Good to hear that you're liking it as well :) I have been going back and forth a couple of times, and no, changing back to qwerty isn't worth it, I had to switch due to getting a new job where was not able to use colemak, and I had to go back to qwerty for some years, but now leadership has changed and I'm able to do colemak again, and it really is a saver for my hands, being an IT-administrator I'm typing quite a lot during the day, and the little extra comfort that colemak brings me really adds up.

I also recently did the change to colemak-caw, which also really was even better for me, it changes some letters around, and lets you separate the hands a bit more, which is a lot more comfortable for the shoulders, and even more when you're typing on a laptop.

As I am a european user I'm used to use Alt-gr for different accents and stuff, so that never threw me for a loop, I'm don't even think about the keys as the same really, as they always has done different things for me.I have the same issue as you when I have to use a single hand, but it's a small price to pay for the comfort that I get from typing with a better keyboard layout.

After reading what others have said, I found DH and haven't looked into CAW, but I found it interesting that so many enhanced alternatives exist! I may want to try them out, so long as they're easy to apply to many OSes...I use Linux daily, Windows just for gaming, will be getting a MacBook again to keep in the loop of all major OSes, and also do some admin work on FreeBSD and NetBSD hehe. Is it easy to apply some of these changes across many OSes?

I Also had no idea what AltGr was until here, so I learn something new every day! It'd make sense it is a more useful key internationally, and I expect as much out of a well thought out layout (AltR is barely used in the US anyways). Thank you for all this information DreymaR! I haven't heard of your packages until after I typed this up actually! I'm using all the vanilla packages found on colemak.com right now. It sounds like at least for windows, you have some neat packages as well as a program to handle these things in Linux and perhaps other *NIX OSes?

That would be me confusing things if it is ^^ I'm not sure if I want to mod or not. DH does make sense though. It is far easier to not have to extend for the DH keys. But idt I'm up for learning a mod...unless it's faster than switching to plain Colemak from QWERTY than MAYBE

I'm a bit stubborn and insist on calling the DH-mod Curl(DH) since the point of it is to promote naturally curled fingers. Also since that goes well with AngleWide to produce the CAW moniker. ;-)

stevep99 is a bit stubborn and insists on calling it Mod-DH because that's what he called it in the first place. ;-)

Is it hard to go from Colemak to Mod-DH? I might see some benefit in switching to it, but my main problem is Colemak is already just somewhat supported on  OSes, and DH definitely isn't. Wouldn't be a problem if I just used one OS, but I use...4 mainly, sometimes a 5th one

For me, going from standard Colemak to caw, I dropped from ca 60 WPM down to 27, and then it took me a couple of weeks to get back up to 50, now I'm pushing on 60, so it's a lot easier than changing from qwerty to colemak.

Yeah me too, it's such a comfortable and simple mod that really makes sense, I guess it just depends on Shai's willingness to accept it as such or not.

Boy do I wish I had that kind of money for a keyboard! I love my current one, but it only does the obvious qwerty and then dvorak and workman, which, is impressive in its own merit for a consumer mechanical keyboard. My keyboard is also only a few months old now and I really love it, so I can't justify a new one. I'll just do the hard way...

:D couldn't say I've tried it myself, but it didn't take me long to see that Colemak was better ;) I had spent a couple weeks prior to using colemak watching people talk about dvorak and I saw it was also...interesting like dvorak. But I was more alluding to the keyboard has any pre-programmed keyboard layouts...I just wish we saw more colemak :(

At the beginning I also had idea that it is nothing bad about same finger bigrams, kind of easy to remember for muscule memory. Russian йцукен has a lot same-index-finger bigrams, trigrams, and even some quatrograms because of all frequent letters in the middle. But now I always notice when I’m typing SC or UE in Colemak and it seems like slow down in the typing flow.

Dear ladies and gents,

This is roughly my 1 year in mark since I switched to Colemak, so I wanted to share how my first year has been :)

Now to be honest...I switched to Colemak Mod-DH. I have to say, typing on Mod-DH has been better FOR ME, I just have troubles often with reaching the "B" key, but I find that would have been the "G" key this entire time so...I really don't mind. What's interesting, is each time I type, whenever i have to do the slightest stretch beyond the comfort zones of the keyboard, I notice it. Could just be my wrist issues that I've had for some time now, but those stretches aren't as often as when I used QWERTY, I can say that much, as sometimes when I set up a test OS or have to use someone's computer, I almost always feel strained (and feel like an idiot because QWERTY is hard now).

Here's why I don't recommend MOD-DH:

• It's not as universally available on OSes as Colemak (I've seen vanilla Colemak on macOS, OpenBSD and NetBSD and Linux...shakes fist at FreeBSD, maybe I should be the one to do a pull request)

• Need to take extra steps to setup Colemak DH on your computer

• If you virtualize operating systems like me, you'll have to set up Mod-DH on each VM, or SSH into it.

• You'll want programmable hardware to REALLY enjoy it

(sorry for the wretched formatting, too used to HTML and Markdown and this "user-friendly" way of adding lists has stumped me)

But if you can get passed those things and sometimes put up with the inconvenience, I say if you're interested in Mod-DH (or other variants of Colemak) please do give it a try! What I've done is use what's provided on GitHub for macOS, for my Linux laptops (cuz I don't do Windows laptops) and times I've done FreeBSD and OpenBSD I've been able to make a modified evdev.xml and rules file to include my keyboard layout and it has worked well for me. For my workstation, I bought a Vortex Race 3, set it to Colemak mode and then programmed the necessary keys to match the Mod-DH layout. And since it use DSA-style keycaps I was able to rearrange my keyboard caps :) What's funny though, is people don't realize they don't have QWERTY TRULY memorized until they try to type it on my keyboard. They look down and their mind blows up haha.

I have about reached full efficiency for typing at this point. With QWERTY I was able to type upper 90s to 110WPM depending on the string (all Typer Racer tested), and right now I'm consistently getting upper 80s. I don't even care if I reach that speed though because the comfort of typing is worth any loss in speed. And I don't notice the loss in my day-to-day typing since I more or less type in quick bursts, think about what I typed, then quick burst again

All in all, thank you to Shai, and the geniuses behind the variants, and the people who have gotten Colemak readily available in most operating systems :)

I'd say this is because now you are using a much better layout, you notice the difference. It's general point about whenever you switch to using something of better quality: it makes you more discerning.

Fair points for those who are looking to install a layout out-of-the-box on their OS. In that case you probably want an established layout that comes as standard and so base Colemak would be adequate (Windows excepted of course).

But to enjoy the full benefits of improved comfort and efficiency in your keyboarding, you'd be wanting to do more than just use bare Colemak - not the least is using Extend, but maybe other options worthy of consideration like moved modifiers, symbol/accent layers, wide layouts etc.

In the end, relying on a pre-configured list of layouts is always going to be rather limiting, and so the better bet will be to either install something customizable or use programmable hardware (or a usb remapper).

Maybe there should be some sort of effort to get Extend included as a built-in option in some operating systems?