You are right, it's painful and difficult at first. Looking back, the first three weeks are the hardest. You live in a slowing down motion picture.

Touch typing can take a while to hone.  You see alot of folks here talk about some pretty high speeds, but most of us have been touch typists for a very long time.

Typing classes in high school and such can last an entire semester or even longer... so do expect it to take a while.  I went from reasonably fast hunt and pecker as a kid to a really fast touch typist in around 18 months.  Perhaps all of those lines of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." I did bored out of my mind in school too (I know I spent at least a week typing that as fast as I could over and over and over to see how much I could cram into a single given class / etc heh).

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There are plenty of things to consider when touch typing as far as comfort etc.  You can google up a lot of questions and answers regarding the topic.

I cover a fair amount of questions to ask yourself:

https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php … 817#p14817

Take a look at fast touch typists on youtube.  Videos where folks discuss mechanical keyboard sound tests etc are excellent for giving you closeups of hand / finger positions etc.  I'll note that plenty of those folks aren't touch typists, but whatever.  You can look and try to see some ideas etc. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D37Ix9Ng0to

This chick is pretty neat.  Her right hand moves far more than her left, though.  She also isn't quite a proper touch typist, she strikes A with her ring finger, etc.  Might have something to do with the finger nails, I dunno. Most touch typists aren't textbook perfect touch typists.  If you look through some of the discussion here, you'll note that plenty of people acknowledge that LOTS of folks hit the C key with their index finger (which is technically wrong, I happen to do it too).  Basically, you'll take most of the tenants of proper touch typing and find something that works for you.  For me, this tends to be lazy approach - the more my fingers or wrists have to move, the less happy I am.

Lastly, as far as pain in touch typing - you're undoubtedly focusing very hard on finger position and finger movement, thus your muscles are likely tense for controlling your fingers. This will cause joint, tendon, and muscle pain.  If you can learn to just completely zen like relax while typing... it should 'flow' better.

I enjoy reading these updates.

I think your point about difficulty in learning is right on the money.  How much touch typing did you do before?  You said you were learning to touch type at the same time as learning Tarmak.

I was a reasonable half blind hunt and pecker under Qwerty, but found touch typing a bit of a slow climb and I also learned under a new layout.  I'm not sure if that was a help or a hindrance.  My fingers are still a little uncomfortable with touch typing, but it's getting easier/looser.

I step into Qwerty every once in a while.  And although I have never really touch-typed Qwerty there is still a familiarity about it.  It can catch me by surprise.  I can't really touch type it, but with a little help from my eyes the brain sometimes goes first.  It's probably just soingrained.  I have tried touch typing Dvorak with less fingers (say no pinky) and I can quite soon get to grips with it, though not as fast.   The brain must do some serious dot joining.  Amazing really.

Regarding Tarmak, I think it was useful in my case. Being effectively unable to type for several weeks (which is what a cold-turkey switch would have meant) wasn't really a viable option. If circumstances were different, if say I had a free couple of months -- with no day-to-day work -- then I'd probably have gone cold turkey. As it was, I may well have not chosen Colemak (or at would have at least postponed it) if Tarmak didn't exist.

Spending quite some time on Tarmak-1 in particular was useful as E is so frequent that it was good to get that to bed down early. Especially as it also changes hand. I probably rushed the later stages a bit too much (skipping step-4 entirely), which meant I struggled for a while after reaching full Colemak.  But I don't really regret that. 

Curiously though, I found that in the early Tarmak steps, I would often revert back to hunt-and-peck, and only once I was on full Colemak did I manage to be more disciplined about keeping my fingers in the proper positions.

I think it's great that Tarmak exists, as it's always good to provide options to potential new users which make the transition more accessible.

I've found that most sites significantly reuse text, making it so that you become very proficient at those texts but not so much at any other.

For that reason, I'd suggest using a program like amphetype that lets you read and practice typing at the same time.  The danger of repetition is reduced, especially if you periodically read from different sources.

Heh, still preferable to my situation.  I didn't even bother trying a speed test beforehand, since I was switching for comfort (while true, still very short-sighted).  As a result, I now wonder ever so often "did I use to be this fast?  Or did I beat my old speed a while ago?  Or might have I been even faster?"

I also learned Colemak for comfort more than speed, but I'm still interested in tracking my progress speed-wise.

Of course, it's good that I'm faster on common words - which is what 10fastfingers training helps with.  It's just that I noticed that my score on there is not really an accurate reflection of my typing in general. For example typing this post - there's no way it would be anywhere near 40 wpm.  I'll have to check out amphetype.

@davkol

1. Unrepresentative results: you get to be very fast with the specific texts they measure, but much slower otherwise

2. Insufficient flexibility training: since in repeating the familiar, one isn't practicing reacting to unknown texts

3. Boredom: one can only type the same thing so many times before this sets in

My colemak typing is coming along quite nicely, I am probably almost up to my old Qwerty speeds, but the difference in comfort is really noticable... well, certainly for standard English text typing anyway.

