If you train as much as you can, and get rid of the printout as soon as you can, I'd expect you could make it over a weekend. But that of course, depends on how typing intensive your work is. The absolutely worst part for me was when I was below 20 WPM, but I made it past that threshold after just two days with printout, three without. Do you know how fast you need to be able to type?

Software development. Using Emacs.

Could be worse, I suppose. Could be using vim {ducks!}. :)

Regarding going without the printout: when I was learning dvorak, I didn't consciously try to get rid of the printout. I just used it as-needed and then slowly tapered off. My hunch is that your approach of trying to ween off the printout more quickly sounds better. Thanks.

Once I switched to dvorak, I completely lost the ability to touch-type qwerty. Knowing myself, I don't think there's any way I could do both simultaneously, but thanks anyway.

Well, I've got no reason to try to stay similar to qwerty, since my fingers already know dvorak. :)

Also, I do software development, and was considering even relocating some punctuation. When I can make some time, I'd like to try and play around with carpalx + some differenent corpuses (corpi?) of material (half source code, half american english text) to see if it looks worthwhile to touch punctuation. For one thing, I think I'd like the hyphen somewhere a little easier to reach. For another, parentheses. I'm a Kinesis Contoured/Advantage user, so the locations of Backspace, Delete, Space, Enter, and all the modifiers are fine where they are. Might send the arrow keys packing though to make room for some more-often-used keys though.

But I see your point about Colemak. I noticed this figure at the carpalx website http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?popular_alternatives and Colemak certainly seems to do *very* well there.

As for the question how many days it will take to be proficient, in my experience this can be very different for "plain text" than for "action keys".  When typing plain text (like e-mail, ...), I can somewhat easily switch my brain from Colemak back to Qwerty, and mistakes can be corrected anyway.  But for keyboard-driven programs, like mutt, vi, or in your case emacs, it will cause a lot more confusion (initially, or when switching between layouts later), and errors are less easily corrected (and potentially destructive).

Just something to keep in mind.

I have been using colemak for about a month now, having switched from somewhere between 50 and 60 wpm on qwerty, and am up to 46 wpm with an error rate of 6 on keybr.com's test today. I have spent a total of 13 hours or so on that site over the last month (it totalizes for you), and probably as much again on other typing tutors. 

Typing was a real mission the first two weeks, after which I could start functioning semi-normally again (say 25 wpm, with lots of concentration - it was very difficult typing emails and trying to think of what I wanted to type and how to type it at the same time. Thus typing tests which supply the text were much much easier to type that emails etc.).

I switched cold turkey, but did relabel my keyboard, since I do a lot of one handed typing in applications such as Autocad. The switch became much easier once I put the labels on. I don't think that the argument that it allows you to cheat by looking down is a very strong one, especially if you have touch typed before - just don't look down! I used a brother label printer to print labels for the keys.  With rounded corners they don't peal.

I still have a bunch of habits that bug me a little, especially combinations that I used to type with one hand out of touch typing position - say Alt F,S to save, or cd (as in change directory) - old habits.  But is is getting easier every day, and my speed keeps improving by 1 or 2 wpm per day on keybr.com.

All in all I am very happy with my decision to switch - the layout is starting to feel really smooth and easy now (much better that qwerty), and I think there is still a lot of speed as my fingers learn to quickly do common combinations of letters. The rolls took a long time to become habit, but are really starting to kick in now.

I ended up disabling qwerty completely in the control panel, setting colemak as the only layout, because otherwise every now and again an app would start up in the wrong layout.

My feeling would be that it would be a LOT more difficult to learn colemak while maintaining qwerty than just switching cold turkey.

Thanks for the link. keybr.com looks pretty useful.

Yes, now that you mention that, I think I'm beginning to recall that the first 2 weeks were the toughest... still though, that was a while ago, and I'm beginning to think that I might actually be able to get at least *somewhere* over a 3-day weekend...

Has anyone plotted their typing speed progress over the course of their first days/weeks? Would be an interesting curve to see.

Thing is, with the labels, I've found that they do eventually come off. And when they do, they leave this sticky glue-residue behind that's difficult to get rid of.

I agree.

Heh. Of course. :) Thanks very much for that plot. Is the x-axis days or weeks? (I assume the y-axis is wpm.)

Whoa! If that's "days", then that's nice progress!

Not sure how you managed 14 wpm on day one. For me, on day one (when I switched to dvorak), each *letter* was a big struggle. :)

Here's typing champion Ryan Heise's progress:

He's really good though; if you can match his speeds I'll call you a champion too.  :)

If you're really astute about it, I suppose you could benefit from about five half-hour training sessions a day - or more, depending on how you're wired. It'd be important to train properly and with both physical and mental variation.

Not sure whether you might benefit from the Tarmak (Colemak transitional layout)? With that, you learn one hand at a time so you can focus on fewer keys which should make learning easier. Easier, but I don't think we have data on whether it'd also be faster! Ezuk here learnt it that way but he went at a leisurely pace (more focused on how comfortable it was to learn that way).

For me, two weeks of training exercises, then a week of mostly colemak as much as i can bear it, switching back to dvorak when i had a lot to type. now i've had two weeks of exclusively colemak, i'm about 43wpm and it's no longer frustrating to type. my dvorak skill is now totally dead so i have no option of going back, but i don't want to! i really like the feel of colemak, it's so comfortable :)

QWERTY is now quite inconvenient to type with for me.  I have been using Colemak for close to a month, haven't been particularly dedicated with my practice but touch type about 30 wpm. It has been a little frustrating for me, but I understand, and appreciate that after 12 months practice I will be as proficient as I was with QWERTY.   It is just a matter of time.

It took me roughly 3 weeks to reach half of my previous QWERTY speed, which is easily enough to do anything without getting frustrated.

For reference: all of my experiences