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Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

> Colemak is pretty awesome if your goal isn’t to be the fastest typer. I really think it should be the default keyboard layout taught.

I've been using Colemak for about 14 years now. I can't say that I'm faster but haven't had a repeat of the wrist pain I lived with with QWERTY.

It's been a real boon to have Colemak available on macOS and Linux.

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I also switched for reasons of keeping my hands happy (as a prevention measure), not for typing speed.

I'm a bit slower than I was in QWERTY (at a guess, maybe if I race I easily get to 80 instead of 90 wpm or something, not sure). If I kept up with deliberate practice I'd end up faster than I was I think, but I don't really do that.

I think at this point I'm faster in Colemak than I ever was in QWERTY, but speed doesn't matter anywhere near as much as comfort and I also don't think I've ever really "thought" more than 30-50 wpm in real world practice anyway. Typing test scores are useless rote repetition exercises and don't reflect real world typing anyway. I've almost never encountered the need to just retype out everything I'm reading that someone else wrote outside of typing tests. (Though admittedly in the typewriter era that was a more useful skill, before digital files and copy-and-paste.)

After a decade, I type slightly faster on Colemak, but I’d take a 20% reduction in speed and still prefer it over QWERTY.

With QWERTY, I was getting hand pain that I shouldn’t have been getting in my 20’s. Far to many twisted moves from top for bottom row.

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