Hello everyone,
For a long time now I have been plagued by wrist pains. I have De Quervain syndrome and have been told it is chronic and to learn to live with it. However, this caused a bit of a problem for me when typing. My typing speed on QWERTY is so fast that after a short while of typing at a high speed, my wrists start to hurt a lot - and when they do I can't do much of anything until the pains stop again in a few days' time. This was rather inconvenient and rather painful... so when a friend of mine mentioned alternate keyboard layouts, I immediately latched on to that and started looking into it myself.
I have been in doubt for a while on whether to go for Dvorak or Colemak. My main reason for choosing Colemak ended up being that Dvorak put quite a large strain on the pinkies and wanted them to reach for the upper row a lot. My pinkies are very short and I would have to move my entire wrist to reach those keys with them. On Colemak, those keys are used much less frequently.
On Qwerty, my average speed was about 85 wpm, but although I could type without looking at the keyboard, I only used three of my left hand fingers and one of my right hand to type. I have a tendency to make a LOT of mistakes when typing, but am able to feel that I'm making the mistake and correct it automatically, even when I'm looking neither at the screen nor the keyboard. I once tried teaching myself to type with 10 fingers, but after so many years of typing, I couldn't learn it anymore.
Thus, now with Colemak I am starting over, trying to learn to use 10 fingers. I started on December 1st and on the first few days I only practiced for a while every day, because I was too slow to do any normal typing in it. Then, I took a break for a few days because I had an insane workload for university and needed to be able to type at a good speed. After four days I came back to Colemak and I have since then made a cold turkey switch and my typing speed is at a level that I can bear it, now.
However, my main problem is STILL accuracy. For some reason, even when I know where the keys are, I keep making mistakes? Do you guys have advice for that? My low accuracy slows me down a lot and I wish to improve it, but no matter how slowly I type, the mistakes keep coming.
My WPM over the past days is as follows. I haven't tested today, yet. The x's are for qwerty days. The number is the WPM average, the % is accuracy.
Dec 1: 13 90%
Dec 2: 18 91%
Dec 3: 21 95%
Dec 4: 24 98%
Dec 5: x x
Dec 6: x x
Dec 7: x x
Dec 8: x x
Dec 9: 30 90%
Dec 10: 32 90%
Dec 11: 37 88%
Edit: Did one test today of 38 WPM, 90% accuracy.
Keys that I keep missing are p, g, j, l, k and ;, mostly. The top row mainly, and especially L and J - and the J is very frequent in my mother tongue (Dutch), which complicates matters. It is at a rather difficult spot for me.