Last year I had never heard about Dvorak or Colemak. Over break (the beginning of this month) I had an idea to start switching around my keys (\ < > : and ;) to be
able to better configure a few applications. I searched and found keytweak and it worked perfectly. At this moment I discovered that many people had switched
their caps and backspace, which was ingenious to me.
That led to this forum and colemak. I was discouraged at first due to having a strong 60 - 65 wpm rate with qwerty and not wanting to lose all speed for at least
a couple months.
I decided to make the switch about two weeks ago (a very slow week during the semester) and downloaded the program, amphetype for practice, and made a simple
batch file for quick switching (just restart explorer.exe) between qwerty and colemak, the weekend after (1-21-12). I decided to go with the cold turkey approach.
The sunday after, I memorized the entire colemak board (over a few hours with minor breaks), my name (Timothy Cookson), login names and passwords, and short words
like "the, that, when, from, and, want, were", etc. I was able to trot along at about 13 +- 3 wpm at about 94% accuracy and hit 18 wpm a couple times before bed.
The next day after a couple hours of drills I was at about 18 +- 4 wpm regularly and was hitting 25 wpm 1/6 trials with 93% accuracy (I was really trying to push my limits)
and by the end of Tuesday I was sweating and shaking after pulling a 28 wpm @ 97% out of nowhere (it wasn't as bad as it sounds).
On Wednesday I never went below 27 wpm nor 95% accuracy after 30 trials. I topped out at 32.4 wpm on a 70 word trial with 96.6%.
I skipped out on practice for two days and went back to qwerty for a bit of programming. I also tested my qwerty speed but was never able to get over 55 wpm :(
Thankfully my colemak speed didn't suffer at all afterward. I was still at about 30 wpm on Friday and finally hit my goal of 35 wpm that night
(which was the point I choose to never turn back to qwerty).
Over the weekend was shadowing 40 wpm at 97%. And today (Tuesday 1-31-12) I have just tasted the sweetness of 43 wpm (20 wpm from my original qwerty speed).
I will leave my keys where they are (other people use my comp). I have had absolutely no trouble with r,s,e,i,g or j. My problem still lies with f and p.
Slowest keys:
p - 10.0 @ 91%
f - 11.5 @ 80%
k - 12 @ 83%
r - 16.5
l, u, g, y - 18.5
d - 22
fastest keys:
space - 95 @ 99.8%
h - 87
a - 77
o - 61 @ 97%
e - 58 @ 96%
n - 53 @ 96.5%
t - 47 @ 97.5%
w - 40
PS: all this was written in colemak
