I have been typing in Colemak for several years now and I don't really have any issues going back to QWERTY, with the caveat that, like the author, I have to lo

I have been typing in Colemak for several years now and I don't really have any issues going back to QWERTY, with the caveat that, like the author, I have to look at the keyboard to do so reasonably well. It's a little bit hard to compare speed with online tests because of this, as it is necessarily slower than touch typing when reading canned text off the screen (but not a real penalty if you are typing things you are thinking), but I just did an online test and was 69 WPM in Colemak vs. 44 WPM in QWERTY. Obviously I'm much slower than you in either case (assuming the tests are comparable), but the penalty doesn't seem to be as large as you are suggesting, and this is with only extremely rarely needing to use QWERTY and never actually practicing. I also find in my life that when I need to type on other people's computers or on my HTPC, that I'm not often drafting large blocks of text, but your mileage may vary. I also don't have any problems with keybindings in vim or emacs. Most keybindings are semantic rather than locational, with the major exception being hjkl in vim. The inconvenience of applications ignoring the input has only affected me for games, so I have to remember which games I need to switch to QWERTY before playing (on Mac you can switch layouts with a key command, so it's very easy for me). Technically with games you usually DO want to have the keyboard layout ignored, and the vast majority do, but probably 1 out of 10 or 15 doesn't in my experience. I would say that the annoyance of using Colemak comes up less than 1/100th as frequently as the annoyance of using NoScript, which I also use. With respect to the iPhone, I just leave it on QWERTY and it isn't an issue. Using your thumbs to type is sufficiently different that I don't think it affects your ability with the keyboard. Mac and Ubuntu at least come with Colemak pre-installed, but Windows requires an installation, I guess. I'm intrigued by the possibility of remapping my number keys though. I may consider doing that.