I use Colemak. Colemak is great to avoid and prevent pain if you type in english. It feels no faster than qwerty though. Probably the fastest layout for english is Dvorak. So, if you want a layout that will help you prevent lesions to your hands in english, go for Colemak.
... But if what you want is pure speed, then go for steno, plover, ...
https://www.youtube…

Thanks for replying!

I realize I forgot to answer what helps people type the fastest:
You should type without looking at the keyboard. And one good way to improve naturally while having fun is playing a game where you chat with other players using text.

Which games?... There are many... Or you could go and play a text-only "Multi User Dungeon" like:

http://www.alteraeo…
https://www.materia…
http://www.3k.org/
...

Dvorak and Colemak are made to do the same thing, move commonly used keys on the home row. And they both did that as about as good as the other. Between those two I would say Colemak is better for most because It is made to have similarities with Qwerty while still being as good as Dvorak. I personally use Dvorak though.

Another relatively known layout is the Workman layout. This layout makes it so the most commonly used keys are placed in a hand shape possibly making it even more ergonomic than Dvorak and Colemak. Norman is also similar to Workman except for Norman is made so right hand is used more frequently assuming right hand is more capable due to being dominant for most.

In terms of speed, It is hard to say how much it exactly increases due to the lack of data, but I've experienced huge speed increases since I switched to Dvorak. And in theory, it makes sense these layouts will give speed benefits compared to Qwerty because there is less hand movement. But I've heard many people where they couldn't commit to it enough to get faster than Qwerty. Either way, in my opinion, I will take Dvorak over Qwerty even if I am slower on Dvorak because of the huge benefit it gives to comfort.

edit: I forgot to mention that there is such thing as a chorded keyboard, most commonly stenotype. These have a huge disadvantage of a learning curve, but some people are able to input 300+wpm consistently. I've been taking attempts of learning stenotype using an open source software called plover, but I can't even type a full sentence yet.

>> Between those two I would say Colemak is better for most because It is made to have similarities with Qwerty while still being as good as Dvorak.

This is true. In Colemak a lot of keys are the same as in Qwerty:
fpgjluy;rstdneiok change locations
`1234567890-=qw[]ah'\zxcvbm,./~!@#$%^&*()_+{}"|<>? remain in the same keys, which is good)

One thing I hate about Colemak is that it turns the right Alt key into AltGr, and so you lose the right Alt, which is anti-ergonomic (but there are tricks to remap Alt back into the Alt keys, which is what I always do myself)

My advice intelliscoptic is that you don't learn another layout, because you'll feel useless when you have to type in other people's computers. The time to learn Colemak is when you are in your 30s or older and are already feeling pain when typing :=)

One thing you could try though intelliscoptic is to learn Dvorak or Colemak while still keep practicing Qwerty, so that you don't forget it, that way you'll be able to use any of the two whenever you need it. I knew Qwerty, then tried many different layouts, ended up with Colemak, and am currently trying to relearn Qwerty so that I know both well, Qwerty and Colemak.

Hi, Colemak user's here. I took a leap of faith and decided to let go of my QWERTY layout. It took about 1 week of constant practice at ratatype.com to get accustomed to the keys. Then, one month of daily practice to get the same speed as my QWERTY. It's been 5 months now and my highest speed is 75 WPM. However, it's been decreasing lately, perhaps because I'm not working with a laptop anymore.

I made my own - I waited until I found my dream keyboard (split, good thumb key placement, programmable - keybeard.io if anyone's curious) and while I waited for it to arrive, designed my own layout around its strengths and weaknesses, aiming for highest frequency of home key use, minimising using the same finger twice (including with a 'redial' key to repeat the same key, allowing words with doubled letters not to need repeated same finger use) and common shortcut keys I was likely to use while using the mouse to be on the left hand.

Not that hard to do, really, you just need something to show you the frequency of bigrams, like this: http://norvig.com/m…

Matched my old querty speed pretty quickly, have now surpassed it (not by much, but am still improving bit by bit), and it's just much more comfortable for my arms and fingers.