Why? That's like saying a car manufacturer prioritising comfort over horsepower is a bad thing. You prefer to be stuck in an 1200HP tank with iron seats during your morning commute instead of a fancy mercedes with cushy seats? It's just an opinion.

Yet again, making you faster does not mean it will medically benefit you. Nor does making it more compfy mean it will medically benefit you. If you run 40 km/h (those are Usain Bolt speeds) for an hour you're bound to have injuries. But if you run 20 km for 2 hours not much is going to happen.

I agree though, the first months are tough, and you waste quite some time during them. But if you enjoy learning a new layout because you find it enjoyable and hipster, who cares? If I think that colemak is more comfy than qwerty, and most colemak users think the same, who are you to disagree with us? Ar far as I know, you haven't even tried it.

Judging by your posts your obsessed with being able to type as fast as possible. Which is perfectly fine, there is nothing wrong with being competative. But 99% of keyboard users doesn't really care how fast they type, since most of the time you're typing, you're not actually typing but just thinking about what to type.

You can only measure proxies that, hopefully, sorta correspond to whatever comfort is supposed to mean.  Distance moved, same-finger, the usual stuff.  It may not be ideal, but it's the best we have.  It's similar in a lot of the social sciences.

A better proxy (though this is more long-term than what we'd normally think of as comfort) would be something like the rate of typing-related ailments per layout.  Unfortunately, no researcher seems interested in investing in such long-term studies when the standard's already entrenched anyway.

I'm guessing that successful layout switchers are more likely to be comfort than speed-oriented, and you're just seeing that reflected in the forum users.

Switching layouts reduces speed for at least a while, with no actual guarantee you'd make it back to your old speed or greater.   This temporary slowdown is also likely to hit the speed-focused more on a psychological level.

On the other hand, people switching for reasons of comfort often don't have a choice (if their hands are on their last legs, or may be soon), and are more likely to notice positive changes like reduced distance (which is noticeable even during the first days of practice).  More incentive, less immediate psychological pressure.

In the end, the people who are more likely to persevere in switching layouts are those who value comfort over speed.  The advocacy probably evolved on its own from there.  This isn't to say you're wrong, though, or that layout advocacy shouldn't start focusing more on speed - saying "this layout will make you type faster" is likely to turn quite a few more heads - just that that's what happened.  If you collect enough data, maybe we could start using statistics to make a serious speed comparison.

Tarmak may also help reduce the population skew by smoothing out the immediate speed-loss, though I suspect that the reasons still wouldn't quite go away.

Speed is not an issue, I've switched nearly 9 months ago, and my Colemak typing speed has been on par with my previous QWERTY speed for the last 6 months.

Comfort is not measurable, so what... you know? Pain is not objectively measurable too, that does not stop drug manufacturers from marketing painkillers.

I find nothing wrong with sharing my personal subjective experience.
I'm claiming that Colemak is more comfortable for me. I do not claim, that it will be beneficial for you.

The problem is even though speed is measurable it's incredibly hard to perform a study to measure it without bias. You can't just measure the speeds of people typing and make a scientific conclusion.  For example on this forum and for people switching to Colemak/Dvorak you can't just measure typing speeds for the following reasons: 1) are we truly a representative sample population of typist (definitely not, I would venture to say the average person switching keyboard layouts is faster than the ~40wpm average); 2) For the people that exceed their previous QWERTY speeds was that because of Colemak, or just a matter of the extra practice focusing on typing (In my case an hour a day for over a month); 3) Extremely fast qwerty typists often completely disregard "proper typing technique" (i.e. Sean Wrona who centers his hands over the letters that will be typed, not always the home row), so is there any reduced "distance" or comfort benefit for these people? Well, it would completely depend on the style they use.

Basically to properly study the effect of an alternative keyboard correctly you would have to get a couple of classrooms of young students who are just learning how to type and teach them Colemak, or Dvorak, and measure their speeds over a matter of months, possibly years (we don't need a control group b/c 99.99% of typists are the control group) and see how they are performing versus the rest of the population. This study will almost assuredly never happen.

That being said I do "feel" more comfortable typing now in Colemak vs qwerty, and even though I've only been typing for about 1 1/2 months in Colemak I'm approaching my old qwerty speeds and feel like I will surpass them rather easily... But, when it really comes down to it on this forum we can only post what keyboard layout we enjoy, our feelings of comfort when typing, our current progress on speed and our improvement, but we can never truly say this keyboard layout is the best.

Well, that only says that distance traveled does not directly model speed (since multiple fingers can travel in parallel).  Were you designing a layout for speed, you would probably want to maximize the occasions in which you can reach for several of the next letters in parallel, rather than strictly minimizing the distance traveled.

I've been around here since 2007 and I can safely assert that most Colemak typists are concerned with speed *and* comfort. Maybe you didn't look through enough posts before you decided there weren't any, even if pure speed brag posts like yours aren't common.

True, measuring comfort is harder than measuring speed – even if neither is completely trivial. The speed of a given typist in a given situation on a given text is easily measured, but comparing the underlying speed potential of layouts is much harder as you're hard pressed to find comparable populations and do enough measurements to produce good statistics (without being paid to do so), and have to make decisions about what to test (syllabus, test type, situation etc). I think it may actually be easier to assess the comfort issue as that manifests itself rapidly whereas you should ideally let typists train new layouts for years to measure their speeds comparably and relevantly.

Why not buy a smaller keyboard and use a more efficient layout? </snarky answer>

More seriously, you're probably underestimating the distance reduction of an efficient layout.  Patorjk's analyzer gives a ballpark figure of 40% reduction.  Unless your old keyboard was pretty darn big, you're not going to be able to reduce the distance by nearly that much.

Finally, there are also disadvantages to reducing hardware size, most obviously a reduced margin for error.

Reducing keyboard size?

This can be done in two ways:
1. reducing number of keys, and cramming F-keys and edit keys in function key layer (as it is done in Happy Hacking keyboards).
2. reducing distance between individual keys.

First method is has its benefits, but holding down additional Fn-key can, in the long run, be more tiring then moving your hand around.

Second method is even more problematic. Do you remember first generation of netbook's, those little things with 7" screens had keyboards to small to touch-type (for me at least). My fingers are to wide to use narrower keyboard.

You have come to the right place. For reducing finger travel, Colemak is one of the best layouts

Thanks for the responses, what about my suggestion of using QWERTY-SUX to reduce motion?

So why not try it?

I will post all the other details including its background at a later date.

That's right, I meant high. I will look into those.

Touchscreens lack tactile feedback, although I can reach decent speeds on an iPad.