> 3) Use a kinesis advantage. Blank keycaps for style points.
These keyboards are quite expensive, but totally worth it. My previous employer offered them as one of several keyboard options. I went with it due to some pain, it took maybe 6 weeks to used to the layout. Ended up buying one a few months later when they went on sale (usually 10% off around black Friday), as my pain had gotten dramatically better. The company that makes them is also pretty hacker friendly - they sell spare parts and they've been willing to help people who want to make custom controllers for their keyboards.
I actually hacked a trackpoint (harvested from an old IBM desktop keyboard) into my kinesis and used that for a while, but due to the way the sensor works it really needs a solid mounting to work well which I just couldn't achieve.
I personally have had decent luck with a vertical mouse (anker makes a cheapish one that works fine).
Not the guy you replied to, but I switched to Colemak last year. It took me about 3 weeks to get to a "usable" state, and maybe 2 months to get within 75% of my previous speed with qwerty. My progression was roughly:
0-1 weeks: Can't type anything without looking at the key map. I would switch back to Qwerty if I needed to type something long out (emails mainly).
1-2 weeks: Weird phase. I can't effectively type in either qwerty or Colemak unless I really "focus" on it. It's hard to describe, but this week was terrible for productivity :)
3+ weeks: Forced myself to use Colemak exclusively. During this time I started doing real typing exercises, and turned off autocomplete in my IDE, since I found that was detrimental to learning. I also wrote a ton of documentation for a couple of my projects, which involved a lot of typing.
Before I switched, I would get intermittent pain in my wrist (maybe twice a month), which has since completely disappeared. When I need to type in Qwerty now, it is very uncomfortable, in a way that Colemak never was.
I can confirm all of this learning Dvorak. Having seen this with myself and others, it really is like a short version of learning a language and seems to use the same part of my brain. There's that period where you're not good in either layout and you need to get something done like you're saying (but after all the fun initial gains) and that's when most folks quit. If you can push past that week or so, it seems you're good. It's painful though.
And yeah, I can still touch-type in Qwerty too, but it feels like contorting my hands in knots. I can type it in fine, I just never noticed before how crazy you have to move your hands to do it.
yeah it took a couple weeks of daily practice at home, row by row. Then I switched at work once I could type about 20-30wpm (down from 112wpm or so on my best tests)
It was incredibly painful to start using it full time but I built good habits from the start as I re-learned touch typing. It's a very valuable experience watching the brain learn a new keyboard layout as an adult.
From there it took me maybe a month or two to be very confident. I then was unable to type in qwerty without looking at the keys for a couple years. Now my brain is pretty happy switching back and forth. It's odd but I find Ive learned things like typing one handed with colemak on keyboards that are qwerty (eg my macbook) and odd things like that so the brain keeps learning to work in a pinch in the edge cases years later.
Colemak is _incremental_ to qwerty so is significantly easier to learn and get started with full time than dvorak for a software engineer.
I bought my kinisis used I should say! It was $200 plus I think $50 and several months to get the blank keycaps ordered (was hard to track them down in canada - had to go through another supplier as kinesis won't ship them direct and it was a special order)
> 3) Use a kinesis advantage. Blank keycaps for style points.
These keyboards are quite expensive, but totally worth it. My previous employer offered them as one of several keyboard options. I went with it due to some pain, it took maybe 6 weeks to used to the layout. Ended up buying one a few months later when they went on sale (usually 10% off around black Friday), as my pain had gotten dramatically better. The company that makes them is also pretty hacker friendly - they sell spare parts and they've been willing to help people who want to make custom controllers for their keyboards.
I actually hacked a trackpoint (harvested from an old IBM desktop keyboard) into my kinesis and used that for a while, but due to the way the sensor works it really needs a solid mounting to work well which I just couldn't achieve.
I personally have had decent luck with a vertical mouse (anker makes a cheapish one that works fine).