Thanks for your valuable insights, ckofy.  это, эта, etc are indeed an interesting case where contemporary e-mail/chat letter frequencies will differ from the classical text corpuses, as well as modern loan words.  In English, that/they/them/... don't have that.

On one hand, your case motivates me to further improve Rulemak for native users, but on the other hand, it would move it away from the original design principle: being easy to use for existing Colemak users, without (necessarily) being fully optimal.  We've been through a few revisions of the layout in this topic since 2008, and the position of э was never questioned so far.  I'm also with DreymaR to keep a keyboard layout and its variants "modular", by separating letter and symbol layouts; with the current layout, you could choose between the Qwerty or the йцукен top row without affecting (most of) the rest of the layout.  Out of curiousity, since you're using Colemak as well: does your physical keyboard have Qwerty or йцукен labels?

I would agree that the current э position is not so bad that it require to break the rulemak design principle. A little stretchy at ANSI keyboard, but in most cases it is эт bigramm at the beginning of the word. BTW, "эт" has position 103 in the list of bigramms frequencies, the next э bigramm - "эк" is at 349.
The main usage of rulemak is a phonetic layout in pair with colemak, similarity to colemak is more important.

ghen,

Your rulemak.pkl has one issue, "ч" is entered lowcase both in normal and shift layers.

SC023 = H	1	ч	ч	^h	h	H	; QWERTY hH

Here is the great typing training website which supports English and Russian and has many layouts in both.
http://klava.org/  (klava (клава) is a slang name of keyboard (клавиатура) in Russian.)
I'm not sure how good it is for the systematic learning of layout from home row to numeric row, I'm using it for texts typing and it is very good.
It calculates typing speed and error's percentage, shows keyboard and keystrokes, has autobackspace feature which can be turned off.

So, overall, this is a very good keyboard trainer not only for Russian but for English as well.
Also, it has the offline extension available for chrome (Klavarog Δ)
I'm not participating in this project, my advertising is sincere. :)

Cool, thanks!  For Linux/X11 users, Rulemak will be added to the next release of xkeyboard-config (keyboard layouts for X11) as well.

As you can see from the discussion, there are decent reasons for most of them. :-)

If you want to change CH, you could try the Bulgarian variant (Bulmak) instead?

my layout looks like

Ergodox w/o staggering...
thumb keys is double action, shift when pressed, keycode on tap

Hi armatus. I'm using Ergodox as well. How did you program the double action for keys?
Regarding your layout for Rulemak on Ergodox, I have some concerns. Why so weird position for "ь"? I proposed to put "Э" in the place of "/" as well, but my reasoning was it's far position on the standard keyboard. Ergodox can propose closer position in the same direction as the "Э" located on the standard keyboard.
Here is my layout. I labeled only keys used by rulemak on the picture.

"ь" and "э" remains on the same keys, but "э" is much closer and easier to press now.
"ё" and "ъ" changed their positions, well, who really cares about them?
Now "ш" and "щ". Changed as well, but personally I never enjoyed of seeking them with my right pinkie. That position at Ergodox looks easier to access.
My argument for moving "ш" to other hand is to break the "шь" bigram for two hands. In the standard keyboard this pretty frequent bigram should be entered by the right pinkie.

we talk about phonetic layout
so why:
h == ч, it's nonsense, any phonetic russian layout have h == х
see at

look below zero!

what you think about changing х and ч placement in rulemak?

it's not wrong. it's rare
http://klava.org/#rus_basic
even rulemak in a list of layouts !!! but no ЯЖЕРТЫ at all

most usable in ex USSR is JCUKEN like on picture
others are rare and mostly unknown (i'm only once meet a ЯВЕРТЫ keyboard, but it was long ago in 1991)
JCUKEN has more followers this time of all phonetic layouts in russia

---
it's unusual to find other
than qwerty+йцукен in use (((

---
in general it's bad when similar looking keys placed in one place in different layouts
most russian hate c == с placement on qwerty+йцукен
it cause many mistypes in words started by this letter
(like cyjdf, i'm start to type in different layout, but didnt recognize this fast enough)

If you look at the very first design at the beginning of this thread, Х was originally on the H position, and Ч on = (number row), based on the KOI8-R transcript scheme, but it was not very nice, so they were moved to their current position in the next revision.  Х fits equally well on X and H (depending on transcript scheme), but Ч has no direct mapping.  It is usually transliterated as "ch", so H made sense.  Also, Ч is more frequent than Х.

Given that the Russian alphabet has more letters than the Latin/English alphabet, some Russian letters have to be placed on Colemak non-letter positions (at least if you want them all on a direct key, without modifier keys), and some, like Х, have multiple possible destinations.  We tried to account for letter frequency, and to some extent, elegance and symmetry (see the whole ь/ъ/ё and в/ж discussion), but keep in mind that Rulemak was designed for non-native use, that is, it should primarily be easy to remember and not fully optimized, as non-native users will never block on raw typing speed anyway.  Most users are happy with the current layout, so I'd like to stick to that.

>>>Ч is more frequent than Х
---
middle col requires wierd finger movement to access
so on bottom line it is better