Colemak is noticeably more comfortable than qwerty, but it is not faster. If you are worried about injury then a switch is worthwhile.

Most people are able to match their typing speeds fairly quickly. Since you are a high-performance qwerty typist, watch out for what happened to James McKay (jammycakes here at the forums). He was unable to match his previous qwerty speeds after several months of practice. Your mileage may vary.

Most people on Qwerty seem to be typing at around 40 WPM... so Qwerty can't be any good either? :-)

Speed isn't everything.  If you don't want to lose your current speed (120 wpm is good!) it's better not to switch at all because you *will* have to relearn everything and it *will* take some time.

If on the other hand, you want to lose pain, and gain more comfort and accuracy, Colemak may be something for you.

Hmm, well, I really have nothing to do this summer, so this is shaping up to be a nice boredom killer.  :)

Two days after switching cold turkey, my QWERTY speed has dropped to 111, and my Colemak speed is 23.

The thing I've noticed about Colemak is that it's forcing me to type correctly.  When I type in QWERTY, I don't use either pinky, except for Shift and Backspace, and my ring fingers take over for them.  My middle finger, in turn, often covers many ring finger keys.  Learning Colemak, meanwhile, forces me to properly use my fingers, leading to a much more graceful, relaxed feel.

I'm definitely liking Colemak so far.  Hopefully I, too, can reach 100 in 30 days!

That was my observation, too.  While I've finally caught up with my old Qwerty speed in the meanwhile, I don't regard speed as the main benefit (anymore).  Correct typing style, and the vastly increased accuracy and comfort that followed from it are now the main benefits to me.

The average typist does 40 WPM, and if you graph average typing speed it's a bell curve, but there's a sharp drop off at 70 WPM. (Wish I had a source...I was looking at this just a few days ago and now I can't find it.) I think most people on this forum type 70 WPM or so because alternative layouts look better to fast typists.

I think you should probably switch. At those speeds you will eventually have wrist problems I think. You should be able to regain that speed, though it may take a while. Also if you practice QWERTY every day it is possible to stay at almost the same QWERTY speed. I've actually increased my QWERTY speed over the past month by practicing about 10 minutes a day, once every two or three days or whenever I remember to. It's still lower than what it originally was though.

Also you should switch because someday, they will teach Colemak to children in typing class, and when you convert to Colemak, that brings us one step closer to this dream. Do it for the sake of the world!!

No, the effect is not persistent.

And of course you'll eventually develop just as effective techniques with Colemak as the ones you have with QWERTY today. It just takes time.

That's interesting, Korivak.

When you start typing in either Colemak or Qwerty again after having used the other layout, for how long are you "confused" enough to make a lot of typo's?  And do you still make typo's once you've been using a layout for a few minutes?

I'm interested because I made no attempt at all to maintain my Qwerty skills, and I'm a real hunt'n pecker now with Qwerty (but I use it very rarely and usually only for a few sentences or commands).

I do notice though that my Qwerty muscle memory didn't completely disappear when I have to type when I'm very tired.  Then somehow it all seems to come back and take over from Colemak, which confuses me a lot and causes me to make lots of typo's.  I should just go to bed in such situations... :-)

Perhaps maintaining two keyboard layouts is easier if you "tie" them to particular keyboards, computers or environments (eg. home = Colemak, office = Qwerty).

Makes perfect sense to me, esp. the phone/sms example!

The numeric keypads on a computer keyboard (or a calculator) and a phone are different (upside down), too btw.

Huh.  I think that, at the expense of my ability to type in QWERTY (down now to an abysmal 22 WPM, from 114 or so), I've made rapid advances in Colemak, in which I've been typing, IMing, Facebooking, etc.  I'm now at a high of 55 WPM (average of three tests at 49 WPM) after 6 days.

I'm hoping that my muscle memory remains over my three-day vacation from the computer, though.  I'm hoping my speed doesn't drop! Lol.

Day 10 and I'm at 63 WPM.  I almost plateaued at 50 WPM, but my friend encouraged me to just keep working at it, telling me that it was all just a mental block, and I jumped to 60 WPM.  Now I'm hoping that I'm not plateauing at 60 ;) My progress is definitely slowing down, though.  And my QWERTY speed has been staying consistently in the 20-30 WPM range.  Hmm.

I'm definitely liking the comfort of the Colemak keyboard, and how it seems much smaller than the QWERTY keyboard, because my fingers aren't flying all over the place like before.  I'm noticing that I still commonly switch the R and S keys, as well as the E and I keys, and have difficulty with the G and J keys, but that's probably just me.

Thanks to Shai for creating this lovely layout! :D

I also still have the R-S and E-I problems, although much more rarely now than I did while learning the layout.

You should. Period.