However now that I am using proper touch-typing technique, I have increasingly started to notice how different the experience is doing "normal" typing (e.g. emails, or even typing tests),  compared to as a software developer, doing a lot of coding. Especially using a modern IDE, with their content-assist features which allow you to fill in expessions using short strings of text, then arrow keys/return. Plus developers tend to use a lot of key shortcuts and more symbols/punctuation characters, not to mention the amount of general editing with heavy reliance on arrow keys, copy/paste etc. Basically it feels a lot more disjointed than normal typing.

I have implemented a some changes using the brilliant AutoHotKey to try to address some of these issues, but I feel the developer experience is still far from perfect. This is what I have set up so far:

1. A single tap of CapLock is backspace.
2. Holding down CapLock and pressing another key gives a new layer. This layer is similar to that of DreymaR and others, and sets up arrow keys, PgUp/PgDown, Home, End etc around the right-hand home keys.
3. A singe tap of AltGr is Return.
4. Holding down AltGr and pressing another key gives additional characters. Previously I used this for extended/accented characters, based on the MS international layout. But since I rarely needed to type those, I have now instead put common programming keys (e.g "{}[]-_=+", etc) on the home row for this layer. I have not fully adapted to this yet but if feels like a promising idea so far.

The issues I have are:

- The CapsLock layer sounds great in theory but I find it awkward to use in practise. Especially when selecting text using arrows to cut/paste elsewhere. You end up with awkward combinations of CapsLock and Shift while also navigating around with the right-hand keys. Perhaps this can be overcome with time. But my feeling is this layer would be better as a toggle on/off via a single tap of CapsLock. But if I did that I would need to remap Backspace to something else. Or alternatively use some other key to toggle this layer.

- I would like to find a better method for Shift. I am unsatisfied with the pinkie stretch. Sticky shift might be a possible improvement here. It occured to me that CapLock would actually be a logical Sticky Shift, as it would be like its original meaning but would only stay in force for one keypress. But of course I can't re-use CapsLock for everything! I have considered remapping Left Alt so that I could then use that for e.g. BackSpace instead. But with each of these changes it's getting more and more complicated.

Yeah, so probably most of these problems could be solved by getting a better-designed keyboard. And I will do that when one I like the look of becomes readily available. But in the meantime I continue in my quest to find a mapping which is intuitive and efficient. Interested to know what bright ideas others have come up with in this area.

Nice ideas with the tap-release versions of Caps and AltGr. I've been wary of trying it, but if you think it works very well over time then keep telling us! :)

For Shift/Ctrl/Alt with the extend layer, I really think you need a set of modifiers like I have on S/T/A (I couldn't use R for Ctrl because of a ghosting quirk in the hardware). Otherwise, like you say it'll get very contorted. Hitting Caps+A+S+I for Alt+Shift+Right actually feels smooth to me as it's all on the home row. Once you're used to it, these chords flow from your fingers like playing the piano.

I wouldn't toggle the layer, as it's very powerful to be able to jump right in and out of it. I frequently need to jump up one line and back one word to delete a small typo, then type in the right word before moving back to where I was and type on; going in and out of modes for that seems clunky in that case and a sticky layer would be a disaster then as I see it. Maybe I'm more with Emacs than with Vim on that particular issue, although I use only the latter editor.

In addition to the brackets and such, you might consider a left-hand NumPad on your AltGr layer? I have mapped an expanded NumPad for my "Extend layer #2", and it's nice now and then. That might be a toggle layer of its own, though.

If you have an ISO keyboard, another possibility is to (like Neo) make VK_102 an extra modifier (or making it into left shift and making the old left shift the extra modifier).  This would prevent the angle mod, but you could use still use the angle mod's physical fingering (since you already hit C with index finger).

My impression was that stevep99's issues were more to do with the more "modern" programs deficient in keyboard functionality, and that remappings like an Extended navigation layer weren't making up for it. 

I would take care not to overuse emacs' movement shortcuts, though; they're arguably the worst aspect of emacs (haha only serious):  C-b and M-b are probably the most blatant examples: out-of-the-way if C- and M- are hit with the opposite hand, and downright contorted with the same hand.

In lieu of that, I hear i-search is a popular movement method in emacs, and Colemak, thankfully, positions C-r and C-s very nicely.  However, if you haven't already, also look into alternative movement methods such as Ace Jump Mode or even Evil (an extensible vi layer ;).

A new milestone reached: Just recorded a first reaching exactly one word per second (i.e. 60 wpm)!

Although, I usually am around 50-ish. Definitely levelling off at this point. That's OK though, it's a comfortable typing speed and I believe have overtaken my previous Qwerty ability at least.

The biggest problem now is the amount of mistakes I make.

It can sake some time to get all of the keys right when typing, it's been around two months for me and I still have some problems with some letters on the board(positioning of the v and b keys and the p and g keys because of the left staggar of the keyboard.).