Hi all,

I wanted to tell you about my successful switch from QWERTY(Z) to Colemak. A few months ago a friend of mine told me about Colemak (some of you might know him, it's boli). As a programmer I type quite a lot and I thought that switching to the Colemak layout would do me good. Not to forget the geek factor when you tell others about "this" layout you are using ;-) Before the switch I used the swiss german QWERTZ layout for 15 years or so. I never really practised typing with QWERTZ. Furthermore, while programming the limiting factor is more the speed of the brain then the speed of the fingers; and writing manuals - well - programmers don't really like to write them if they don't have to. As a result my speed with QWERTZ was at a lowly 52 wpm (measured with http://hi-games.net/typing-test).

I tried the "QWERTZ by day and Colemak by night" approach and soon reached 30+ wpm with relative little training (about half an hour a day for 3 weeks or so). My training included lessons with TypeFaster, some rounds of Typing of the Dead and above all many minutes with hi-games.net/typing-test.

But then, out of no obvious reason in retrospect, I stopped training and used QWERTZ again all day. But after a few weeks I reconsidered my decision and resumed using Colemak at home. And after another week (at about 35 wpm) I switched to Colemak at the office to. It was hard time (well, not *that* hard): the letters were not really a problem, but all special characters moved compared to the swiss german layout (nothing to blame the Colemak layout for, though). But as a programmer I can only profit from the new positions of these special characters.

Now my max speed with Colemak is 55 wpm (which is more than with QWERTZ!) and I think there's a still a lot of potential. I have never really regretted the decision to switch to Colemak.

Thanks for this fantastic layout.
Cheers,

raymi