Hey guys, we've already met in other sections of the forums. :)

I'm a self-taught QWERTY user, never learned actual proper touch-typing but having a computer since the age of 6, making it 20+ years, I've acquainted myself with it quite well and average around 100wpm with a strange sniping technique. It really is quite a unique technique where I use 3 fingers on my left hand (+pinky for shift and +thumb for space) and only one finger on my right hand (must come from my FPS gaming where my right hand is usually busy shooting people!). The fact that it's QWERTY and most of the good keys really are usually on the left side, this hardly slows me down much.

I work abroad a lot, too much if anyone actually cared to ask me... So I decided to spend some of my free time in Stuttgart this month to learn Colemak. I'll use this thread as a personal log, updating it periodically as I progress (or not).

____________________________________________________

I started looking into Colemak on 20/01/16, right after purchasing a POK3R keyboard that came with Colemak built-in by default. I've heard about Dvorak in the past but it looked like a crazy layout so I never even thought of trying it but I can't say I've ever heard about Colemak until that day. You guys need to work on your PR!

I spent a very long time just reading pretty much every topic and post on this forum and chatting to people in #Colemak on Freenode and eventually I grew some courage and started trying. I found the 10+ different recommended learning websites on the \Learn page discouraging, over-saturating my already over-saturated brain with too many possibilities. I ended up choosing keybr.com because it felt the least rushed, while every other learning website would give you 1-2 lessons per pair of letters and move on - but we all know that building muscle memory and habit comes from repetition.

During my first few days I was also looking a lot into Stevep/Dreymar/others tweaks, specifically the Angle and Wide mods. I quickly realized that I won't be able to use either very effectively because I've been using ANSI keyboards my whole life but both these mods are designed for ISO boards so I spent another couple of days analyzing and thinking how to pull it off and eventually decided the best course of action would be to get an ISO keyboard - so that's what I'm doing right now. I shipped the ANSI POK3R back to Amazon and waiting for an ISO-UK to replace it. In the meanwhile, I'm typing on my laptop's hybrid layout (ISO layout with ANSI locale that lacks all of the weird symbols).

At this point in time, I'm 100% sure that the Angle-mod is necessary, otherwise the alternatives are
a) using incorrect fingers for keys (Z=ring, X=middle, C=index)
b) moving unrelated fingers (when typing X=ring, having to move the middle+index finger right and down to give room)
c) bending my wrist or fingers unnaturally
And I must say, these are all quite terrible.

I'm not sure about Wide-mod (but probably yes) and mod-DH (but probably no), but we'll see as we go.

____________________________________________________

As of today, I've spent 5 hours on keybr.com and have unlocked 5 letters, which gives me a total of 11. If you're wondering why I'm not using Tarmak, that's because I have no idea what my fingers are doing on QWERTY, it's all quite magical. At this pace I should have the whole alphabet unlocked and happily typing in Colemak in about 15 hours!

Alright, that's it for now, back to practicing!