Short story:

About 6 months ago, I was looking for a QWERTY alternative, tried DVORAK a few days but was happy to find COLEMAK, ever since no regrets.

Long story:

I started looking for new keyboard layouts since I could feel that my hand/fingers are taking the toll of the last project's programming work. I was a QWERTY user back then, I was not fast on the keyboard, mainly because as a programmer I usually type only several lines at the time then go back to analyzing the problem at hand. I remember doing around 80-90 on the average back then.

I started using Colemak (at home and work) just before I got my new job, I was fortunate since I got the time to train at home and I was not expected to do much in the first few weeks at my new job back then (most of it was classroom type training and some bug fixing that a colemak newbie could easily handle) I remembered practicing for 2 weeks with the tutorials provided in this site (the standalone typing tutorial at home and the web at work whenever I had time) After that, I was satisfied to have a 95% true accuracy on 40wpm, I had to put my newfound skills to the test.

I haven't noticed that I'm using Colemak for half a year now, last time I checked (4 mos ago) I was doing 70wpm and surely I had exceeded my previous QWERTY speed by about 10-20 wpm now (I'd check when I had the time. And it surely feels good to my fingers, now my only problem is the mouse.

As a progammer, I definitely liked the way it retained the locations of Z, X, C, and V. I also like the semicolon's new location, now I rarely press Enter or ' accidentally. (I program i C, C# type of languages)

I still use the Caps Lock though, I never learned to use it as a backspace, that could be because back then there are problems when remapping the Caps Lock key, causing system instability. I still use the beta version (caps lock unchanged) but I definitely experienced using caps lock as backspace before and it is sweet, too bad my work pc was sensitive to this mapping.

As a gamer, that one is really hard, I had to remap things and I had to learn to type fast.. especially when someone is telling you to support or buff them (in CAPS.. :D )

Overall, yah it's nice, plus I'm the only one using it here, it sure makes eyebrows rise when they find that the letters are coming up differently when they're typing.

If you're new, just do the typing test over and over again until you achieve those 95 - 97% true accuracy, don't lose hope (or your keyboard)... trust me, I know that having the 's' just one character to the right from its previous position is confusing.. :D

Another tip: I was a touch typist back then so I had less problem memorizing the locations and now I'm touch typing on COLEMAK but remember (as said in this site) whenever you're typing anything QWERTY, look on the keyboard, don't memorize QWERTY anymore, just look (If you're typing COLEMAK, it's best to not look on your keyboard). Now whenever I look at the keyboard, my brain just could not help but type QWERTY, but when I touch type, it only remembers COLEMAK (which is good, that's what I want)

Good luck to all of us Colemak users...