I Switched to Colemak for 30 Days — Honest Review

Why I Actually Did This

Let me be upfront: I didn't switch to Colemak because I thought it would make me faster. I switched because my right wrist had been aching for months and my physio told me QWERTY was making it worse — specifically the finger travel distance required for common English letters.

She wasn't wrong. QWERTY was designed in the 1870s, allegedly to prevent typewriter jams by separating commonly paired letters and slowing typists down. Whether that origin story is completely accurate is debated, but what isn't debated is that your fingers travel significantly further on QWERTY than they need to. The most common English letters — E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H — aren't all conveniently parked on the home row. Your fingers leave home constantly, stretching up, reaching sideways, returning to base.

Colemak, designed by Shai Coleman in 2006, puts 10 of the most common English letters on the home row. The idea is you spend more time with your fingers resting where they already are, and less time reaching up to T and E and the top row. Less travel, less cumulative strain.

I'm not a layout evangelist — I want to be clear about that. I don't think QWERTY is some kind of conspiracy against typist health. But my wrist hurt badly enough that I was willing to try something uncomfortable. So I committed to 30 days, tracked everything: WPM daily, wrist pain on a 1-10 scale, and honest productivity impact. Here's exactly what happened.

The First Week: Absolute Disaster

Photo by Nikita / Unsplash

Day one, I remapped my software to Colemak (I kept my physical QWERTY keycaps to force myself to learn by feel, not sight), opened up a practice session, and typed at about 8 WPM. Eight. I was a 71 WPM QWERTY typist reduced to hunting and pecking like I was five years old.

Days two through four were humbling in a way I wasn't prepared for. I'd reach for keys that weren't where I expected them. I kept typing "hre" instead of "the" because in Colemak, F and P swap positions from QWERTY. My brain knew exactly what words I wanted to type — but my fingers had decades of muscle memory that refused to cooperate.

What made it survivable was dropping the ego completely and treating it as a brand new skill — not "relearning typing" but "learning to type for the first time." I stopped trying to type at any reasonable speed and just focused on placing each finger correctly without looking. About 20 minutes of deliberate practice twice a day, no more.

By day seven I was at 19 WPM. Still embarrassing, but the curve was pointing up. My wrist pain that week was actually higher, not lower — mostly because I was tense and typing oddly during the learning phase. That was genuinely discouraging. I almost bailed on day six.

For comparison, when I'd previously written about keyboard layout comparisons between QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, I knew the statistics. Most people learning Colemak hit their old QWERTY speed somewhere between week 6 and week 12. I knew the numbers. I just wasn't emotionally prepared for how rough weeks one and two would actually feel in real life.

Weeks Two and Three: The Slow Climb

Something clicked around day 10. Not a dramatic breakthrough — more like the fog starting to thin. I stopped consciously thinking about where each key lived and started sometimes just... typing words. Not fast. But correctly, without looking, without agonizing over each individual letter.

By day 14 I was at 31 WPM. By day 21 I hit 44 WPM. The progress chart looked almost exactly like what the Colemak community on Reddit describes — a steep drop followed by a slow, steady, inexorable climb.

I used two tools during this phase. First, I ran daily timed tests on TypingFastest's practice mode and logged my score in a spreadsheet. Having a consistent benchmark mattered a lot — I could see even tiny improvements like going from 31 to 33 WPM in two days, which felt meaningless in isolation but showed the trend was moving correctly.

Second, I specifically drilled the Colemak home row until I stopped second-guessing it. The home row is ARST on the left (instead of ASDF) and NEIO on the right (instead of JKL;). That NEIO right-hand cluster — N, E, I, O — handles a massive chunk of English text. Once my right hand knew those four keys cold, my speed jumped noticeably because I wasn't hesitating on the most common letters anymore.

My wrist pain started dropping in week two. Not gone, but down from a 6/10 to about a 3/10 on bad days. The reduced finger travel was already showing real effects, which was the whole point of trying this in the first place. That improvement alone was enough to keep me going.

