serves to exert power in a humiliating way, one that minimizes our effort and intellect along the way. Of course, there are countless more ways that we can do harm through poorly chosen words, but I am glad that we have started to examine this.

On Mansplaining

It is telling to me that the standard introduction to any mansplanation, well, actually…., is almost the ultimate expression of rectification. It is appropriate that we have identified this behavior as an expression of masculine insecurity - the man uses sheer volume and insistence to counter a position he poorly understands. More innocent mansplanations still work in the same way - without contradicting a man may simply offer some explanation (I am right!), believing this to be helpful to the person whose ignorance he has assumed.

I am aware that there could be some irony in trying to frame the whole of this phenomenon in terms of my manifesto, but it is not my intention to do so. It is rather that mansplaining reveals a great deal about the harm done and intentions behind rectifying behavior.

Doing the Right Thing

I do not want to suggest a feeling of smug superiority - just about every harmful behavior I have described above I have also engaged in at some point. I know I will continue to do so, too. But I want this to be better, and I want to work with people who are also committed to these goals.

Looking back to the start of my journey, I have to question now the intent of the wise, old man in his original assertion about human behavior. Was this yet another example of some unsolicited advice from a person who exploited their maleness and seniority to add more weight to their pronouncements than perhaps they deserved? Is this all that wise, old men do? Almost certainly.

As it turned out, I did not wholly embrace it as truth (none of the above makes any claims to social science or psychology), but neither rejected it wholesale. I discovered that while it may not be literally true, I might arrive at smaller truths by entertaining it as an idea (the contradiction is probably what made me laugh). I’m grateful that it was shared with me.

That there is nothing wrong with being right. Rather, it is the desire to be right that colors our judgment, that leads us on the wrong path. Being right is also not the same thing as doing the right thing. And I want to focus my efforts now on this, while trying to free myself from the tyranny of being right.

When I started my first job I was programming in Ruby sans Rails, and knew I had to get up to speed quickly. I purchased Russ Olsen’s Eloquent Ruby (2011) and read it cover to cover, though I struggled a bit towards the end. I tried some things out, and then I read it again. Then I played around some more. I learned the joys of metaprogramming and then burnt my fingers. I went back and read it a third time, now with the understanding that some of the things in the back were dangerous.

Up until Eloquent Ruby, the resources I had used to learn all had the same agenda: how to tell the computer to do stuff. In other words, they would describe the features of things without spending too much time on the attitudes toward them. And it is much harder to do the latter.

The concept of Eloquent Ruby came as a revelation to me at the time - the idea that there were not just rules that make up a language, but idioms too, attitudes that might even change over time. I loved the idea that I could learn to speak Ruby not just adequately but like a native.

By this time I felt bold enough to call myself a Rubyist, and I owed much of the enthusiasm I felt toward the language, and the success I had early on in my career, to this book. I bought another of Olsen’s books on design patterns and read it cover to cover, again, multiple times. I was ambitious and knew that “good” programmers had experience and expertise working in different programming paradigms while still not sure in what direction I would go. So I learned with great interest that he was either working on, or had at least declared an intention to write, a book about Clojure.

I had no idea at this point what Clojure or even Lisp was, but the author had gained my trust enough for me to want to read about his new book, whatever it was about.

And of course I had no clue at the time that this book would be in the pipeline for years. I understand; these things take time. But, being impatient, when I felt confident enough to start learning another language, I decided to go ahead with Clojure anyway.

I have now played with it for about 3 years, have pored through some books that were good at what they set out to do (exhaustively survey the features of the language), have built some things of a certain size. Alas, not getting to code and think in my second language every day, I have never felt that I really “got” Clojure, that I really knew it in the same way that I knew Ruby. I could not properly call myself a Clojurist (do they even call themselves that? See, I don’t know).

So I was pretty psyched when I learned that Olsen’s book was nearing completion, and that its title was, perfectly, Getting Clojure. When it came out in beta form, I did something I almost never do - I bought the eBook (I typically like to do my reading away from the computer).

And it has not disappointed. I am so happy that all the elements of Olsen’s style are present and on top form - his gentle humor, his writing with compassion for the learner. He knows crucially what to leave out and what to explain deeper, to illustrate. There are examples, contrived, yet so much more compelling than most (it’s hard to formulate new examples that are sufficiently complex yet small and interesting enough to sustain interest). There are lots of details on why you might want to use a particular thing, or more importantly, why you might not want to - in Olsen’s words “staying out of trouble” - details that are so vital to writing good, idiomatic code in whatever language. And there are examples of real Clojure in use, often pulled from the Clojure source itself, that not only illustrate but give me the confidence to dive in myself, something that wouldn’t have occurred to me alone.

