Many years ago, a friend of mine switched his keyboard layout to Colemak. I thought I'd one-up him, so I searched for the most optimal layout and ended up with Carpalx's QGMLWY.
The neat thing about Carpalx's layouts is that most of them preserve the most common keyboard shortcut keys, which saves a lot of headache.
Took me maybe two weeks to get the hang of it for regular typing. It felt impossible at first, and then one day it just clicked! I used TypeFaster (old touch-typing tutor software... site seems to be gone?), which helped a lot. You can load any text you like into it, so it can be helpful for studying too!
Main issue with alternate layouts was that muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts was hard to break! (Many programs' shortcuts didn't work with the layout, they used the physical key instead.) I used it for a few months, then I used Colemak for maybe a year (so I'd be the only other person who could use his computer, heh), and then several switched computers a few more times and just ended up back with QWERTY.
I briefly played with the idea of "compressing" the English language by removing redundant letters. That way you'd only have to type the "short" form of a word, and it would be expanded for you. There's a whole ecosystem of text-expansion software, so the "product" would just be a word list to load into them... and I guess some way of learning it! (I think chorded word-at-a-time typing is much faster than any keyboard layout / compressed language scheme, though it might be more difficult to learn.)
Edit: Re Carpalx QGMLYWY: I just remembered, I found a portable AutoHotKey program[0] that allowed you to use Colemak on any machine by intercepting the keystrokes. It even had a handy little keyboard layout diagram that would display in the corner of the screen. So I took that one and modified it from Colemak to QGMLWY. Alas, I think it's been lost to time!
The neat thing about Carpalx's layouts is that most of them preserve the most common keyboard shortcut keys, which saves a lot of headache.
Took me maybe two weeks to get the hang of it for regular typing. It felt impossible at first, and then one day it just clicked! I used TypeFaster (old touch-typing tutor software... site seems to be gone?), which helped a lot. You can load any text you like into it, so it can be helpful for studying too!
Main issue with alternate layouts was that muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts was hard to break! (Many programs' shortcuts didn't work with the layout, they used the physical key instead.) I used it for a few months, then I used Colemak for maybe a year (so I'd be the only other person who could use his computer, heh), and then several switched computers a few more times and just ended up back with QWERTY.
I briefly played with the idea of "compressing" the English language by removing redundant letters. That way you'd only have to type the "short" form of a word, and it would be expanded for you. There's a whole ecosystem of text-expansion software, so the "product" would just be a word list to load into them... and I guess some way of learning it! (I think chorded word-at-a-time typing is much faster than any keyboard layout / compressed language scheme, though it might be more difficult to learn.)
Edit: Re Carpalx QGMLYWY: I just remembered, I found a portable AutoHotKey program[0] that allowed you to use Colemak on any machine by intercepting the keystrokes. It even had a handy little keyboard layout diagram that would display in the corner of the screen. So I took that one and modified it from Colemak to QGMLWY. Alas, I think it's been lost to time!
[0] - https://colemak.com/AutoHotKey