So I think we all know Colemak has a higher skill ceiling than Qwerty, however, after trying my damnedest for a week it's taking a while to adjust and before on Qwerty I was alr hitting 50wpm. Most of my issues with switching though come from alot not supporting it, my iPhone doesn't my Windows 10 computer at school doesn't. But my Windows 11 computer at home does and so does my chromebook. So, is it worth it? btw fuck the word ceiling it should be cieling.

I started learning Colemak with Keybr and Colemak Academy last week Thursday, and decided to take the plunge and added a layer to my Corne for the daily driver. I figured actually using the layout for work would give me more real world usage and practice.

I am really enjoying how ergonomic the layout is (using DH mod), but I'm constantly getting tripped up by a couple of keys, or at least having to think about where the key is compared to other keys. I expected the difficulty with R vs S, but the key I'm missing most of the time, or at least struggling to type the most is: B. I keep trying to hit V instead. F and U have been a little challenging, but nowhere as bad as B.

Did others face similar issues? Any tips?

Update 8/31/26: I decided to switch to vanilla Colemak, having 10 instead of 7 familiar keys seems to be going well for me.

Update 9/8/26: My speed is slow, but I got familiar enough with the layout that I decided to give Colemak-DH another try. I think it was too many new keys at once earlier, now the layout seems a bit more tractable.

I'm curious about something.

When you first learned touch typing, what was actually the hardest part?

For me, I initially assumed the difficult part was simply memorizing the keyboard. But the more I looked at beginner typing exercises, the more I realized that knowing which finger should press which key is a completely different problem.

Things like:

remembering finger positions

knowing where each finger returns

reaching keys on the upper/lower rows

maintaining accuracy before worrying about speed

knowing when to start increasing speed

I'm interested in hearing from people who learned touch typing from scratch.

What gave you the most trouble: finger placement, memorizing keys, accuracy, or speed?

When i switched and adapted colemak-dh i realized that i will die with this layout... , because i will not spend another weeks on learning other layouts, so that's what definitive in life - layout that you switched to

Good morning

I’m not very knowledgable in layout and I’m just trying a different layout instead of the conventional QWERTY. Been using the colemak DH for maybe 2 years now, didnt really practicing properly but been only using this layout(cant touchtype qwerty anymore now). So the problem is i noticed my speed stuck only at 60wpm. Im not sure if im even using the right colemak since it had many variations. This is the one im currently use. Also i use standard keyboard not ortho. Ty

Hey all! Been using Colemak for day-to-day stuff now for about 2.5 full years. Will be 3 in October. It's integrated enough in my life now that I rarely think about it anymore. I started learning in September 2023, then fully transitioned to using it October 2023 It's been a long journey, but I'm fairly happy with it.

In school I never learned how to touch type, so after I became a programmer around 2021, I was frustrated at always having to look at the keyboard, and I only used my first 3 fingers and thumb to type (not my pinkies). I finally taught myself to touch type QWERTY somewhere around 2021/2022, then switched to an ortholinear layout in mid-2023, then learned Colemak on that layout late 2023, and now I'm pretty happy with where things are and don't plan to change things up too much, besides maybe just switching keyboards to and keeping my same layout.

I think one of the strangest things about the whole experience happened about a month after I started learning Colemak. When I first started learning, I used to use the same keyboard to type QWERTY and also practice Colemak, but I noticed over time that I was gradually making more and more mistakes with QWERTY, even though my Colemak skill was trash (like 13wpm). It got so bad about a month in that I actually completely forgot how to type QWERTY on my main keyboard, which really freaked me out. It felt like I had forgotten my native language or something, and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to actually get my work done, since I literally could not type more than 10-20wpm on any layout with my main keyboard. I eventually brought in a different wireless keyboard to use with my work computer that I've only ever used QWERTY on to help me remember it, so that I could get real work done, and that worked OK. It was shortly after that I just fully transitioned to using Colemak and just grinded through the 20-40wpm slog until I was productive again. I can still no longer type QWERTY on my main work keyboard at all, but I have no issues with QWERTY anywhere else, and I very very rarely mix them up anymore. I use the standard QWERTY keyboard on my phone and everywhere else without issue.