It seems ironic that Getting Clojure isn’t the book I wanted way back when I first heard about it, but it is the book that I need now. I enjoyed going over the earlier chapters, cementing knowledge along the way, forming new narratives that simplify the surface area of the language while giving me the things I need to know to find out more. And it gave me the confidence to dive way deeper than I thought would be comfortable. For example, Olsen encourages you to write your own Lisp implementation as an aside while he looks at the core of Clojure’s. I went ahead and did this and am so glad that I did - I feel like I have gained a much deeper understanding of computer programs in general, something that may have been lacking in my not coming from a Computer Science background.

I have no doubt that this book will appeal to many others from different backgrounds, different places in their development. But I can confidently say that if, like myself, you are self taught, or don’t come from a “traditional” background, perhaps Ruby or a similar dynamic language is your bread and butter but you are trying to expand your horizons, if you need materials that focus on the learner and building up understanding in a more structured way, Getting Clojure gets my highest possible recommendation.

Without much warning I recently decided to learn Colemak.

What?

Colemak is an alternative layout for keyboards. It aims to improve on both the traditional QWERTY and the only slightly better-known Dvorak by placing the commonest keys on the home row, along with certain other considerations, to improve ergonomics and comfort while typing.

Why?

This came as a bit of a surprise to me as I have always felt somewhat opposed to learning a new keyboard layout. This may have stemmed from my own frustration in the past in doubling on Clarinet and Saxophone. While the two are keyed similarly, they correspond to different “notes” as they are written down. Though it is very common for people to do this, I really don’t enjoy the feeling of disorientation at all.

The drawbacks I identified as:

• the initial effort of learning
• having to “double” when confronted with a QWERTY keyboard
• really, having to collaborate with anyone on anything ever again

The supposed benefits of faster typing speed and prevention of RSI I never saw as a net gain. Which is not to say that I don’t care about those things (I take injury prevention very seriously, having blogged about this before). It’s just such an inexact science that I would welcome both of those benefits if they came, but couldn’t reasonably expect them as guaranteed.

But I think there was one other factor that has completely swung this for me that has probably not been present at any other time that I’ve been thinking about this. It is that I am incredibly bored. So bored that I don’t want to learn anything exciting like a new programming language, or even a new natural language, or how to ride a unicycle or spin poi. I’ve been craving the dull repetition that I’ve felt as a musician, a quiet confidence that if I do this dance with my hands slowly and correctly enough times, I’ll program myself to perform a new trick. I’ve been actually longing for the brain ache you get when you’re trying to do something different and your muscle memory won’t quit.

How?

There are many of these online, but I found The Typing Cat particularly good in getting started out. Not wanting to take the plunge straight away, this let me emulate the new layout while I went through the exercises, preserving QWERTY for everything else. For the first couple of weeks I’d do QWERTY during the day and practice 1-2 hours of Colemak in the evening, until I got up to an acceptable typing speed (for me, 30 wpm, while still very slow, would not interfere too much).

Once I was ready to take the leap, I was confronted by a great number of ways to do this, ranging from reconfiguring the keyboard at the system level (useless, since X ignores it), configuring X from the command line (annoying, because those changes aren’t preserved when I make any customizations in the Gnome Tweak Tool), to discovering I could do most of this by adjusting settings in the UI. I’ll describe only what I eventually settled on in detail, in case you are trying to do this yourself and are running a similar setup to me (Debian 9/Stretch, Gnome 3, US keyboard).

To set up Colemak, simply open Settings, go to Region & Language, hit the + under Input Sources, click English then English (Colemak) and you’re done. You should now see a new thing on the top right that you can click on and select the input source you wish to use. You can also rotate input sources by hitting Super (aka Windows key) and Space.

Unfortunately I wasn’t done there because I had a few issues with some of the design choices in the only variant of Colemak offered. Namely, I didn’t want Colemak to reassign my Caps Lock key to Backspace (as I was already reassigning it to Escape), and I wanted to use my right Alt key as Meta, something I use all the time in Emacs and pretty much everything that supports the basic Emacs keybindings (see: everything worth using). While there may have been a way to customize this from the command line, I never found out what that was, and besides I wanted to find a solution that jelled as much as possible with the general solution I’ve outlined above. It was with this spirit that I decided to add my own, customized keyboard layout. If you’re having similar grumbles, read on.

