Learning Colemak-DH

In the beginning of 2023, I took a few explicit learning goals whose nature needed me to put in small but consistent effort for relatively longer period of time. The idea was to learn something via this discipline path as I have not done that for a long time.

One such goal was to learn Colemak Mod-DH and switch away from QWERTY layout. Other than usual benefits of Colemak-DH, I assumed this would also help a little with my RSI. After ~6 months of consistent practice, I am comfortable enough to say that I have decent muscle memory for Colemak-DH. Here is the chart showing my WPM on MonkeyType's common words¹ test:

A few observations throughout this journey:

1. Switching the layout for day-to-day work was really important to go beyond 60-70 WPM. Before this, I was mostly just spending some practice time but was not doing any real work on Colemak-DH.
2. There was around 2 week duration just after switching when I was doing really poorly in both QWERTY and Colemak-DH. I stopped doing daily logs after switching so this dip in performance is not visible in the graph.
3. Interestingly, majority of the WPM jumps came after waking up from a night's sleep. One day I would be hovering around 34-36 WPM and the next day morning I would breach 45.

I am still not comfortable in programming on Colemak-DH, since I have generally not been programming much these days. But it's nice to get to this state for regular typing at the very least.