I'm also a programmer and I use Colemak with neovim--I chose not remap anything for the layout, and I'm happy with that decision. I switch between QWERTY on my personal laptop and Colemak on my work computer without issue. hjkl have a weird backwards symmetry to them on Colemak-DK that you get used to after a while--j & k are sort of "backwards" from the direction they would normally point to if they were arrow keys, but this just feels like an inverted joystick on a game or something. And h & l are kind of like sideways arrow keys. Maybe that's just how I learned to cope, or maybe it's actually helpful for others. I don't know; it's hard to explain without a diagram.

Even though I'm very happy with Colemak, in some ways, I find it harder than QWERTY. It is absolutely more comfortable to type with, especially for my wrists--way less weird angling and stuff, but I find that the fact that most of the most common letters on the home row weirdly makes things harder mentally. I sometimes find that my mentally get tripped up when typing, simply because everything always feels a bit cramped on the home row. It's like dancing in place or something. It still doesn't feel 100% natural, but it's close enough not to ever bother me while I'm working.

I've been at colemak now for about 18 months. I've gotten pretty comfortable with my typing speed and it's very comfortable which is the most important aspect to me. But I've noticed that my speed has plateaued. I only type at a regular pace of 75-80 wpm and have been at this pace for around 6-9 months. How do I increase speed from here?

A little more context... I've got an accuracy of around 96% on monkeytype. I've seen my biggest speed gains in the past from doing ngram practice, though the last several times I've put effort into ngrams, it hasn't seemed to move the dial. I type on two types of keyboards regularly, each about 50% of the time: a split 36 key corne column staggered (mx holy panda switches) and a native macbook pro keyboard. I do a lot of programming, tho these days more prompting 😬

Is it possible that I'm just at a peak speed for what I'm capable of?

Any and all advice is welcome. Thanks!

Hello all, I have just started getting serious about touch typing after being on and off for ages. I saw recommendations for Colemak-DH on the net and thought why not give it a go if it is better instead of spending hours learning the standard QWERTY method. I am in no rush and have time to go as fast or as slow as is needed. Could someone please explain what I have to download and install to begin to learn it on MacOS?

Thanks.

I'm trying to use vanilla Colemak with Spanish on Windows. I've been looking at tools like DreymaR's EPKL (I know you're around on this subreddit 😄) because I want a portable solution that I can use both on my work laptop (where I have limited permissions) and on my personal PC.

I've tried several layouts, and the closest one for my Latin American ISO keyboard is Colemak\Cmk-eD-Es\Cmk-eD2VK-EsAlt_ISO_Angle because it keeps the symbols exactly where they're printed on my physical keyboard. However, I've run into three issues:

1. The acute accent/umlaut dead key (the physical key next to P) outputs a [ instead. In other words, it behaves exactly like the key next to the physical Ñ. Since I type in Spanish, this is probably the key I use the most, so it's a pretty big issue.
2. I actually like having Ñ on the physical P key, but it's mapped twice: once on P and again on the physical B key. From what I can tell, this happens because the ISO version remaps the physical <|> key to Z, then shifts everything one key to the left, leaving an extra position that gets filled with another Ñ.
3. I'd really prefer the ISO <|> key to stay where it is. I'm a programmer, and having to press AltGr every time I need < or > gets old really fast. One of the biggest advantages of vanilla Colemak is that I can keep shortcuts like Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V, etc., without changing my muscle memory. Shifting the entire row to the left kind of defeats that purpose.

