I'll give you this: It looks very nice! :-)

Brackets together, easily recognizable Colemak(Curl) heritage, a decent position for the hyphen-minus and slash, all in all downright pretty. Yeah, I think you have a good personal variant there. And the thumb Backspace provides an interesting twist.

If anything, some would balk at the increased distance to LShift and Tab. But I guess that's up to personal preferences and if you manage to use both shifts as you ideally should, it's probably all right. No worse than the ISO LShift you know, and we use that all the time! Another issue is the loss of AltGr, but if that's an issue to anyone they might use the Caps key for AltGr I guess? Then again, it might be better to just leave the AltGr then and put the Back back on Caps. :-p

Did you mean to have the centre column (square brackets and slash) left shifted to this..

    `~  1 2 3 4 5 = 6 7 8 9 0 - \
    Tab  Q W F P B [ J L U Y ; '  Del
     Esc  A R S T G ] M N E I O  Enter
    Shift  X C D V Z / K H , .  Shift
Ctrl  Win  Alt   Space   Backspace  Fn  Pn  Ctrl

Otherwise, (for me) the *BGZ* seems like a stretch for one of the hands. I like the idea of shift key ease -- rather than swapping the pinkie stretch from the right to the left hand for the shift key. Don't have a problem with the right but am noticing it with the left pinkie in the new layout as I develop new muscle memory.

For the central *square brackets* and *slash* in the wide-mod: which hand do you find best for these keys? Do you do a long index finger reach or shift the whole hand over? (I have heard some typists can do a whole hand/layout shift without thinking which is beyond my current ability.)

The one benefit I am finding with the layout I am practicing on now, is that the left pinkie extension can comfortably reach the *hyphen* and (curl to the) *question mark (slash)*. The *equal sign* is a plus when coding. So my hands provide complete coverage of the central rows from the home row. With the wide-mod, I would need to look at the keyboard for the central column assignment -- until I've practiced enough to do without.

Trying out all these possibilities.. it certainly has been an exercise for my neural pathways :-)

...

Oh! just had an idea from your shift key proposal. I could try swapping the *slash* with it to have..

    `~  \ 1 2 3 4 5 6  7 8 9 0 [  ]
    Tab  / Q W F P B  J L U Y ; '  Del
     Esc  - A R S T G  M N E I O  Enter
    =  Shift X C D V Z  K H , .  Shift
Ctrl  Win  Alt   Space   Backspace  Fn  Pn  Ctrl

Rather unorthodox to say the least! Looks odd on inspection but this could be a case of aesthetics be damned! I get (curl) left shift and retain ease of reach to the *hyphen* and *slash*, retaining home row coverage. Just wish the new left shift key could be slightly bigger!

Ah yes, I remember seeing your AltGr symbol layer. I would have to do a major hotkey remapping for that layer (to the Win key which I already heavily use) as controlling my *nix tiling window manager environments with the Alt key is pretty much ingrained from a decade of usage and, unfortunately, the Poker 2 does not distinguish between the left and right Alt keys.

The beauty of programming a keyboard like the Poker 2 to implement these Colemak variations is that I can simply plug it into any computer and I am good to go -- in fact, I am finding that I have to do that now, as I have become so accustomed to the Curl mod in this short time! As symbols and special characters aren't used significantly by me, I can continue to make do with the "shift + number" row for now.

The relocated Shift to the Qwerty Z position really does feel noticeably better -- not surprisingly, since it restores the ANSI Shift (relative) position with the Curl mod. Both pinkies are happy now! The symbol groupings are relatively intact and still look reasonably balanced (depending on your personal aesthetic, I'm biased!), save for the inner Shift, and the *equal* sign is still accessible.

I think I have a layout that I can stick with for more than a day now! :-)

...

This is the layout I finally settled on with changes to the left hand symbol cluster -- my *nix/Vim usage shows..

     `  = 1 2 3 4 5 6  7 8 9 0 [  ]
    Tab  - Q W F P B  J L U Y ; '  Del
     Esc  / A R S T G  M N E I O  Enter
    \  Shift X C D V Z  K H , .  Shift
Ctrl  Win  Alt   Space   Backspace  Fn  Pn  Ctrl

I originally thought that I'd want a larger *left shift* key but it actually is better as is, allowing easy reach of the *backslash* -- use it to conveniently "escape" characters (plus, it doesn't look out of place, being almost in the mirror position it was on the right hand side!). I can't say enough about how effective it is to be able to curl the pinkies to press the *shift* keys.

Nice!

Is there a way to make the totals stand out a bit more? I had some trouble reading where the end result was at first. If you could bold the totals lines that'd help.

I was thinking about "lite" DH mod i.e. DbgHk.

I guess the attraction of this is the fewer changes from Qwerty - and base Colemak - involved.
But I was wondering why you wouldn't prefer a version with the original clockwise D>P>G rotation:
D>P>G
H<>K
This gives improved D and G but worse P, which is similar to the improved D and G but worse B that DbgHk gives.
But it also results in 17 changes net from Qwerty, same as original Colemak, which is one less than DbgHk.
The D is possibly slightly better in the Qwerty R than in the B position? The other factor would be how you feel about moving P vs B.
Overall I'd say there's very little difference between DbgHk and DpgHk, but perhaps the total changes from Qwerty remaining at 17 would be significant for some...

