Isn't "no time" a tad optimistic? It took me months to achieve reasonable speed. But it's very nice when you get there :-)

It took me 2 months to reach half my Qwerty speed, when I can type comfortably. From then on it would be very relaxing and beautiful journey.

I was a happy user in no time. I didn't become a reasonably fast user until much later. ;)

Welcome, eviltobz!

Oh noes! Don't do it! Breathe deeply, and stay cool. ;)

I'll have you know that I'm rooting for you guys! Go team Colemak! :)

I think that my slow slow speed is gradually increasing, but accuracy is still something of a problem. If I make a point of really slowing myself down then I find that I can type pretty accurately (albeit with a chunk of stopping my fingers when they're just about to strike the wrong key) but the feel of typing some little clusters of letters at speed is so appealing when it flows correctly that it encourages me to try to type faster than I probably should whilst the muscle memory is building, and then things go wrong. And when things go wrong frustration sets in leading to me hitting a whole load of wrong keys whilst I try to stab at the right one. Bah.

:) no worries, I'm not going to be giving it up. I'm hoping things will get a bit easier when I get (and build) my ErgoDox so that I'm using a similar physical layout at home and at work, I sometimes mix up reaching for some keys not because I'm going for the wrong button, but because I'm expecting it to be in a different place. The straight lines on the kinesis layout are just sooo much better, but when there's all that muscle memory to overcome, and my home setup is keeping me on the old silly-angled design that really gets in the way.

I also feel a bit like switching to colemak at work makes me feel like I need to push myself to type faster because I know that I'm nowhere near as productive as I used to be when I need to churn out a load of text - which is something of a trademark speciality of mine ;) I need to force myself into doing some slower practice at home to build my accuracy back up so that the speed can follow.

Modifier keys are where the kinesis and ergodox shine, the thumb clusters are chock full of awesome, not so much with the standard kinesis layout (doubly so with my ancient board which has the OS keys on the keypad layer on the top rubber buttons - yuck) but with some tasty remapping it becomes a dream. Shift on the thumb makes so much sense, it's even easy to type characters that are on the same hand whilst using it. I use macs at home, but I can't think of much that makes me use alt/option and nothing that I use ctrl for :) I'll likely end up with my home keyboard putting the command key in the same spot as my work windows box's ctrl for added simplicity.

I've made a point of staying away from qwerty as much as possible, and actively doing hunt-n-peck when I have to use one so I can get my colemaking up to speed without the old way interfering, but it's shocking how quick I am on my iphone's qwerty pad still. I can just type instinctively on that, whereas in colemak I find that I'm having to spell words out in my mind, then find the key. It's amazing how slow I am at spelling when I need to thing about it ;) Good luck with it all matey.

Yup, I can see that doing shortcut heavy apps could be an issue, certainly when it's not an app that you're normally using from a touch-type position - it's also a bitch to do a bit of one-handed hunt & pecking when you're eating a sandwich at your desk or something. With my windows key still on the rubber F-key section (albeit brought up from the keypad layer, with printscr pushed back) trying to hit the ever useful Win-E to open a new windows explorer window is really really not comfortable. I might have to get around to sacrificing my page up/down buttons to the rubbers and wap the windows keys onto my clusters of love.

You thought about having a nice fancy ergonomic keyboard for the typing and a plain old flat board for the media editing? maybe even with the fancy keycaps or stickers that label up what all the functions are? For a while I did think that one of these bad boys would be nice http://store.apple.com/uk/product/H8300 … oduct-Feed

Cheers for the tips. I've considered looking into a softwarey approach to getting some simulated layer stuff, but I have to remote in to different machines and VMs regularly and that has a nasty tendency to ignore a lot of the local keyboardy setup. That's one of the nice things about using the kinesis, I just have everything set to use the normal qwerty driver and let my remappings handle the sends and then all my typing pops up colemakified :)

My local machine is still the most important of the bunch though, so I may nick a few of those ideas at some point.

On my virtual Windows or Linux machines I've just plopped down a Colemak install (PKL or XKB patch). Putting in a //PortableApps/PortableKeyboardLayout folder and linking to it in your users' Startup folder is quite simple on Windows at least.

Oh, that's a bit tougher then. You could still have the boxes autorun the PortableApps.com menu (should be unobtrusive) and select PKL from that whenever you remote in, I suppose? Or, if you're slightly more cheeky PKL could start up suspended (using 'startsInSuspendMode' in pkl.ini). You'd still have to copy that folder into your obscene number of boxes I suppose... unless you're a scripting wizard... ;)

The Extend layer can be used to sell PKL to non-layout people: It's easy to explain why you want such a handy tool at the ready when working with a computer!