[weehobbes]

I love Colemak and have used it for years. Typing with it feels absolutely great compared to QWERTY (mostly with less finger travel to reach common keys) but I agree that it's not worth the switch for most people. It took me about 2-3 weeks to be able to type functionally, and then about 6 months before I was as fluent as I was with QWERTY. Hardest part was remembering that the S key was moved right by one key - I kept mistyping S for almost a year.

I did try Dvorak before Colemak and really hated it. Not only was Ctrl+XCVZ a pain, I found that my left pinky got very strained because of the position of the L key which is a very common letter in the English language.

After learning Colemak, I tried practicing QWERTY occasionally to be "bi-keyboard" but I just could not do it. The more I practiced QWERTY, the worse I got with Colemak. So eventually I had to drop QWERTY. Now, whenever I use someone else's computer (usually just to do a small task), I have to hunt-and-peck and it makes me sad.