| I'm three months into colemak now, together with learning touch typing (and switching to vim as main editor). I've managed to get up to around 50 wpm coming from 75 wpm with normal qwerty without touch typing (just 6 finger freestyle). I've still some time to go to get over my initial typing speed. A really cool thing about colemak for me is replacing caps lock with backspace, which in itself is getting rid of so much finger/hand-travel, but that can obviously also easily be hacked into qwerty as well. To this point, I don't know if I would recommend switching to anyone for the following reasons: - You will slowly use muscle memory of normal qwerty, which can become quite awkward whenever you forced to use another computer. It's not like you cannot type it anymore, but you will be quite slow and inaccurate when typing. However, these situation barely exists for me in everyday life. - Learning the new layout is quite a feat that takes time and daily dedication. I decided early on to use the new layout in my job (frontend dev) which definitely speed up adoption for me but also slowed me down considerably for some days. Even then it will take quite some time to get back to your initial speed. - Depending on your profession, typing speed may not at all be a bottle neck. This is true for me as a software developer, where you spend the most time thinking about how to solve problem before typing them in small chunks. - Wrt touch-typing, I weirdly found out for myself that it can actually cause some wrist and hand strain rather than protect from it. To me it feels that by using a lot more muscles to type it also increases chance of wear-and-tear. This is especially true for the pinkies for me, which I never used much for typing before. Good thing about colemak wrt keyboard shortcuts is that it only changes letters (no symbols, punctuation, etc.) and then as few letters as possible to still achieve the best finger travel. In practice that means that many shortcuts stay the same, e.g. the common ones as CTRL-Z/X/C/A/Q/W etc. I sort of did the switch as a self-experiment after being intrigued by all the science behind optimized layouts, and also to challenge myself to learn a new skill for the new year. I wanted to learn touch typing after decades of freestyle typing which I increasingly noticed was very error-prone. I figured that learning a new keyboard layout at the same time is a very good opportunity. Not sure if I will stick to colemak permanently but so far it's still fun to try to gradually improve on it. |