Hello everyone! I thought I whould share my experience in learning colemak the cold turkey way. But first some background information.
I am going to college next year, to study computer science, so I thought i would learn to use a keyboard the right way, to save my wrists and fingers. A little bit less than a year ago I first heard about dvorak, and thought "What the heck, let's try", and went complete cold turkey on dvorak. However, this did not work, so I gave up after 2 weeks, when I had enough of typing "ls -a" on dvorak.
On qwerty, I have no idea how to type properly. Before colemak I was typing at roughly 28WPM according to 10fastfingers, using about four of my ten fingers. But last autumn I started thinking again. I took a brief look at dvorak again, but it simply didn't work. Then I found out about all the other keyboard layouts, including colemak. So, once again I went cold turkey (yes, I'm a cold turkey guy...). This time I used a homebrew colemak xmodmap with the often used åäö (In Swedish, that is.) on altGr+rst, contrary to standard colemak. One thing I learned from that experience is that xmodmap is NOT FUN.
The first day was horrible. I used a map of the colemak layout as wallpaper, and that was it. Just half an hour in a typing tutor the first day, and that's all the typing tutoring I have done. I tried to really take the typing slow, and get it right from the beginning. I think I dropped down to about 3WPM.
The second day, my girlfriend did not like my experiment with colemak. Each IM message took a few minutes to compose, and I was about to smash the keyboard with a nearby hammer.
But after a week of hell, I knew where the keys were, and could remove that ugly wallpaper. The second week was not as hellish as the first, but still awful. I had gotten up to about 10WPM.
The third week I was starting to accept the new layout. My IMs took less time to write, the keyboard didn't get smashed, and I starded to get a little used to it. This week, my speed got up to something like 15WPM. It was still slow, but it started to get closer to my old qwerty speed. When I used the qwerty keyboards at my school, I started to try to write colemak on them by reflex.
A few weeks later I was basicly up in my old qwerty speed, but unlike on qwerty, my typing speed did not stop there, but it improved further.
Now, about six months later, I am typing at 45-55 WPM, and still improving. I enjoy colemak all the time now, and I have absolutely no regrets about the switch. I (fortunately) switched to a costum Xkb layout, based on the colemak layout included in X on arch linux, but with my åäö mod, and the standard '9' and '0' buttons replaced with '(' and ')' for some reason. Sometime in the future I might improve this layout further... I got a TypeMatrix keyboard (typematrix.com). It has a colemak switch built in, so one keystroke and I can use my keyboard on every computer. Unfortunately some of the special characters get scrambled on a swedish qwerty layout using my keyboard. Wonderful keyboard.
I don't have the dicipline to not go cold turkey. I would completly fail if I were to use some transitional layouts or just practice for a few minutes a day. I can recommend cold turkey, but only if the will and the time exists. After one month, the hellish experience is over, and the fun begins.
