[mellinoe]

> How long did it take you to learn colemac?

Not the guy you replied to, but I switched to Colemak last year. It took me about 3 weeks to get to a "usable" state, and maybe 2 months to get within 75% of my previous speed with qwerty. My progression was roughly:

0-1 weeks: Can't type anything without looking at the key map. I would switch back to Qwerty if I needed to type something long out (emails mainly).

1-2 weeks: Weird phase. I can't effectively type in either qwerty or Colemak unless I really "focus" on it. It's hard to describe, but this week was terrible for productivity :)

3+ weeks: Forced myself to use Colemak exclusively. During this time I started doing real typing exercises, and turned off autocomplete in my IDE, since I found that was detrimental to learning. I also wrote a ton of documentation for a couple of my projects, which involved a lot of typing.

Before I switched, I would get intermittent pain in my wrist (maybe twice a month), which has since completely disappeared. When I need to type in Qwerty now, it is very uncomfortable, in a way that Colemak never was.

[arafa]

I can confirm all of this learning Dvorak. Having seen this with myself and others, it really is like a short version of learning a language and seems to use the same part of my brain. There's that period where you're not good in either layout and you need to get something done like you're saying (but after all the fun initial gains) and that's when most folks quit. If you can push past that week or so, it seems you're good. It's painful though.

And yeah, I can still touch-type in Qwerty too, but it feels like contorting my hands in knots. I can type it in fine, I just never noticed before how crazy you have to move your hands to do it.