Hi Ma Geezer! 

yeah we are around.  it's just been quiet for some reason here lately.    It's not a super active board, but there are spurts. 

It seems to me that you would have been and maybe still are a prime candidate for the method Ryan Heise used to acquire Colemak.  There are threads here discussing getting up to speed while maintaining Qwerty that you may want to look for.

see here
http://www.ryanheise.com/colemak/

since you have devoted clearly a significant investment in time already to learning Dvorak, it would be really hard for anyone to make that judgement call for you on whether Colemak makes sense.  There are some former Dvorak users on here and then of course others swear by Dvorak.  No one can answer this for you. If you still feel that Qwerty is even now instinct and second nature, it MAY be possible to pick up Colemak rather quickly. Colemak was designed with a user such as yourself in mind, but don't expect an overnight miracle.  The first week may still feel rather clumsy especially with Dvorak in your system. 

I don't know of any definite studies and certainly none that would be able to make you path clear cut,  Qwerty dominates too much for that.

welcome.

I learned Qwerty in the 8th grade back in 1972, and could type at 70wpm by the time the school class was over.  I have used it consistently until 8 years ago, when I switched to Dvorak.  My reason for switching to Dvorak was mostly because of carpal tunnel syndrome, and I wanted some relief for the pain.  At the time I was typing in the 80s (software architecture and development is my profession).  I don't type as much as you do, but I certainly do type a fair amount.

I worked with a couple of guys who had switched to Dvorak, and they kept telling me I could learn it in a weekend.  Well, they weren't lying, I did learn it in a weekend.  However, learning it and going past the level of feeling utterly frustrated with it because of typing so slowly are two different things. 

I made the switch cold turkey.  I did it during a two week vacation and practiced Dvorak each day for probably a couple of hours.  I used typing tutor software during those two weeks, and was up in the 40s with high accuracy in Dvorak by the end.  I felt going back to work was not going to be a problem at all with my new Dvorak skills which were noticeably improving daily.

WRONG!  I learned quickly that typing in a tutor program is one thing, and tasks like typing emails, software specs, and program code are a completely different thing.  I was at most in the teens with not very good accuracy, as if I was learning Dvorak all over again.  I was completely amazed at the difference, stumbling all over myself when typing from my head and then going home to type rapidly and accurately on the typing tutors again.

It took several months, but eventually I could type in all situations faster and more accurately than I did before in Qwerty.  The bonus is that my carpal tunnel pain did go away.  I never kept up my Qwerty skills, and now have to hunt and peck when typing Qwerty.  I did eventually end up remapping a few Dvorak keys to locations more to my liking (for example I swapped I and U) but I'd never go back to Qwerty.  I've heard a few people complain about shortcut keys in Dvorak, but I guess that I am used to them and now the same shortcuts in Qwerty don't seem right at all.

I have thought about trying Colemak a few times; mostly just out of curiosity about whether or not I'd like it more than Dvorak.  I think for you it might be a better solution than Dvorak simply because it is somewhat similar to Qwerty.  Something to keep in mind about Colemak is that you would have to install software on your computer to make it work, and in some businesses you might not be allowed to do that.  If that is not a problem, then Colemak might be a great option for you.

I don't think the 40+ years of Qwerty are going to be a problem for you moving on to a better keyboard layout.  Like you mentioned, a fast typist thinks in words and sentences while typing and not in letters.  It takes a while for your brain to build the new pathways; learning the letters is easy but getting to where you no longer think about the letters at all takes a while longer. 

Thanks,
Mark.

I am not allowed to install software on my PC at work either.  So the official colemak install.exe (the one that installs Colemak as a native Windows keyboard layout, obviously requires admin privileges) or the registry remapping won't work.  But "portable" apps like Autohotkey and PKL work perfectly well.  They're portable binaries, meaning you simply unzip the program+config in a location you have write access to and run it.  PKL works very well for me, and allowed me to make more custom remappings to (like creating my own Colemak-like layout for Russian characters).

At home, with NetBSD (or with Linux or anything else that has X11) I have native Colemak support shipped with the OS (as a simple text file, so also customisable if you wish).

I should have explained more in my original posting on the need to install software.  I have seen the posts in these forums about using autohotkey scripts and that sort of thing.  I didn't think that would be a good solution for the original poster since she types around 100 wpm, so I didn't mention it.  I could be wrong, though, since I've never tried it or had a reason to.
Can an ahk script really keep up at those speeds?

Thanks,
Mark.

To the main thread: learning a new layout can be a long way, just depends how fast you are learning new things, for example new dancing? Tracy, quite interesting thing you have written - I write faster from my had (emails, documentation) than typing what I see when I practise with Amphetype. Beginning touch typing things were just opposite, like you, when I was typing from my head I was frequently stuck (when I noticed someone is watching me, almost always...).

When I started learnig (for the first time ever) with Dvorak, it was hard. But having some skills I have tried Colemak, it was easier to get through, but again I tried qwerty and it was even easier. The point is that when you activate your neurons to break the habbit and learn something new it is mainly the matter of time when you build up a new neural paths. Maybe even changing layout makes your neurons more active? 

I was typing only on Dvorak again for some time, but I reached some level of maximum and get tempted to switch to Colemak because I thought it was easier. Right now I am typing on Colemak (for about a month). Again It seems a little harder than Dvorak but I bet it is only because now I type faster than last time on Dvorak  (I still make progress). There are very little differences between Dvorak and Colemak so I am sure whichever you choose over qwerty you will be very satisfied in the long term. I plan to stay with the Colemak, it has a good advantage - the brackets are on qwerty place, because I do lots of errors trying to reach them with pinky I prefer to do alternative fingering on them looking at the keyboard.

