[touggourt]

> You have to break a lot of ingrained 'finger memory'

That seems obvious but it's not true:

Your brain can easily learn different habits. For example, look at musicians playing and switching on various similar music instruments (between keyboards, different guitars like banjos or bass, kalimba (Thumb-Pianos) with 8 or 12 keys and different tuning, etc.).

Don't forget also that you can learn something fast when it gives you a quick benefit. For example, learning the french alternative keyboard layout "Bépo", takes only 2 or 3 weeks, because after one or two hours of exercises you are already typing frequent words easier and faster. I learned at the same time, the ergonomic Typematrix keyboard, and frankly the ergonomic part of the layout was easy to learn. Of course I didn't forget the other layouts, and I can type on classical Azerty or Qwerty keyboards without much thinking.

Human brain plasticity is very high.

[Eji1700]

It's always been crazy to me how adamant people are that they can't learn things like this. I know not everyone is the same, and yes it will be harder for some than others, but I have 3 different keyboards in use with slightly different layouts, and it did not take me that long at all to start using them, or to get back up to full typing speed (for the record I code so having symbols easier to access is so so nice). Further I rarely have issues switching back to a normal layout (my only problem is i remap capslock to control on everything and will sometimes hit that instead).

The two things i've seen that prevent people is, first, an expectation of instant success, which just isn't realistic. It'll take a few days, but once you've done it once it's quite trivial to swap back and forth as needed.

Second, there's a shocking amount of people who just cannot touch type? Even in IT/Dev environments I've seen hunt and peck or other strange forms. Not blaming them but I really think it's a major failure on our society that with tech so integral we don't do a better job teaching these skills.

[robbedpeter]

It's also counterintuitive in that learning a new skill will not override your learned muscle memory. Your brain is awesome at incorporating context, so you won't lose any proficiency with regular keyboards. You might actually get better, if there are any mutually beneficial motions that are reinforced.