Best of luck! You probably won't regret it. I found I was up to my normal QWERTY typing speed within a month and a half of dedicated practise from cold turkey (80-90WPM). You might get to your old typing speed after all. Either way the comfort is totally worth it.

If you've been at 118 WPM with QWERTY then surely you shall rise at least as high with Colemak.

Check out Ryan Heise's story if you will, he was comparable in speed. And some guy at his test page did 130+ WPM iirc. That's the fastest Colemaker speed I know of; unfortunately we couldn't quite convince Sean Wrona to switch although he was intrigued by Colemak. ;-)

I believe typists have a lot of skills and traits that are largely layout independent. So when you get over the initial humps and chinks, you'll find yourself in good shape again. I'll wager you'll surpass your QWERTY speed eventually, as that's the most common outcome by far.

The less common keys moving to worse positions are often the ones that keep throwing you off the longest. They aren't common enough to learn quickly, and the keys moving to better positions are more pleasant to learn. The semicolon was in a too good position on QWERTY so it falls in this category.

In addition, symbol keys may feel a little differently than letters conceptually which may be an additional confounder.

Speaking of a bit more curl and large hands... sounds like you'd benefit from Colemak-CAW then?

Ya, I think I may just be overdoing it a bit. I'm going to stop with the extra few hours of drills daily for a bit and ramp those back up next week. Guessing it is just new muscles and tension with trying to be accurate.

Ya, good point on the semicolon and colon.. as a programmer those get a lot more use than is typical so ya will have to retrain that one. I may try my ring finger for that key honestly as that seems a bit more ergonomic and not a whole lot of rolls with the semicolon anyways so not missing our on much giving it double duty.

I'm going to stick to vanilla Colemak for the time being, at least a month to give myself a real opportunity to adapt and evaluate it. CAW looks intriguing, though I do use a split keyboard at work so not sure the main benefit is as bit a win for me.

Will check in next week with my progress!

Well, just reached my 2 week goal of averaging 50 wpm on TypeRacer:
Type Racer History

Not second nature by a long shot yet, but the rate of mistakes is decreasing at a good rate. No doubt once the last vestiges of Qwerty have been banished things will pop up even more. 60 doesn't seem too far at all, I'm getting quite a few mid-50 races as it is.

Still slightly uncomfortable on the right hand, but I really think that's just getting used to the increased workload on my right pinky and ring finger.

In any case, for anyone wondering, seems 50 wpm in two weeks seems pretty doable (I know I read some other accounts) it you put in the time to practice. We'll see how the curve continues from here on out.

That sounds quite a bit more realistic than the goals that many people set for themselves.

I look at it like this - I probably maxed out at around 80 WPM in my typing classes in middle school. It was alright for the time, going from typing with one finger to proper touch-typing, and it was a huge leap. It was only in the following years that I subconsciously developed the notion of "Hey... I can go faster if I really want to". Comfortably over the next few years, I pushed higher still, but there was an upper limit to that as well. The leap from proficient to "pretty darn fast" was less effortful, took longer, and the magnitude of the change measured in WPM was pretty low compared to the first hurdle.

Now you have a good base upon which to build and don't need to re-learn the basics of touch-typing, but you are adding two pieces of information. One is the possibility of rolls for comfort and speed. The second one is the relocation of keys to better positions with a much higher emphasis on home row usage.

I think mastering those two added pieces can easily follow a similar pattern to the less-intense leap I wrote about earlier. Unless you really need much higher speed now, you might be better served to simply use the layout every day for everything you type and ease up on the typing drills (maybe once every couple of days?). The only hard thing about a schedule like that which I would still consider essential is that you should avoid forming muscle memory for the wrong patterns, and instead go back over typos and force yourself to re-type the whole word. It might also be helpful to re-type words where you know that a rolling opportunity exists, but you didn't use it. I've found that rolling only interrupts typing flow if it's something you're doing very deliberately. When it's a habit, the flow continues pretty much undisturbed.

That makes a bunch of sense! ^_^

Oh nice, that's encouraging to hear for sure and I'll definitely give that a try. Though I generally have control of the computers I do all my typing on it does seem a shame to lose such a useful skill after honing it over so many years.

I missed my goal this week and didn't break through to 70 wpm on Type Racer. I'm averaging about 65 right now, again, still mostly due to mistakes here and there ('d' seems to be a common problem still) Though typing for daily tasks (like this note) is no longer painful, I do find my accuracy suffers when composing still vs drills or typing tests etc.. So obviously there's still some short circuiting taking place in my brain despite the layout being super natural now.

Going to work hard this week to break through to 70 and obviously at this point I'm still using Colemak at work, hoping things start falling together more easily when composing though. That said, I'm still feeling progress has been good and I'm happy with how fast I'm gotten past the worst hump, a month in and I'm happy to have made the jump, just hoping the next month gets me over 80 wpm again.

Another week passes and I'm up to 70wpm average on Type Racer, a bit quicker actually.

Errors have gone way down this week, at least when transcribing. I think qwerty is being exorcised fully now. I often have sections into 90 wpm now in texts in TypeRacer and the main hangups are often punctuation, that darn semicolon is the hardest adjustment and for some reason I struggle with quotes as well now and then.

Composing new text is still worse than transcribing for some reason but my most used commands on the terminal are becoming fast and natural again, so that is a very nice development. I tried typing a bit in Qwerty the other day and that both feels very wrong and so so nuts in how much my hands move, though I'm still much slower than before I don't see myself going back.

I will probably drill a lot less going forward as I don't think I'm getting huge benefits there. (though perhaps should work on some of the punctuation) Seems that accuracy is still the thing holding me back and that seems to be mostly just getting better through old habits dying off. Will check in every week as I remember though with where I'm at.

Quick update.. progress is still happening though more slowly. I'm at about 73ish average on Type Racer, though that varies quite a bit based on how much I've been typing that day or whether I get a crazy paragraph or something.

Typing is mostly natural now, errors are mostly under control and composition is starting to feel more fluid though still not 100% there. I am definitely at the point now where it is no longer painful though and day to day work is just fine. (I'd say that line has only been crossed in the past few days)

Still so far below my previous typing speed that I feel a bit sheepish about the journey so far though, but I have faith that will come with time. I'll try to keep the weekly updates coming!

Seven weeks in and I'm now at 76 wpm in TypeRacer. I think I'll be able to get to 80 in the next few weeks which will put me not too far off from the original goal of 90. Every day is getting a little bit easier and I'm pretty confident at this point that 90 will happen, just might take another month or two!

You're already faster than me. Good work! ^_^