The Productivity Nightmare Nobody Warns You About

Photo by Zan Lazarevic / Unsplash

Here's the thing nobody in the Colemak subreddit adequately warned me about: switching layouts doesn't just affect your typing speed. It affects your entire computer workflow in ways you don't anticipate.

Keyboard shortcuts, for one. Ctrl+Z is now nowhere near where your left pinky expects it. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X — the positions shift if you're remapping at the OS level. Vim users face an entirely separate level of chaos I won't even try to address here.

I spent roughly three extra hours a week in weeks two and three just fumbling through shortcuts I'd been running on autopilot for years. My work output tanked noticeably. I had to think consciously through copy-pasting. I started making more typos in Slack messages than I'd ever made on QWERTY, which my colleagues definitely noticed.

This is the real hidden cost of switching layouts that benchmark numbers never capture. Your raw WPM in a practice session might be trending upward, but your functional productivity — writing emails, coding, navigating applications, using keyboard shortcuts — takes a much longer hit than just your typing test score suggests.

If you're considering switching layouts and your job depends on keyboard-heavy productivity, I'd strongly recommend doing it during a quieter period. I switched in January when things were slow. I'd have completely lost my mind if I'd tried this during any kind of crunch.

For what it's worth — I was also remapping on a 60% mechanical keyboard during this period, without function key labels on the physical keycaps. That added an extra layer of chaos on top of everything else. If you're going to try Colemak, use a standard full-size layout first and save yourself that particular headache.

Tips That Made the Learning Curve Survivable

Looking back at the full 30 days, there are a few specific things I'd do differently -- or do exactly the same -- that made a real difference in whether this experiment succeeded.

First: I kept a QWERTY fallback at OS level. If I desperately needed to type something fast (live client call, urgent email), I could switch back temporarily by toggling the input method. I used this maybe five times across the month. Knowing the escape hatch existed reduced the anxiety enough that I could push through difficult moments instead of bailing permanently.

Second: I didn't try to practice Colemak everywhere at once. For the first two weeks, I only used it for deliberate typing practice sessions on TypingFastest's practice mode and for personal notes. Work emails stayed on QWERTY temporarily. This split approach kept me from losing my mind while under real deadline pressure.

Third: I found the Colemak community on Reddit genuinely helpful -- not for technique tips specifically, but for normalizing how hard the first two weeks are. Knowing other people had gone through exactly this wall and come out the other side was more motivating than any tutorial.

Fourth -- and this is the one I wish I'd done sooner -- I identified my worst letter pair on Colemak (for me it was the TH bigram, which felt wrong for weeks) and drilled it in isolation. Ten minutes a day on just that pair. It clicked around day 18 and my speed jumped three points almost immediately after.

Your worst pair will probably be different from mine. That's fine. Find it early, drill it specifically, and don't let it become the hidden drag on everything else.

Day 30: The Honest Numbers

By the end of 30 days, I was typing at 53 WPM on Colemak. My pre-switch QWERTY speed was 71 WPM. So I was still 18 WPM below where I started. That sounds like a loss — and in the short term, it absolutely was one.

But here's what else happened over those 30 days:

- Wrist pain: Down from a 6/10 average to a 1.5/10 average. That's the one that matters most to me. - Finger soreness after long sessions: Essentially gone by week three. - Score consistency: Much tighter. My 5-session variance on Colemak was ±4 WPM, versus ±11 WPM on QWERTY. Colemak's home-row efficiency made my speed more predictable.

That last point surprised me. On QWERTY, I'd bounce around a lot depending on what kind of text came up. Words heavy on T and E and R were faster; anything with a lot of Y and P was slower. Colemak's home-row concentration smoothed that variance out significantly.

At the 60-day mark (outside the official 30-day scope, but worth knowing), I hit 64 WPM. Three months in, I cleared my old QWERTY ceiling at 74 WPM. That crossover point isn't guaranteed — a lot of people switch back before they get there. But for me, the wrist improvement alone made the experiment worth it even if my speed had never fully recovered.

If you want to try Colemak without going fully cold turkey, the TypingFastest garage shows configuration setups for different keyboard layouts so you can experiment before committing to a full switch. That's honestly a smarter approach than what I did.