Just a little update for those interested. It has been about 8 months since my last post, and almost a year since picking up Colemak. Progress has been slow, with only about 10-15 WPM bumps in different tests, which is probably because I don't actively invest time practicing typing anymore. Typing common words with Colemak has been much easier than I can recall for QWERTY, which can spike up to about 150-170WPM, but the unfamiliar words balance it out by being quite slower. It'll probably take some time (years) to relearn and become comfortable with larger words again, but it will come in time.
109WPM - Hi-games - 30 sec
98WPM - Hi-games - 1 min
115WPM - 10FF
92WPM - TypeRacer average all time
No fancy graphs or stats, but some discussion about some (perhaps) unique experiences. Since cutting off QWERTY completely, my touch typing has all but disappeared. Typing QWERTY now requires extensively looking down at the keyboard, but I can still manage a decent pace; around 75-80WPM, so all is not lost. This is considering that no effort has been involved in maintaining QWERTY typing. In terms of typing on a touch device such as a tablet, QWERTY is still mainly used, and has suffered no noticeable drops, with swype/swiftkey offering the same results. This could probably be attributed to the fact that it's similar to looking at the keys when typing on a keyboard, so the procedural memory in motor skills is left intact. In terms of finger rolls on certain words and trigrams, the increase in speed feels fine on some, but a little restrictive on others. Particularly for words that have consecutive outer finger (pinky and ring finger) keys, it feels akin to having your hand on a difficult chord for those of you who are familiar with piano/guitar playing - something along the lines of typing "layout" for a lack of a better example. I also find that as speed increases, a lot of typos come in the form of a sort of letter metathesis (basically mixed up letters) and not just outright hitting the wrong letter. This might have something to do with the alternation between hands and fingers, or just linguistic processing, but I have no physical evidence for it - take "you're" for example, which has 4 letters on the right hand followed by one on the left (comes out as "your'e" more often than I'd like to admit). In terms of hand weighting, as you type in 10-20+ minute sessions, there is a noticeable right hand bias (as indicated by Shai already), but nothing discomforting; it seems to be just a mental thing. Also, even at a year in, typing when tired is a lot more difficult than QWERTY especially for unfamiliar words, even when typing slowly, but this has improved with time.
Some programs to discuss further in depth. Many of the shortcuts in programs have been designed for use of the left hand, while in concurrent use with the mouse. For Photoshop, some of the main hotkeys such as merge and duplicate might require you to use your right hand, or stretch your left to reach the keys. Old hotkeys such as ctrl+s have been switched since the last post, and is not proving to be a problem at all. For programming, there isn't much of a learning curve, the semicolon is perhaps the only major move, but it's quite simple to adapt to once you are familiar with the layout (other people seem to have covered programming pretty well already, so I won't go into details). Document editors such as MS Word, and MS Excel aren't affected much either, since much of the actually data uses code i.e. =VLOOKUP, and not hotkeys. As with gaming, it's actually surprising how many companies automatically switch your keys for you i.e. WASD to WARS, along with E to F, R to P, etc, as I assume they are using your registry to assign keys. Some games don't though, and it may take a couple minutes to set up all the keys. You also have to be careful with games that won't take 'yes' for an answer, and won't allow you to change your keys, but using a simple AutoHotKey script will solve it easily. Switching my typing layout during university hasn't been much of a problem either, although some labs have required a temporary account with no access to the Colemak switcher, so it was back to typing terribly in QWERTY for these; keep up to date with your QWERTY! Good luck again everyone, I hope to see more Colemak typists out there.
For anyone interested that is using Colemak as their default Windows language setting, although it's quite easy to find yourself, or create one, here is Colemak back to QWERTY for gaming:
#SingleInstance force
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 100
#UseHook
Process, Priority,, Realtime
SetKeyDelay -1
Capslock::Suspend, Toggle
^Capslock::Capslock
-::-
=::=
q::q
w::w
f::e
p::r
g::t
j::y
l::u
u::i
y::o
`;::p
[::[
]::]
a::a
r::s
s::d
t::f
d::g
h::h
n::j
e::k
i::l
o::`;
'::'
z::z
x::x
c::c
v::v
b::b
k::n
m::m
,::,
.::.
/::/
Enter::Enter
;Space::Space
^+Esc::
Run, "C:\Windows\System32\taskmgr.exe"
Process, Priority, taskmgr.exe, Realtime
Return
Last edited by aFFiliation (16-Dec-2013 01:25:47)
