nicklear said:1) I share the laptop we have with my wife and so I would have to switch the keyboard quite a few times a day realistically. Would it still be worth it? We might have a computer each at some point in time, but I can't guarantee it.
Once you become a Colemak typist with a good technique, you shouldn't need to look at the keyboard, so in that case you could leave the keys labelled Qwerty and it wouldn't matter. Some advocate even learning with Qwerty keys still place as a way to discourage looking at the keys. But I am sympathetic to the idea of not wanting to see Qwerty, especially when learning.
You could just get a second keyboard to plug in for your own use, perhaps one with blank keys. If you got a small mechanical keyboard that would be already a better experience than using the default laptop keyboard. When I was learning I used stickers temporarily.
nicklear said:2) I am a video editor with many years of muscle memory built up of keyboard shortcuts. But these are editable within the software so feasibly whatever i have on shift-F I can change to shift-T etc. So I'm less concerned with that.
One of the nice things about Colemak is many of the common shortcuts remain unchanged. Obviously if you've learned a lot of shortcuts for a specific application, then you would need to do some relearning. I don't think I would remap them to non-standard keys though. Anyway, I think that's a relatively minor issue - most of the difficulty in the transitional period will likely come from day-to-day typing rather than shortcuts.
Good luck with the transition if you decide to go for it.
Last edited by stevep99 (12-Jun-2016 14:22:08)
