Funny when I went to register on this forum I found I already had a login from a failed attempt at switching 9 years ago. Time does fly.
Happily things are moving along a lot better this time, while I am not quite at my qwerty speed just yet I am already finding the typing with Colemak more relaxing. Main reason I think is I spent more time practicing in small doses (1-2h a day) for the first couple weeks, and really doing the typing drills, rather than switching cold turkey. Another thing is a trick which I actually picked up from another layout and I wanted to share. As a programmer a good chunk of my typing is spent in the upper right quadrant of the keyboard and with traditional touch typing those symbols would all be typed with my right pinky: [, ], {, }, ', ", =, _ and -, as well as ( and ) which are not typed with the pinky but are an uncomfortable stretch, and let's not forget backspace. Now before I started learning to "properly" touch type (and learn colemak) I would just move my whole hand over and type those with my index and middle finger. And that worked OK except I lost my home row position so quite often typos would ensue. Well with Colemak I wanted to really apply myself to touch typing (plus it was even tougher to keep typing correctly since I wasn't familiar with the layout) so I refrained myself from doing that. And that was fine while practicing, but after I started using Colemak for most of the day for a day or 2 (writing actual code instead of typing exercises) my pinky was killing me. So instead what I did is make the caps lock key a mode switch key and assign a symbol to the letters. For example F is [, G is %, L is backspace, NUIE are arrow keys (caps lock by itself is still backspace but it doesn't repeat anymore of course). It took a little while to get used to but now I really love it. It can be done with Xmodmap on Unix and AutoHotkey on Windows. This could be done with qwerty too of course but I have a very hard time with the same finger digramms that are much more common in qwerty so I was not able to do proper touch typing with that layout. In concept it is similar to the "extended" mapping from DreymaR though that one is a lot more elaborate.
In case anybody should find that useful I saved the xmodmap and autohotkey files on github: https://gist.github.com/nicocrm/b353393 … e3c760f3be and https://gist.github.com/nicocrm/0afae7d … b4a01b6aa3.
