Hi! and welcome to the family :) It is tiring in the beginning to switch, but you'll thank yourself later. I'm not that fast of a writer with colemak this far ~55-60 WPM but I can share some tips that I found very helpful:

• Practicing writing books through amphetype is a nice less boring way to practice

• Focus on accuracy rather than speed

• Get the front of your keyboard raised rather than the back, it makes your wrist a lot happier

• Be prepared that your wrists might get more tired for a little period while getting used to the new patterns

• Maybe look into the DH and Angle wide mods, they are in my opinion even better to write on (Not completely on them myself yet though)

Thanks, these are really useful.

Definitely focusing on proper hand placement at the moment so it is very slow going!

Just managed a 18WPM score so at least some progress after a pretty frustrating day!

I was opposite, I found Ergodox (and the entire world of alternative keyboards) after switching to Colemak. Do you use Ergodox as your daily driver? What model you use? Recently I tried to tent my Ergodox to quite steep degree, and it is surprisingly comfortable to type on. But I would say that first it is required to get used to flat split keyboard, this is very different experience after using one piece keyboard for years.

Wouldn't that more or less just spread the pain over many weeks? I haven't tried tarmak, I have only done the cold turkey switch, so who am I to say.

Maybe I was just used to being broken having done the dvorak switch not so long before.

I haven't finished mine yet, waiting on the parts from Poland. I can't wait to get on with it.

I read that Windows has finally bought support to other keyboard layouts. So hopefully we can now just add colemak and add a hotkey to switch layouts.

True but I thought it was still good that now you don't need to go through MSKLC to get colemak. They have it as a layout just like you have it on the macs.

Yes I also felt that way once I made the change (QWERTY?). Good you are focusing on accuracy, I focused on speed initially because I wanted to get work done but my accuracy took a hit, now I am trying to improve my accuracy.

I definitely had more accuracy issues with QWERTY and that's exactly why I've ditched it.  I need to unlearn that bad muscle memory and felt that having the keys in different places was the best way to do that since my bad habits with QWERTY were ingrained over the best part of 25 years!

Hit my first ever 25+ WPM scores today and don't drop below 20 WPM at all now.

I had a bit of a "no man's land" nightmare yesterday as my Colemak kb disappeared and I was totally lost on QWERTY. Realising that going back now is going to be just as much work as it was to get here has been a positive discovery and has boosted my resolve in sticking with it.

I have a few days off but am sticking with Colemak on my phone for that period, onwards and upwards. I'm hoping for consistent 30+ By the end of the month.

wow, I'd love to get up to those sorts of numbers!

I think the 30's by the end of the month is totally attainable now as I've just had a couple of fliers on the typing tests this lunchtime, hitting 2 over 30WPM.

I'm averaging a comfortable 23-26WPM today, excluding the 30+ ones and again, am concentrating on 100% accuracy so I consider this my "real" speed. I am really happy to have gained ground as I've been away from my kb for 4 days!

Considering how error-prone my QWERTY typing was, I actually already "feel" quicker on Colemak, even though I'm still regularly freezing and taking a second to think about letter placements. I can tell that more combinations are in muscle memory so I think in a month or so this'll have a huge effect on speed - I'm easily wasting at least 20-30% of my time on thinking. I, R, P and L seem to be the ones that can throw me off so It's probably a case of just soldiering through.

I've always found that typing long form text and letting Amphetype find out where I'm damaging myself the most usually bring more results than doing drills like that, because I'm notoriously bad at finding out where I'm bad myself, I'm keeping thinking that some letter is messing me up more, but then seeing that my problem is lying with some combination of letters that I'm typing slower, "you" for example is a rather hard word to write for me, but it turns out that even though it feels a bit strange for me it's not one of the words that really brings me problems.