Mornin' all. I've recently started down the path of colemak, so thought I'd join in with the customary experience thread. I've been using qwerty keyboards on computers since I was a kid, something around 30 years, and the best part of the last 15 I've spent working as a computer programmer. However, most of that was as a non-touch-typist until I taught myself about 3/4 years back. I wouldn't say I was fast or accurate, but I was generally good enough for my needs. A while after that I saw piccies of the datahand and kinesis contoured keyboards which really grabbed my interest but far exceeded my budget. Around a month back I finally managed to score myself a (very old & skanky ps/2) kinesis on ebay for not toooo much money. Whilst waiting for it to arrive (international shipping can be sloooow) and searching for tips and stuff I came across the geekhack keyboard forums, and ended up getting drawn in to the Ergodox custom keyboard project too. As people discussed their layout plans I had my first sight of colemak and ended up here. As I'm already investing in ergonomic boards (one of which won't even have printed keys) I decided to have a crack at an ergonomic layout too.
I ran through the lessons on learncolemak.com over friday and saturday of last week, on sunday I moved to using it exclusively at home. At work on monday and back on qwerty I could already feel how much my fingers were dancing all over the place, even if they were far far faster and more accurate, so on tuesday I switched there as well. My kinesis finally turned up there yesterday, so with a little hacking that is now outputting colemak natively.
So, one week in and I'm painfully slow at it all - I get moments where it flows beautifully for a couple of words then blows up in my face with a stream of wrong characters or a 5 second pause to think what I need to press next. So I'm still running through lessons again in the evenings, or typing my story out for strangers on the internet ;) to build up that practice (more meetings than typing at work this week so that wasn't quite the boost it could have been) but I'm definitely liking it. Just gotta wait for those improvements to come. I think that the sudden change to my main keyboard probably through a spanner in the works too, as other keys have suddenly moved, sometimes in very radical ways, but she does feel nice :)