No, it's a very tempting idea: The middle of the keyboard would be a perfect place for a mouse controller – if it didn't take up much space. I've seen trackballs that might work; I'd like to try one. But in my opinion they should just widen the keyboard a little (one key's width is fine) to accommodate a ball on the home row and buttons on the bottom row.

Something like the Unicomp Trackball keyboard meeting their Trackpoint keyboard (seems that IBM invented that stick, pervs or not).

While they were at it, they should fix the silly left-hand row stagger to make a more "truly ergonomic" keyboard. :)

   
   Here's an image I made once to show a correctly staggered board with a trackpoint.
   Half a key wider and a small ball would've fit in there, with two button keys below.

Some people love the nipple stick.  Hear the groans of the Thinkpad users, when they added a touchpad!  I quite like the track sensor thing that they put on Blackberries, that has replaced the old trackball.  I'd be happy to use the nipple if it were far more, dare I say it, sensitive.

I started to think how useful it might be to have an available nipple on each hand.  You might be able to do something very special by tweaking both simultaneously.  That would allow then for a gorge down the centre.

My suggested keyboard isn't bi-sixual! It's unisix. You can choose which hand to touch its six with though, which is nice if one hand gets tired from working the six too much.

If you keep changing layouts every now and then, you can be sure that your pains will be prolongated. ;)

I dove into Dvorak just before you originally started this thread (just did a quick post-date check), and my accuracy with it is... well, not too bad when I'm not aiming for speed, but still quite sub-par when I try to type fast.  That's quickly changing though, as my accuracy seems to be starting to shoot up.  Like you, I also went cold-turkey early on.  But the one thing that really seems to help me is practicing with several typing tests a day on hi-games.net.

Just over four months now (minus a period of about three weeks with no keyboard, so no practice), and I am nearly at my original QWERTY speeds... but it will be a while before I match (or surpass) in both speed and accuracy.  IMO, using a new layout seems to be only part of the equation... the other part to improving is regularly (and actively) practicing, actually trying to get better.  If you expect to just magically get better over time, well, it will happen... but a little extra push can help in major ways.

In my experience... first comes the speed, then the accuracy... and with the added accuracy comes the ability to sustain even higher speeds for longer.  But again, I am kind of pushing myself a bit to hasten the process up a bit.  However, it seems that you are also trying to learn proper touch-typing technique at the same time; no doubt that adds a decent chunk of time to the learning process which I was able to bypass.  I'd say just keep going... you'll get there.

This part really bit me in the ass when I switched to Dvorak.  With QWERTY I got so used to typing, long ago that problem went away.  Only to resurface when I tried to learn Dvorak.  Now, I'm once again to the point where I can type (in Dvorak) without the bizarre key staggering really affecting me too much.  I went from over a decade of touch-typing QWERTY to touch-typing Dvorak and had problems... no doubt going from your own method of typing QWERTY to properly touch-typing Colemak probably increases the pain for this particular problem.

Unfortunately, it's been so long since I originally learned proper typing, I have no idea how long it was before I originally stopped having the problem.  But what I can tell you is it lasted quite a while.  I don't think I'd blame that on Colemak... it's the keyboard.  Stupid mechanical typewriter legacy that just refuses to die.  All I can say is, try to adjust the angle of your keyboard... mine has to be at a slight angle with the left side closer than the right for me to be able to type decently.  If it's just a bit off, errors galore--no matter what the layout and my skill with it.

Here's a bit of irony: Colemak actually gave me fewer problems here.  The reason?  It's always either the bottom-left/top-right keys or the top-left/bottom-right keys of the board that cause the problems, depending on angle.  With the entire bottom row virtually unchanged in Colemak, only the top can really be a problem... and the top, to me, always gives less trouble than the bottom.

I make plenty of mistakes, but I backspace and correct them.  They do dissipate over time... don't let them bring you down.

Edit: Ah, after reading through the rest of this topic, I now understand what you meant by the keyboard being off-center.  I thought you were talking about the traditional staggered design, but it seems that you're talking about the entire keyboard being pushed to the left to make room for the mouse.  In that case... well, I deal with the same problem, but the best way to fix it is probably to get a "tenkeyless" model that completely lacks the numeric keypad.  I have yet to find a "fix" to this myself... I'm just putting up with it.  It would be nice if there were decent keyboards available with the numpad on the left side instead, or if standalone keypad didn't cost so much considering what a basic piece of hardware it really is...

Actually I am using Dvorak and have been since about early December last year.  I am trying to reach my old speeds in Dvorak (almost done...), and then learn Colemak as a second layout (already have the basic layout in my mind, just slow and error-prone...).  I actually have no intentions of "switching"; just getting decent with both layouts.  As for left-handed mouse... I sometimes (rarely) switch temporarily when my right arm needs a break, but it never lasts.  I'm right-handed and it just "feels" wrong.

I agree.  IMO both layouts have their places, can't really go wrong with either one.  Both are light-years ahead of QWERTY.  The way I see it, Dvorak's "flaws" as listed on the Colemak site are really just part of Colemak's advertising campaign more than anything; they're not really anything major.  I have quite a bit of respect toward such a good layout that was created without the use of computers or any of the fancy algorithms and automatic simulations that are run on them today.  That had to have taken a hell of a lot of work and research, some serious dedication.  Dvorak was ahead of his time.

I know I made the right decision (between those two, at least) because the left-handed keyboard shortcuts are very important to me.  Hell, colemak even brought a bunch of shortcuts closer than qwerty.

However, I did find dvorak's alternating rhythm more comfortable than colemak's rolls (this might be a matter of taste).  I wish there was a layout that had both shortcuts and alternation. 

Sadly, that is not a challenge.  It turns out that availability still means quite a lot to me, and I probably wouldn't switch anyway.  Colemak comes default on linuxes, which is great, but more importantly it's relatively popular on android, which turns out to be essential to my learning strategy.

Actually, the Capewell Dvorak layout, and a layout I've made which further improves on that layout, preserves the keyboard shortcuts of QWERTY while boasting of Dvorak's high alternation.

Can I see your new layout?  C-D actually misses a couple important shortcuts, like ctrl s, w, f.

Workman "proves", if anything, that new layouts improving on colemak, dvorak etc can't seem to be made without also having some disadvantage over the original - thus we're already close to optimal.

That doesn't mean that no improvement is possible, only that you'd probably sacrifice something for it.

Heh, I doubt MS made a layout changer for linux.  I did find a hack that turns it into qwerty when you press ctrl, but I found it inelegant, especially since many shortcuts don't use ctrl. 

I'd say the big disadvantage to those is movement of shortcuts.  Still, it's an option if knight doesn't need them as much as I do.