In part 1 of this post, which now has been nearly 3 years ago, I have toyed with the idea of using workman layout as my new keyboard layout. After using it for a few months, as much as I could, I did not feel the compfort has impreved and I was getting a weird pain in my ring finger. After scouring typing forums I have found this to be a common complaint about workman so I decided to switch.
I settled on the most commonly recommended QWERTY layout alternative, Colemak-dhm. I have now been using it for over a year exclusively, with the occassional switch to a normal qwerty as and then my custom Ferris Sweep keyboard is not at an arms reach.
Colemak-dhm
You can find more info about the layout on the official website so I am not going to bore you with the details. Initally, I have found the full time switch to be a struggle, not only did I change the layout but also went from a standard keyboard to a column stagerred ortho layout. I struggle to keep my WPM above 40 for a long time. After chatting with some peolpe on typing discords, I have used one bit of advice, set accuracy as the the target and the speed will come with time.
And this is exactly what I did, on my monkeytype.com settings I use the expert mode which kills the tests after my accuracy drops below 95%, this was brutal at start but quickly I got used to slowing down to get the test completed, after about a month I got back to my QWERTY speed of around 60WPM, but I have to stress that my accuracy on qwerty was probably around 80% at best. Anyway, below is my progress screenshot from monkey type, you can see a massive dip in WPM, and over time that goes up and the error rate goes down. Right now I can reach 70+WPM with 98% accuracy on a 1 minute test and I am absolutely fine with that. I have also enabled Expert mode where a test automatically fails when my accuracy dips below 95%, this was brutal at first but I do think it really helped me focus on accuracy vs speed.
I am comfortable and touch type easily, plus the occasional switch to QWERTY is not as bad as I was expecting it to be.