You could also combine the H<>M switch with D>P>G if you were willing to allow 18 changes from Qwerty for the improved H.

Not wanting to overcomplicate things - but it seems there is a family of possible DH mods!

While wading through the recently upturned grave of a post from 2006, courtesy of our resident necroposter Piotr ;-) – I came across this nugget of history gold:

Well, that's just hilarious isn't it?! I've forgotten that post completely, although I did remember being a little displeased with the Colemak G position (but especially after switching to the Angle mod!). And now these two keys as well as D are in fact in better positions without messing up more than 1 more key movement from standard Colemak (and dethroning B and K a little). ;-)

Also note me bragging about my shirts of chain mail. Ahh, those were the days...

I started with Dvorak a year or two before I heard of Colemak; can't quite remember off the top of my head how long I spent with Dvorak, really. Then I spent a lot of time thinking – even thinking up layouts myself before I realized that I couldn't improve on Colemak. I learnt a lot from that process though. I think that several more astute layout designers like Qwertie/David came to pretty much the same conclusion eventually: Colemak is a really good layout for most purposes, and one of the very best for many.

My speeds have improved quite slowly: I was a 50 WPM typist with QWERTY and I think 55–60 WPM with Dvorak at the best, but only lately have I gotten to 65–70 WPM consistently for texts in Amphetype using Colemak(-Curl).

I've always found the Colemak AltGr layers wrong for me. Hence my Colemak[eD]. And Extend layers weren't really invented before I and others did it around 2008 I think? For the ÆØÅ I was in trouble with their Norwegian Dvorak placements that didn't work for me, but the Colemak AltGr placements certainly aren't good enough for typing Norwegian with either. However, Colemak doesn't mess with the symbol keys at all so I could just use the symbol mappings from the Norwegian QWERTY layout; this is what I now call a 'keep local symbols' locale layout. It was quite a bit later I settled on the Colemak[eD] 'universal symbols' strategy.

That key is not shown in the diagram, as it is not used for an alphabetic character when using the angle mod. The angle mod is strongly recommended for Mod-DH. For comparing non-angle-mod layouts in my analyzer, I use a value of 4.0 for that key as it's even worse than J.

The bottom row ring finger - that scores 2.8? I wouldn't say that was especially low, but maybe it could score higher. All the numbers are just my estimates based on my experience and reading other peoples opinions. If you want you can put your own choice of the numbers in the analyzer to see how it effects the results.

I guess you are referring to this pattern of keys in Mod-DH...

M
K H

When I created Mod-DH, the idea was to minimize access to the centre-column keys, while at the same time keeping as few changes as possible to standard Colemak. As DreymaR has pointed out, arguably the Colemak K / Qwerty N position is not as bad as H on the middle-row. Since M is more common than K, you could for example have:

K
M H

However, this does mean 3 right-hand keys changed from standard Colemak instead of 2. Also, for those with matrix-like keyboards, the M would suddenly seem badly located for a mid-frequency key.

At the end of the day I think the difference between those two options is quite minor, so I'd prefer the one with fewer changes.

New Mod-DH (with angle shift mod) user reporting for duty! Bloody fantastic layout. Thank you!

Yes, "Curl" refers to the natural way of holding your hand relaxed over the keys, fingers following a slight curve so that the index fingers gravitate towards the lower row (and the middle fingers slightly towards the upper, incidentially). On Colemak, that indeed means Mod-DH.

You want Stevep99's Dvbg mod (I suppose you want the Hm mod on the right hand too then?), with the ANSI Angle(Z) mod and a Wide mod of your own making. I'm supporting that in Linux, since my xkb files are modular – apart from the custom Wide which you'd have to tweak yourself obviously. :-) But so far that "support" still entails tweaking a few files I think.

It doesn't really have a very catchy name, I guess. Steve would refer to it as "the" (ANSI) DH-mod, pretty much, I guess, while I'd call it Curl(DvbgHm)Angle(Z)Wide(Angelic) which is obviously very technical and not very snappy. Colemak-CAW is quite snappy, but personally I use that specifically for my own flavor of CurlAngleWide.

I don't know the impact of the ANSI angle mods since I'm lucky enough to be an ISO keyboardist. Haven't got much feedback on them either, so far. I'd love to hear some. On ISO, there's no real change in fingering which is sweet. I've heard of ANSI users wanting to switch to ISO because of this.

My own flavor, yes. That'd be Curl(DbgHk)Angle(ISO)Wide(/). You'll find it near the top of my BigBag sig topics!

Most people haven't heard of the angle mod of course, but my casual observations of other people typing reveals quite a lot of people don't use the supposedly "standard" typing method, especially when it comes to keys like C. In practise people tend to develop ad-hoc techniques to cope with the fact that the standard keyboard is so poorly designed.

Colemak has been designed with proper finger placement in mind though, which means you either have to (i) use the "standard" (i.e. uncomfortable) technique, (ii) use the wrong fingers for some keys, or (iii) use the angle mod.  The best option being (iii).

It should be clarified though that whichever DH mod you use, they are all intended to preserve default colemak fingering. Obviously the situation is made a little more tricky by being an ANSI user though :)

If it helps, my write-up of the Angle mod is here.