I switched to Colemak for 6 years and then back quite some time ago (something like 2009-2015). Colemak was certainly more comfortable as the author noted but I

I switched to Colemak for 6 years and then back quite some time ago (something like 2009-2015). Colemak was certainly more comfortable as the author noted but I found enough friction that I switched back: * Shared machines are hard to avoid when working on hardware like I was. * There’s a lot of lost value in not being able to just sit down at someone else’s machine and navigate/code/etc. The reverse is also true of not easily having other people use your machine. * If you game, this can be really hard. Some games attempt to do the right thing (e.g. WASD => WARS) but auxiliary things like “I” for inventory are less clear. Do you keep I to have the mnemonic or keep the physical spot? Caps lock to backspace can also mess with games that have chosen, for god knows what reason, to make caps lock a hot key. I spent a ton of time editing undocumented keymap files, and that’s not how I want to spend my leisure time. * Not having caps lock means that if you somehow get caps lock turned on, it’s a pain to get it turned back off. This did happen to me multiple times - I used AHK for the remap and it’ll occasionally fail, usually due to external factors like an aborted system shutdown. * You have to touch type. Getting physical Colemak keyboard for all cases (especially laptops) just isn’t feasible. This meant no more one handed typing or searching for hot keys when gaming (because I’m off the home row and I couldn’t build one handed muscle memory without a physical colemak keyboard). * Lots of custom shortcuts are needed. It’s great that core copy/cut/paste/undo are kept in the same spots, but if you become power user of something like photoshop, you have to either remap all the shortcuts (again losing many mnemonics) or lose ergonomics as related keys spread out to odd spots when they should be clustered. * You never really get rid of QWERTY muscle memory (at least 6 years on it with lots of focused practice, I didn’t). My overall amount of typos went way up compared to QWERTY. Also, and this is what finally made me switch back, the passwords I knew by muscle memory turned out to be different than what I thought I was typing. I had a password I could type, but didn’t know it (I swapped a fewer characters without realizing it). When I had to input this on a phone, I realized I couldn’t do that without first typing it on a physical keyboard. * Virtual keyboards, such as on game consoles, are usually QWERTY (or alphabetical, yuck) and being able to touch type QWERTY does speed up their use. In the end I accepted that we live in a QWERTY world and we’re too far down the rabbit hole to change. I find giving up some efficiency a worthwhile tradeoff for a drastic reduction in edge cases and overall fiddliness.