| I switched to Colemak for a couple of years. The trick for me was using a typing tutor relentlessly over a weekend, enough that I could do around 40-50 wpm. Then I went cold turkey and never used QWERTY. Colemak is a little bit friendlier than Dvorak because it leaves a bunch of keys intact, which is nice for preserving common shortcuts like CTRL-C, CTRL-V, etc. It also doesn't touch punctuation, which always seemed more disruptive than it needed to be in Dvorak. In the end I switched back to QWERTY because I started working in a paired programming environment, and switching between the two whenever we would switch drivers became really annoying. My main problem is that I was never really able to be proficient at Colemak and QWERTY at the same time. It was shocking how fast I lost my QWERTY muscle memory. When I switched back, it came back fast, but it was difficult for me to use someone else's QWERTY keyboard efficiently while I was using Colemak. The other issue I've always had is that programs are designed to have a mix of positional shortcuts and mnemonic shortcuts. When you switch keyboard layouts, it's hard to keep both, even with customization. For example, vim uses hjkl for navigation due to their position, not mnemonic. So you want to preserve those. But in Colemak that row is "hnei", so now you need to change "n" and "i", but those are both mnemonic (next and insert), so what do you change them to now? |