Hey everyone,

I was a former QWERTY typer and have been using Colemak for about 4 years now. My motivation for switching to Colemak was mainly due to the finger strain I'd get from programming all day and other schoolwork. It took me about 3 months to learn Colemak comfortably with about 2-4 hours of daily training on some Linux typing program (sorry, I really don't remember what it was I found, but it's somewhere in the Debian package manager). Near the end of my training, I transitioned into random Flash typing games on the web and www.typeracer.com. It took me well over a year to reach the speed I had with QWERTY - average 75 WPM and I'm maybe marginally faster than that now. However, my peaks - 120 WPM are way higher than what I could ever achieve with QWERTY, which was hardly over 100 WPM. The best part is I don't ever get any finger strain and fatigue with Colemak.

For about a week during my training on Colemak, I tried to maintain my QWERTY skill but gave up on it. I effectively unlearned it and it was just too difficult to try and switch between the two on the fly. I keep the physical key layout set to QWERTY as is since there are those rare occasions when I need to use it. For awhile in school when I would need to use public computers with Windows, I ran an executable built from AutoHotKey that would remap the keys in memory to Colemak as long as it was running. This was convenient because it was annoying if not possible to change settings on those computers.

QWERTY never again.