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I learned to touch type in junior high school, which puts that event around twenty years ago. More than half my life ago, for those who are keeping score. Those patterns are very deeply ingrained.
So it's been interesting to try learning a new keyboard that is different the qwerty keyboard layout. I got a frogpad this last weekend for my birthday.
It's a one-handed keyboard, that unlike the matias half-keyboard, is specificalyl optimized for one-handed typed. The matias is laid out like the left half of a qwerty keyboard; you hold the space bar down to get the other half. The 15 keys on the frogpad are the 15 most used letters in english. So that means I'm having to learn key combinations that contradict the 20 year old paths in my brain.
(By the way, the frogpad is recognised by Linux.)
The frogpad has an on-line tutorial tailored to its layout, which isn't free. It's sold by subscription for a certain period of time; I bought a 3-month subscription to the tutoriall. I should have well mastered it by then. I'm not totally thrilled by the idea of a company selling me hardware and then selling me the software I need to use it properly; on the other hand. it does really help you learn to type with it. The typing excersizes are partially randomly generated, so you're not just typing the same static examples all the time.
The tutorial saves your progress and gives you access to the next examples in turn:
I'm doing pretty well. The "T" key is in the home row, and that's one that I kept trying to put where it is on the qwerty keyboard. However, I spent some time typing words with Ts in them, so I'm finally starting to improve. The tutorial holds the results (speed and errors) of all the exercises you've done, so you can see if you're improving.
I've only been at it since the weekend, but I'm almost to 25 words per minute using the unshifted keys.