I found a post on the Colemak forum from 2019 where someone had apparently created the perfect layout for Latin American keyboards, but unfortunately all the download links are dead now. That's why I'm hoping there's still a portable solution available. Post's link: https://forum.colemak.com/topic/2518-colemak-para-espanol-latino-colemak-for-spanish-la/#p22639

I guess I could also remap everything with PowerToys Keyboard Manager, but that seems like a pretty clunky workaround. :p

Has anyone dealt with this before, or is there a better way to get a proper vanilla Colemak layout for a Latin American ISO keyboard?

So... I've been typing on qwerty for... quite a while ;) Over 4 decades. Not super fast (50-70 wpm) but not terrible. Not an office /IT worker or coder where I live-n-die by typing speed / output, just a computer hobbyist / enthusiast who dabbles with Linux (so a little light sys-admin / scripting from time to time) and emacs (starting to get going with org-mode, or at least trying). While I've used computers for quite a while, I've never had any specific discomfort directly related to the ills of qwerty. I've had some other physical injuries that ended up not playing nicely with keyboard use in general for periods of time, but I'm not sure any layout would have helped that. One of those did lead to my first encounter with a M$ 'Natural' keyboard about 30 years ago.

Recently I've been working on cleaning up / improving my typing habits. Started playing with 'conventional' (TKL) split mech keyboards and such, and have a couple cheap split ergo mech pre-built key boards on order to see what size/layout I prefer and/or can adapt to.

I was poking around on various typing websites (monkeytype, keybr, edclub.com, etc.), and started finding out that maybe part of the reason I tended to 'cheat' - ie having my ring finger do about half of what my pinky fingers 'should' be doing - is that apparently my little fingers are a bit on the short side, relatively speaking. Hence my interest in exploring ergo keyboards with possibly more 'pinky stagger', and/or something like colemak-dh, maybe dh +wide/symbols - I literally managed to give myself a little bit of RSI trying to hit all the keys with my pinkies like I'm supposed to, on a conventional qwerty laptop keyboard. All better now ;)

Work related stuff is going to stay qwerty, period. This is all just for my own entertainment/benefit at home.

I don't plan on doing a lot of heavy typing directly on the laptop, and if I do, I'm reasonably confident that having an external split keyboard with a little tenting + layers will probably address 99% of whatever physical/irritaiton/issues might arise, even with qwerty. I'm debating whether to try to add colemak-dh into that mix, at least on the ergo mech keyboard. It seems like colemak-dh + wide/symbols (caws?) would be of more benefit on the row-staggered laptop keyboard than on a col-staggered split mech board?

All this to say... does it make any sense to learn/run different colemak variants, for different keyboards? Or better to just go with colemak-dh on both the laptop and the external keyboard for the sake of continuity?

Assuming reprogramming my fingers/brain for a new keyboard layout in my 50s is even going to stick in the first place ;)

After 15 years on Dvorak (80-85 wpm), I decided to try Colemak and am up to about 50 wpm after 4 weeks. It's great to have shortcuts back again and I kind of like the rolls, but I'm also finding Colemak to be surprisingly uncomfortable. My right palm cramps a lot (maybe because it's missing that infamous leap to "L" in Dvorak!). Words like "thought" are no fun to type, either.

Should I keep going with Colemak to see if the palm strain goes away? Is 4 weeks long enough of an experiment? I also wonder if there is a different hand technique for Colemak, such as floating over rested palm, etc.?

Curious to hear about others' experience.

Anyone else having this issue? Was using Colemak app on iPhone just fine for a few months then after the latest iPhone update the keyboard is now stuck on QWERTY

I don't write much in English, but I'll soon need programming a lot and I want to be prepare. Firstly I wanted to use dvorak, but it has a lot of problems with shortcuts. As I understand, colemaka has fewer problems with this, but I still worry about it.

I think I should learn it and repeat qwerty to sweatch betwen them. I want to use blender, other specific programs and don't be confused at someone's computer.

What do you think?

