Numbers, amusingly, can mess me up.
How long did it take you to learn colemak? I guess if you still use it you find it better than qwerty?
It’s a struggle for maybe a month or two completely upending your muscle memory.. but retaining the locations of AZXCV from QWERTY did help a lot with transitioning. The hardest part for me was how S is moved one character over to where D is (took a while before I stopped making S related mistake..).
I think I practiced typing every day deliberately for a few months until I didn’t feel like I had to consciously think about it anymore and was up to ~80WPM again. No regrets here.. and it’s always amusing watch people use my computer at first
The lesson plan I was using followed home row order and I knew I was "home" in Colemak in the first lessons because even in the first four "main finger" home row keys you start by typing entire, real English words, some of which can be quite long such as Tennessee. (That was always a problem for me in grade school QWERTY lessons was how much home row exercises were garbage and nonsense words.) I feel like that also added to the feeling that learning Colemak was fast and just took then one dedicated long weekend.
I'm incredibly happy with my switch. I was getting RSI pain from awkward top-to-bottom row maneuvers with Qwerty. I still have some pain, but that's mostly from using the computer far too much.
Most of the challenge is not about learning the new layout, but getting your muscle memory to forget about the old way of doing things. If I were to do it again, I'd recommend a progressive layout change; switching a single set of keys at a time. It takes longer to switch, but reduces the upfront mental load.
Any ideas of how well this tends to work as a learning strategy?
And then swap hands.
Then keyboards behind the back.
Have I taken this joke too far? Or not far enough?
How long for me to transition from being quite fast at Qwerty to being happy enough with my Colemak speed? I'd guess roughly 2 to 4 weeks. As an independent software developer and entrepreneur at the time, it worked. I was mostly writing code, not having to write some heroic quantity of emails as a manager.
In addition to the "typing feels better" benefit, I found the very process of changing to be quite beneficial in two ways:
(1) I did more thinking in advance and more planning and therefore less unnecessary typing. This was very niiice. Please imagine Borat saying it for full effect.
(2) The cognitive challenge of switching my primary mode of interaction with computers had a much broader effect on how I appreciated learning and habits in general.
Conclusion: you have should switched yesterday from Qwerty to an APL keyboard. /s
Better: get an adjustable table and chair and ensure that they are correctly configured. Take regular breaks and do exercises. Get a keyboard that is split (to ensure that your wrists are not bent) and tented (to put our wrists at a more comfortable angle). Bonus points for column stagger. For me, switching to a Kinesis Advantage improved a lot to the point where I pretty much pain free.
(IANAD, but personal experience.)
I don’t know what the status is now, if all the OS have built in Colemak layouts but I don’t think they did at the time.
I got rid of RSI by using a Kinesis advantage keyboard for a year (with qwerty layout). This must have gotten rid of any bad habits I had, I focused hard on not bottoming out hard on the keys too.
After a year I switched to a topre keyboard and it hasn’t come back, it’s been over 10yrs.
I'd hesitate to say I notice much of any difference. It makes me a little happy to have made the change. But, in the same way that moving a mouse to my off hand makes me happy. And is something I do every so often.