ErgoMechKeyboards

Just a short term thing. You asked your fingers to think twice before typing. They are giving you opportunity to rewire muscle memory. Once you are done learning they will go back to normal.

I can consistently switch between Ortho and my laptop, hitting nearly 70WPM on both. I would say it took about a month before something clicked in my brain and I stopped trying to use my thumbs for mods on my laptop and miss hitting the key locations. Just give it more time. Your muscles can remember a ton of different things, brain just needs to figure out how to organize it.

I work on both a 36 key split board and my laptop's board and I find it pretty easy to go back and forth. I think it helps to have a fairly different layout on the ergo board, it helps keep the muscle memory separate. I still use qwerty on both, but the modifiers and everything are all different.

I will say I mess up keys like x and c a little more often on the laptop now. Those keys are in similar places, but the difference in row stagger can trip me up a little...

If you stick with it you’ll make steady consistent progress. One thing that really helped me was tracking my progress with monkeytype.com - it might not feel like you’re getting better but seeing how closely correlated practice and improvement are really kept me motivated to stick with it.

I haven’t lost the ability to type as I previously did, though I do find myself resenting being forced to use laptop keyboards. I can do like 60wpm hunt and peck on a row staggered keyboard, and a bit more touch typing on an ortho/ergo/split, but I can’t touch type on a row staggered kb and I can’t hunt and peck on an ortho/ergo/split, haha

No worries, I routinely swap between my 34 key weirdo keyboard and my laptop without any trouble.

One thing that you might find helpful is to get some really unique keycaps on the ergo board so it feels different. I had MT3 keycaps on my ergo board while I was learning it, although that being said, now I’ve switched to choc switches with essentially laptop keycaps, and I can still type on my laptop just fine.

I‘m typing with 50WPM on a Moonlander with Colemak-DH Layout and still can type on a QWERTY MacBook keyboard with my usual 70-80WPM

During the initial leaning phase, switching is hard. From my experience it’ll be easier once you are able to type subconsciously on the Moonlander as well.

Speaking from personal experience here, your mileage may vary.