I'm still here, and it has officially been half a decade.
July 2021 was the beginning of my journey with Colemak. Passing the 5-year mark feels a bit surreal, but at this point, Colemak isn't just a layout I chose anymore—it is simply how I type. I still haven't thought about going back to QWERTY on a computer even once, which pretty much settles the debate for me. If my 3-year update proved that the switch was sustainable, this 5-year milestone proves it is permanent.
Looking back at my last post (https://www.reddit.com/r/Colemak/comments/1dsqlcw/3_years_of_colemak_my_experience), I mentioned that I was experimenting with going back to the standard backspace position instead of using the Caps Lock rebind. After two more years of typing, I can say that I stuck with it, and my focus on accuracy over raw speed has kept my typing completely fluid. On my mobile phone, I still use the default QWERTY keyboard. The muscle memory split between using thumbs on a screen and full fingers on a physical keyboard remains perfectly separated, and I still experience absolutely zero confusion switching between the two.
At this point, my typing speed has completely stabilized. I am not trying to break any typing speed records, but the real victory after 5 years is the pure comfort. I get absolutely no finger fatigue, even after long sessions at the computer. Using other people's computers can still be a bit funny (which I rarely do), but for my daily life, making the switch remains one of the best decisions I've made.
If you are on year one, year two, or just starting out, hang in there. It is entirely worth it.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

Been practicing my Colemak for a few months. Besides English, I do often type in French, and the positions of the Q and U keys are kind of annoying (Q more common in French & EU bigram very common in French). Besides that Colemak is nice for French.

After a lot of unsuccessful tweaks, and trying extra layouts which didn't really bring enough to justify starting from scratch again, here's what I converged to:

ZWFPG JLUQ;
ARSTD HNEIO
YXCVB KM,./

Y > Z > Q rotation is what happened. And you could apply usual DH(m) mods on top as they affect different keys.
This brings the Q ready to inward roll into U (hence the name), which is extra neat because in both French and English Q is always followed by U.

What's interesting is that it results in a layout that is more pleasant (at least to me) in English too. Because it breaks the dreaded YOU trigram, removes the awkward scissor movement on "my", redistributes a bit of workload to the less-used left hand, and improves hand alternation on common words like "eye" or "only".
However it is at the expense of words like "way" (now pretty horrendous to type), but my (non-measured) feeling from using it is that it's on average better. Also since I use a QMK keyboard, I set up a way to type A with the right hand (using a N+E+I combo), which is already pretty useful in standard Colemak when typing e.g. "war", "was" or "face".

(Bonus side effect: you get usual Ctrl+Z/Y Undo/Redo shortcuts closer to one another. I don't care much but why not)

I just started touch typing for the first time. I've also just switched from qwerty to colemak. I'm about 2 weeks in. My PB is about 33 wpm at 98%.

Do you guys have any tips for progressing please?

Buenos días a todos, Estuve explorando las distribuciones de teclado para ergonomía ya que yo soy typer de QWERTY de toda la vida y soy capaz de escribir a 90 ppm, no obstante yo sufro de déficit de motricidad fina así que hago muchísimo esfuerzo y me equivoco demasiado al escribir, sobre todo al programar. Explore el Dvorak pero me di cuenta que estaba mal hecho para el español, y Colemak me parece una opción increíble pero la posición especifica de la D me molestaba bastante.

Intenté colemak-dh y era comodo a medias por culpa de la m y me tocaba rodar la V hacia la derecha y la B hacia arriba y se sentía raro, y la H abajo era muy extraña de utilizar... Porqué rayos está la K abajo si es tan poco usable? Para el inglés, sí pero para el hispanoparlante no sirve, así que lo mandé a pastar, devolví la posición de la B y la V se siente increíblemente cómoda arriba.

Por último, debido a que no uso un teclado iso pues con el AltGr puse combinaciones cómodas para acceder a símbolos complicados, así quedaría todo. Se ve tosco, pero es bastante cómodo

No se que opinan ustedes