First, a word of caution. You’re going to have to edit some configuration files that live in /usr/share. If that makes you queasy, I understand. I don’t especially love this solution, but I think it is the best of all solutions known to me. Either way, as a precautionary measure, I’d go ahead and backup the files we’re going to touch:

sudo cp /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us{,.backup}
sudo cp /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml{,.backup}

Next we’re going to add a keyboard layout to the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us file. It’ll be an edited version of the X.Org configuration which you can find here. It can probably go anywhere, but I inserted it immediately after the existing entry for Colemak:

// /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us

partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "colemak-custom" {

    include "us"
    name[Group1]= "English (Colemak Custom)";

    key <TLDE> { [        grave,   asciitilde ] };
    key <AE01> { [            1,       exclam ] };
    key <AE02> { [            2,           at ] };
    key <AE03> { [            3,   numbersign ] };
    key <AE04> { [            4,       dollar ] };
    key <AE05> { [            5,      percent ] };
    key <AE06> { [            6,  asciicircum ] };
    key <AE07> { [            7,    ampersand ] };
    key <AE08> { [            8,     asterisk ] };
    key <AE09> { [            9,    parenleft ] };
    key <AE10> { [            0,   parenright ] };
    key <AE11> { [        minus,   underscore ] };
    key <AE12> { [        equal,         plus ] };

    key <AD01> { [            q,            Q ] };
    key <AD02> { [            w,            W ] };
    key <AD03> { [            f,            F ] };
    key <AD04> { [            p,            P ] };
    key <AD05> { [            g,            G ] };
    key <AD06> { [            j,            J ] };
    key <AD07> { [            l,            L ] };
    key <AD08> { [            u,            U ] };
    key <AD09> { [            y,            Y ] };
    key <AD10> { [    semicolon,        colon ] };
    key <AD11> { [  bracketleft,    braceleft ] };
    key <AD12> { [ bracketright,   braceright ] };
    key <BKSL> { [    backslash,          bar ] };

    key <AC01> { [            a,            A ] };
    key <AC02> { [            r,            R ] };
    key <AC03> { [            s,            S ] };
    key <AC04> { [            t,            T ] };
    key <AC05> { [            d,            D ] };
    key <AC06> { [            h,            H ] };
    key <AC07> { [            n,            N ] };
    key <AC08> { [            e,            E ] };
    key <AC09> { [            i,            I ] };
    key <AC10> { [            o,            O ] };
    key <AC11> { [   apostrophe,     quotedbl ] };

    key <AB01> { [            z,            Z ] };
    key <AB02> { [            x,            X ] };
    key <AB03> { [            c,            C ] };
    key <AB04> { [            v,            V ] };
    key <AB05> { [            b,            B ] };
    key <AB06> { [            k,            K ] };
    key <AB07> { [            m,            M ] };
    key <AB08> { [        comma,         less ] };
    key <AB09> { [       period,      greater ] };
    key <AB10> { [        slash,     question ] };

    key <LSGT> { [        minus,   underscore ] };
    key <SPCE> { [        space,        space ] };
};

Next you need to register it as a variant of the US keyboard layout:

<!-- /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml -->
<xkbConfigRegistry version="1.1">
  <!-- ... -->
  <layoutList>
    <layout>
      <!-- ... -->
      <configItem>
        <name>us</name>
        <!-- ... -->
      </configItem>
      <variantList>
        <!-- Insert this stuff =-> -->
        <variant>
          <configItem>
            <name>colemak-custom</name>
            <description>English (Colemak Custom)</description>
          </configItem>
        </variant>

Finally, you’ll need to bust the xkb cache. I read about how to do this here, but it didn’t seem to work for me (most likely differences between Ubuntu and Debian, or different versions). So to prevent giving you the same disappointment, I’m going to tell you the best way to get this done that is sure to work: restart your damn computer. If you can figure out a better way, that’s great.

Having done all the above, you should now be able to select your Colemak (Custom) layout in the same way by going through the settings in the UI.

Since I’ve made the switch, I’ve seen my speed steadily increasing up to 50-60 wpm. That’s still kind of slow for me, but I have every confidence that it will continue to increase. I think doing drills has helped with that. Since I have no need for emulation anymore, I’ve found the CLI utility gtypist to be particularly good. I try to do the “Lesson C16/Frequent Words” exercises for Colemak every day.