It all depends what you have to type the most.

Cheers

I'm pretty much a kid compared to you--I've been using QWERTY for 16 years.  Even still, I've found it extremely difficult to learn any new layout (and by "learn" I mean "type at least 70 WPM with"--that seems to be the speed at which typing starts to feel "automatic" to me).  I've only managed to learn one alternative layout past 70 WPM, which is this one:

QWDFG YJKL;
ASERT HUIOP
ZXCVB NM,./

It's Qwerty with most of the top row and home row swapped (so that most typing occurs on the home row instead of the top row--the primary benefit of alternative layouts).  No character changes fingers, and the bottom row is left intact.  I think it took me a week to get to 70 WPM, and another few weeks to get up to 90 WPM.  (My Qwerty speed before switching was in the 105 WPM range.)  If you're a long-time Qwerty typist who's just gotta get a taste of alternative layouts, that's a pretty good one to try.  It's not as good as Dvorak or Colemak, but it's WAY easier to learn.  (They trick is to realize you already know the layout, you just need to mentally "push" certain keys up or down when you first start out with it.  I didn't realize this until four days into the first week or I'd have hit 70 WPM a lot sooner.)

I eventually abandoned the above layout because the benefits didn't outweigh the inconveniences.  (I abandoned Dvorak, Colemak, and a couple of homebrew layouts for the same reason.)  However, it at least proved that an "old" dog can learn new tricks (as long as they're sufficiently similar to the old tricks).  :)

Sadly, Ma Geezer there are no recent scientific studies about the pros and cons of keyboard layouts. You have only the personal experiences of users to guide you.

In my case I was trained to touch type (QWERTY of course) at college. I typed Qwerty for about eighteen years, tried Dvorak, didn't really get along with it, and then tried and stuck with Colemak. Next month will by a year since switching. During the transition I didn't have to type much at work so that helped a lot. The first week or two were pretty hard going. Typing a paragraph would take minutes instead of seconds. That is unavoidable though. You have to crawl, then walk, and finally run. Perhaps you could take a week off work to give yourself a head start?

Alternatively, as keyboard samurai has suggested, you could learn Colemak and continue to use your main layout. There is quite a lot of *subjective* evidence that this works well. I didn't bother but it's something you could consider.

Good luck.

Part of the reason for that, I've discovered, has been my approach to learning those new layouts.  It's always been an "OMG cold turkey must get up to Qwerty speed I'm never using Qwerty again!" endeavor.  So, I end up struggling trying to type everything using that layout, being worthless any time I have to sit at someone else's keyboard (which is always Qwerty), and eventually burning out and going back to Qwerty.

It's worth mentioning that I've been practicing another custom layout for the past couple of months.  The difference this time is, I'm approaching it as a hobby instead of an urgency.  I want to keep my Qwerty speed, but I also want to be able to switch to the new layout if I want.  Once or twice a week, I'll pour 30 minutes to an hour into practicing.  Whenever I get up to a natural-feeling 70 WPM, I might switch to it full time, or at least any time I need to type a lot of text.  Until then, it's no big deal; I'm quite capable and happy with Qwerty.  Perhaps this would be a good approach for you, too, Tracy?

To add my current perspective to the thread: I find I can switch easily between QWERTY and Colemak after typing the initial word in gibberish (because often I expect one or the other and can be somewhat surprised...) I suspect that my use of QWERTY on library computers and on my blackberry and now my iPhone has helped me remember my QWERTY typing skills, even as I spend a majority of my time in Colemak. As I also tend to install new operating systems, I am often forced to type in QWERTY until (if ever) I get around to installing Colemak. And when running under other people's profiles, at home, I again have to type in QWERTY since the rest of the household uses it. It really just comes down to practice -- the more you do it, the better you get at it. Take switching from BlackBerry to iPhone, for example. I was extremely fast with a blackberry, and when I switched to iPhone, I felt like keeping the BlackBerry to send emails with. But as with my switch to Colemak, it took awhile to tell my fingers -- or in this case, thumbs -- where to go, but now 8 months later, I finally can type paragraphs on the iPhone and not mind quite as much. In fact, there was a bug in the 3.0 beta software I was using that hid the keys occasionally, and I could touch-type blind on the iPhone, not even knowing where exactly the keys were, let alone what they were labelled.

Similarly, the trick is to learn to trust your fingers, and not to give up when you make mistakes, just hit the backspace key and try again. And again. You'll make it eventually. I compare such switches to switching keyboard types -- normal to ergonomic, or apple to netbook -- the keyboard is just different enough that your fingers know roughly where to go, just not quite how to get there yet. But they'll learn, as you force it. I mean, even the idea of switching from Windows to Mac, this changes keyboard shortcuts and so on, yet people manage to adapt despite this. So now Mac-Colemak feels more natural than Windows-QWERTY, but when forced into it, I'll use whatever's there. Think of the slower typing time as encouraging you to think more about what you're writing rather than something that makes you feel inferior.

Having said all of the above, I've never did try to use Dvorak, though I did have a French-Canadian keyboard, which was sufficiently different from QWERTY that to regain US punctuation layout for easier programming, I swapped to Colemak. So I guess you could say I had a reason to switch, besides the fact that my fingers and joints would hurt after a day a typing and gaming chats ...