Hello to all, I've just joined the forum.
I'm not a great typist, maybe <50wpm, though I probably should be; I've been in IT for almost 20 years and learnt to touch type at school.
Anyway, stumbling on Colemak has piqued my interest in alternate layouts again; last time Dvorak was the alternative to qwerty, and it didn't look ideal for computing, especially I need to keep some qwerty skill as I often have to use other machines.

This thread is particularly interesting because what Sean Wrona describes is very much how I type, only, um, a little slower obviously.  I 'wander' my hands across the keyboard so that I can use the most natural fingering in the context of the word.  In particular I find 'rolls' very fast and comfortable, especially outward index-middle finger rolls, eg f,d or h,j in qwerty.

I think there are some, uh, individualities with the way I type too.

For a start, I am wider than the keyboard, or rather my elbows are, and therefore my hands come in at an angle to the board, rather than right angles.
The keyboard is also asymmetrical, and therefore my right hand is slightly more angled than left.
Of course fingers are also different lengths.
This all means that my natural home row is more like a,s,r,v - n,j,k,l, or q,w,e,f - j,i,o,p, roughly as described here:
http://dossy.org/2006/01/is-the-dvorak- … an-qwerty/

Looking into the various layouts, I'm not sure they take any of this into account.  The analysis metrics seem to focus on letter frequency more than letter sequences.  The home row is always treated as the best, and the bottom row as pariahs, whereas I find v and n on qwerty actually much more reachable than g,h.  And I find i,o and e, if maybe not w, to be quite tolerable too, perhaps preferable to l and s. c and m are easier than t,y.

I do find g,h a strech, as described here:
http://viralintrospection.wordpress.com … d-layouts/

So, I'm trying Colemak, but one worry is it doesn't seem to be designed for my peculiarities, and also some common 'words' for me are less fluid than on qwerty, for example 'cd', 'ls -ltr', 'pwd', 'you' even, and a couple of others have hit me; common vi commands like 'dw' for example.

Actually how I stumbled on Colemak was by seeing a post about 'minimak' (minimak.org) on hackernews. This layout takes an even more extreme approach to being easy for qwerty users to learn, only changing 12 keys (or only 4 in the minimal case).  Unfortunately I find this is tuned in the same way, for example it leaves h in place.  IMHO, h should move to qwerty j, so that the extremely common 'he' digram is a nice two finger roll. So, currently I'm experimenting with my own take on a minimal-change layout, as follows:

 
`1234567890-=
#qwdfkjuio;[]\
#asrtgyhelp'*N
*Lzxcvbnm,./*R

The stats aren't that good, and there are some problems. The Colemak a,r,s,t works really well, whereas my a,s,r,t suffers with 'rd', 'dr' and so on.  But 'the', 'there' and anything similar are really nice.  I may give Colemak some more time after experimenting a bit with this custom layout.

Sorry, actually this thread would have been better:
» An evolved layout that takes into account alternate-finger digraphs?
https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1537

Thanks for suggesting carpalx, I had looked, and found that the finger position weights in the analyses don't match what I find comfortable, and although digrams, trigrams etc are of course accounted for, they don't seem to measure sequences where you 'wander' your hand to use custom 'rolls', or use the 'wrong' finger because it feels more natural in the context of what you're typing, as Sean Wrona describes.  Custom patterns if you will.

Colemak/Dvorak put the most used keys into the home row, so naturally the Colemak/Dvorak users always put their fingers in the standard touch typing positions.

Qwerty put E and T on the third row, so naturally any Qwerty user will tend to put their left hand onto these keys, since they are the most often used keys. Before learning how to touch type, I also frequently did so.

For individual fingering specific key combinations, it is hard to learn them and it is peculiar. So typing class would go for the standard way of touch typing, in order to mass-train. The individual touch typing way could be faster than the standard sometimes, like Sean Wrona did.

@jackpipe, I get what you mean. You are laying your hands more flat, which some seem to frown upon, perhaps it's not so much an issue on keyboards as opposed to type writers.  I think the arc strengthens the fingers. 

Rest your hands by your sides, and relax, your fingers will naturally curl, they won't lay flat.  The interesting bit is when you look at the ends of the fingers, they'll almost line up when like this.  So the more relaxed position is probably the arc, and if you do arc your fingers rather than laying them flat, it's more likely they'll fall into line on the home row.

If you watch Sean Wrona though, he pretty much types with his hands flat!

Those that prefer the flatter approach will probably be better off with a different home position.  Qwerty kind of encourages it, with ERT and UIO.