Hi everyone.

I've never posted here before, but I learned Colemak in 2009. I've been using it on my main computer ever since and now, sadly, I'm switching back. I loved Colemak, but I've been defeated by the ubiquity of qwerty. I had been touch-typing on qwerty for 15 years before learning Colemak, and even though I immediately lost my qwerty skills it didn't take long to recover them, and I can touch-type on both keyboards. But when I started Colemak I convinced myself that either I wouldn't have to use qwerty at all, or else it would become like a second language, where I can switch between them effortlessly. But I have to use qwerty whenever I use a different computer, which I do often, and even though I can use both, it isn't effortless. I make lots of typos on both layouts, and my speed on both is a bit slower than the 80wpm that it was originally on qwerty. The loss of speed never bothered me, but this tension in my fingers does. I had assumed that it would fade, but after two years my fingers still get confused. They don't know which keys to press, and even when they do I sometimes think they're guessing.

Thank you, Shai, for making a respectable alternative to qwerty that lacked the absurdity of Dvorak. I always wanted to break away from qwerty and I couldn't have asked for a better layout than yours. But I can't escape - the qwerty behemoth is too powerful. It hasn't all been in vain, though. I loved the multilingual features of Colemak and I intend to configure qwerty to do the same, and I'll keep the caps lock as a backspace, of course.

I don't mean to discourage people from trying to switch. The difference in finger-moving distance was very noticeable with Colemak, the caps-lock as back-space was a big improvement and the multilingual features are wonderful. Good luck to everyone who tries it, I'm sure many of you will succeed where I have failed.

sincerely,

Grant