Hi everyone,
I've tried to switch to Dvorak many times and had resigned myself to typing QWERTY for the rest of my life. After finding out about Colemak, I settled on the DreymaR's Tarmak transitional layouts (https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=8786#p8786) as they made a LOT of sense and I figured that I could maintain my productivity at work and can always stop at Tarmak 1 or 2 and still get a lot of the benefit.
I'm coming with around 19 years of QWERTY typing experience with a top ranging from 90-100 WPM.
My experience has been great, and have transitioned to full Colemak over approximately three weeks. My log over my speeds over this time looks like the following. Errors were fairly stable at around 4-5% but is finally dropping now that I'm not switching additional keys every three days. Note that each step was cold turkey and did not type in QWERTY during this time.
11/04/2013 30 Tarmak 1
12/04/2013 42 Tarmak 1
15/04/2013 32 Tarmak 3
16/04/2013 38 Tarmak 3
18/04/2013 41 Tarmak 3
19/04/2013 39 Tarmak 4
20/04/2013 48 Tarmak 4
22/04/2013 29 Colemak
23/04/2013 39 Colemak
2/05/2013 49 Colemak
The transition involved typing at work approximately 5 hours / 8 hour day plus around 30 mins of practice with Master Key. Note that I was holidaying in India from 25/04 to 01/05 and during this time only practiced with Master Key (approx 30 mins / day). Somewhere in between 12/04 - 15/04 I switched to Tarmak 2 but I didn't log my speeds.
The great thing about Tarmak is that I maintained a lot of my productivity and there was a nice feedback loop as I learned. I found myself actually wanting to move to the next step every few days because I really liked like pushing it and I could really see how each change was cutting down how much my hands were moving.
If anyone needs Mac keyboard layouts for the Tarmak steps, I've created some and put them here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/266 … %20Mac.zip . DreymaR, feel free to put them somewhere with the others.
Thanks DreymaR. I think the layouts and steps are pretty much perfect!
Cheers