Colemak 決定！
So, this is what... week two of using the Colemak keyboard layout?
You know, it doesn't really feel like it's been two weeks. I'm typing faster in Colemak in two weeks than I was in Dvorak in a month, and I dare say it's starting to become natural now. I'm still mistyping a few letters here and there, and for some strange reason I sometimes type D when I mean to type T (QWERTY F for QWERTY G). I'll just have to keep typing to get used to it.
I think one of the main reasons the change was semi-natural is that the positions of many QWERTY buttons are the same. 10 keys have really not moved position (out of 26 and an additional punctuation key), though only 5 of those are used with any frequency (A, C, K, N, H, then Z, X, V, Q, and W) unless you're dealing with keyboard shortcuts.
It's a better keyboard layout than QWERTY by far, but it does have its downsides. Typing 'key' takes a bit of getting used to, 'objection' takes even more getting used to... but for something completely random? (All punctuation and capital letters typed with the right hand.)
aN IcE ELEMENt LIKE MINE, I KILL IN ONE KNEE ON MY HOME HILL IN JULY If YOU KNOw I'M LINKINg LINEs.
This sentence, which probably only makes sense if you play RPGs and fighting games, is written almost entirely with the right hand... which illustrates the main downside of the layout - sometimes you only type with a single hand, usually the right. I don't mind this for small 4-letter words, but sometimes I'll admit it gets out of hand. I think this is because E, I, and O are on the same side of the keyboard as some common letters like L and N. In particular, typing July is a bit weird.
But then, it may be that it almost can't be helped given the design goals it was made for. The most common keyboard shortcuts must be on the left side of the keyboard. Z, X, C, and V have to stay where they are, A, S, and T would be good choices to put there too... and as really common letters, they must be on the home row. And just like that, about every left hand home row key has been taken. F isn't too common, and you could make a case for P being a common shortcut too, though those can both be top row characters since they're not used as often. B... well, it's not used overly often, and Winamp expects it where it was (^^), so it's fine there. I'd argue that O (open) and Y (redo) should be on that side as well, but at this point, things are starting to get awkward.
Regardless, it doesn't suffer from pinky kill, I can use the mouse and have access to my keyboard commands at the same time, it's fully Winamp-compatible, it has a better letter in the top dead zone than F (as in Dvorak), and browser-killing shortcuts aren't liable to be accidentally hit. Also, as was my original goal in trying out new layouts, I can say it's much more comfortable than QWERTY, and is starting to look like it will be more efficient in the end. All this in two weeks, at the price of sometimes typing out small words with just the right hand (and very rarely a larger one). I think I'll be sticking with this layout.
For those of you who are looking for the same thing I am, I'd recommend this layout. If you think Dvorak suffers from what I think it suffers from (see above), but still want to stick with a Dvorak-style keyboard, you might want to look into Capewell-Dvorak. It may be a good alternative, and just by me looking at it, I'd say it's an improvement over regular Dvorak.
Finally, it appears as though the official Colemak source file (for Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator) kills Right-Alt+Enter, making full-screening things a bit of a hassle (you must use Left-Alt+Enter, requiring two hands). I think this is because it uses dead keys, for outputting specific characters in other languages than English. If you don't care about As with umlauts over them... then I'm pretty sure you can just edit out all the dead keys and get the Alt-Enter shortcut back. I'll experiment and pop up a source file if that's the case.
Update 4 hours later (?): Removed the Ctrl+Alt mappings, which was what was causing Right-Alt to not function like an Alt key. If you assign any keys to Ctrl+Alt, the Layout Creator will assign to Right-Alt the combination of the two, meaning when you press it, you're actually pressing Ctrl+Alt and not just Alt.
