Yes, I remember when it was like that. Keep going though :P

It's surprising to me that vim users still love HJKL so much. I could understand if it was (qwerty) IJKL. HJKL is not great design for arrow keys navigation really, it doesn't even correspond to the home key positions. Back in the day, I remember using vi(m) with the old green-screen dumb terminals, and so there was no other choice . But these days, when it's much easier to configure everything how you want it, Extend is the obvious answer.

I use emacs with colemak, but not with evil/vim

It was a while back now, but I remember it being pretty hard at the start

Now I don't even notice it - its all normalised

I tried a few times with the extend stuff but never 'got' it. I think possibly the reason being that emacs provides most of that stuff with its own key bindings anyway so its not required. I can see extend would make more sense if you weren't using emacs heavily

i half remember ryan heises site had some info on vim key binding mods for colemak?

haha - my new year 2017 resolution will be to give it (yet) another shot..

the decision for me is even further complicated by the fn key stuff on the filco - which is yet another set of key bindings

i'm not sure how many disparate sets of key bindings my brain can cope with?

How long did it take you to reach the point where it became fluent?

To learn about the wonders of Extend, you should really visit my sig topic(s) and the Extend Extra Extreme topic linked to therein. But yes, it's like the Fn key on some modern keyboards. Only, it's so much better thought out I believe in all non-modesty.

Most who have started using it have fallen very much in love with Extend, and I consider it fully as useful and delightful to me as Colemak itself!

True, if you do have a Filco with an Fn layer on it you may not desperately need Extend. But I still think that Extend is considerably better than anything I've seen on hardware implementations. One major reason for that is the home row modifiers that create combos such as Ext+STN (= Shift+Ctrl+Left) to select the previous word, followed by a quick cut-move-paste sequence without letting go of the Ext key (Caps). It's a thing of true beauty.

yes - i have the classic emacs ctrl/caps switch

i use ubuntu and did it using ubuntu-tweak-tool I think

i.e. I didn't muck about with dreymars xkb stuff

i think technically, colemak has caps as bksp

but like you say - that would be drastic and almost certainly a destroyer of the left little finger

It most certainly doesn't! It completely misses the mark by putting the fairly useless Insert key where I have the useful Backspace, digs its own grave by ignoring modifiers, and pats the dirt nicely over by ignoring the bottom row and pretty much the left hand (how often do you use play/pause/etc?; those belong on the F# keys where I put them).

Don't be duped by the fact that it has the F# keys and most of the right-hand home position right. It lacks versatilty and the power of combos. It's downright shitty, if you ask me, although it's still the best hardware Fn layout I've seen which says a lot.

The power of Extend isn't that you have F4 on Ext+4. It's that you have Ctrl+F4 on Ext+T+4 and Alt+F4 on Ext+A+4. Etc etc.

Are there any other good keys than Caps-lock to put the extend-activation key on? I just got xcape to understand that I want tapping Caps-lock to mean Backspace, while holding it is Control (I hope this is possible in Windows as well?). I don't think that I can cram a third meaning onto that key...

It's a shame that there doesn't seem to be an obviously really good ergonomical keyboard with mechanical switches. I tried to use my Filco Majestouch for some practice today, but my right hand started hurting after only a few typeracer rounds. Back to the MS Natural Keyboard 4000 with its sloppy membranes. Maybe DreymaR's wide angle mod (or is that its name?) would help.

On another note, progress is being (slowly) made: After around 5 days I'm up to around 30 wpm, although my accuracy is only around 90 %. I should probably slow down and try to be more precise, but it's more fun to try and press on.

I'm in a bit of no-man's-land right now; typing on a qwerty layout feels very bad, while my speed and accuracy on Colemak leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm going to offer an alternative perspective. I've been using emacs with evil for a couple of years. I definitely don't recommend rebinding everything to mirror qwerty vim, but I do recommend at least restoring and using hjkl positions (or whatever positions you would prefer for directional actions). If you're using emacs for mail and a lot of other things, I'd especially recommend doing this over relying on an extend layer (which is inefficient). There's no reason to use a modifier for common actions like moving to the next email thread/message.

These are the basic swaps a lot of people make:
n -> j
e -> k
i -> l
to replace the last 3
k -> n
j -> e
l -> i

This goes for the capital versions as well.

I'm not sure what you mean about messing with compatability. I personally use evil everywhere in emacs (mpd client, mail client, feed reader, etc.), and depending on how you do this, it can already require a lot of key rebindings even with qwerty. One possible approach (that works for qwerty as well) you can take if you don't want to have to find the appropriate directional commands for every mode you want to use the hjkl positions with is to bind them to simulate the <left>, <up>, <down>, and <right> keys.  See here for more information. I also have an example that does this specifically for pdf tools here. Keep in mind that for the basic directions, you can do this globally without needing to make rebindings for every evil or non-evil package.

It's my package, so I'm biased towards it, but general.el definitely has better support for evil and a lot of additional functionality. My configuration isn't currently public because parts of it are pretty messy, but I could try to answer any specific questions you have. The only real downside to using colemak with evil is that most evil packages support the hjkl positions. The extend layer approach can't always be used as workaround since some of these packages only bind hjkl and not the arrow keys. I personally prefer to always rebind a lot of keys, but there are more lazy approaches depending on package. I've found it doesn't take me any significant amount of time to throw another evil-define-key (or general-define-key) statement into my config to correct hjkl functionality, so it doesn't bother me too much.

I wonder if I could get extend to work from the additional Fn key that my minila has in between the left alt and space?

left alt is too painful to mess with due to its emacs usage

i use the angle mod on it and it seems ok to me

i think i was a bit rash getting it - prob should have got something like a tenkeyless instead

there is  a wireless minila now, and i think maybe a wireless tenkeyless is about to come out

i'll have to delve into what i can achieve re: the fn key at some point..