If this argument was accepted by all, change would never come.

Adoption can be personal. The more personal change there is, the greater the scale of possible widespread change.

Don't study because your friends don't. Don't save money because over half the current generation doesn't. Don't eat healthy or exercise because most people don't.

I talked to the IT people in my high school when I was learning Colemak and we made it happen. I was that guy at 10wpm, and a year later the guy at 100wpm.

The average speed or standard that I know is 60. I can still do 60 on Qwerty if I feel like it. The layout is on my phone.

Rise above the standards, don't let the standards rise above you.

Colemak FTW

Most of that is actually inaccurate.
• Colemak is good for many languages (see my locale topic) – although some need minor additions
• Physical modding is available, and not looking at the keys is the right way to type anyway!
• On other computers, I use QWERTY happily. If I'm typing a lot on them, I whip out my QUICKIE.
• Special chars not available?
    – Firstly, on Windows I have more special characters than any other method I know of (PKL_eD)!
    – On Linux, Colemak[eD] is every bit as rich as any other layout I think. And then some.
    – On Mac, I refuse to believe that it's impossible. There must be an implementation you don't use.
• Assisting someone? I don't see how that's really different from "school/work computers" above.
    – If you want to pair program you can use a QUICKIE for your keyboard.

One disadvantage is that a QUICKIE costs money and a little effort, granted. And indeed, this and the sum of everything will put the uninterested off. So I'm not saying that you're all wrong, just that your list of arguments seems overly pessimistic when there are positive modifications to nearly all the points on it. ;-)

Again, this reminds me of the Board Wars scroll!

As to the OP: I'm a passionate Colemak fan and even I wouldn't say that it's the best layout. I think it's the best layout available in sum, due to several factors around it. And I don't think there's anything better waiting around to replace it so it's what I recommend. But in theory and in modeling there are many layouts that are nearly as good. So it depends on what you mean by "the best", and there personal preference will play in. For a Dvorak user, similarity to QWERTY will seem largely unnecessary. For a hardcore hacker, availability and a community are luxury items. For a layout freak, the Tarmak learning scheme may hold little sway. Etc, etc.

But I do think that Colemak and its little family of bells and whistles is the best option for anyone who wants an improved layout! Today and likely tomorrow. The brilliant early work of Shai plus the many advances this vibrant community have produced over the years make it a wonderful package of layout goodness.

@drujdeka: I get your frustration, but I didn't read the OP quite as aggressive as that. I hope... ^_^

One thing about Rial, Esperanto etc: These depend on other people. You can't use a Rial or Esperanto unless someone else are willing to interact with you. You can type Colemak on your own though – you don't really need another person to be using the same. I remember Shai making this argument, and it's a good one.

I see the suffering of both the QWERTY and Colemak user. They are different, but it's hard to say which one is hardest. As Shakespeare puts it:

But I'm glad I chose the path of action at least! So personally satisfying.

Oh, and thanks for the support. Yes, it's been wayyyy too many unpaid hours, so recognition is very welcome.

Well, QWERTY and Workman are both t3h sux. QWERTY is just way suxier. There, I said it. ^_^

Apologies for being offline, I only read your replies to the topic now and I'm grateful for the effort put into replies.
This message is a bit long, so I totally understand if you don't answer. I'm just stating my situation. I want to switch to Colemak — but I'm trying to meet certain conditions

My announcing of my departure from Colemak was actually not so I could complain… but to see if I could be persuaded to stick to Colemak
Yes, I cannot be arsed remembering multiple layouts and I am a very lazy person. I'm being swayed from people telling me to stay in QWERTY, and from people telling me to switch to Colemak. I'm very bad at decision making and I wanted to see could I get enough reasons that surpass QWERTY's pros & cons, to make the full switch to Colemak
I'm gonna try provide as much info as possible to my situation and if you could help, it would be appreciated.

I own two devices — MacBook & iPhone SE
MacBook Pro 15" (2017 w/ touch bar) running macOS High Sierra (10.13.3).
I'm sure my keyboard is a backlit British QWERTY keyboard

I use the following input sources:
ABC (Extended) — this types QWERTY + more special characters (hold down on a key & you can select a variation/accent from the popup) — so this can type most languages w/ Latin alphabet
Pinyin - Simplified Chinese — uses QWERTY to type Chinese through romanisation. Most common keyboard type in Mainland China
Hiragana — uses QWERTY to type Japanese (kana + kanji) through romanisation. Can also type Katakana by enabling caps lock / use shift
GongjinCheong Romaja  — uses QWERTY to type Korean through romanisation, since I'm too lazy to learn Dubeolsik (Korean standard layout)
Colemak — Colemak comes preinstalled on macOS. I tried it and had a positive experience, but it's harder to type accents, umlauts and tone marks. And cannot remap all the other layouts to Colemak

Then on my iPhone, I use
English (UK), Pinyin (Simp Chinese) and the Japanese (Romaji) layouts which all use QWERTY (For Korean, I use Dubeolsik (Korea's standard) because it was very easy to type on a phone)

Other devices I used would be the Windows computers in school/uni (always QWERTY), which if I could change the keyboard layout, I would

Typing this post now with QWERTY (yes I know) with two/three fingers. Probably around 40WPM as usual. So I'm definitely considering full switch to Colemak but I want all my other layouts to transfer over, and even then… will it make 汉语/日本語/한국어 less ergonomic and fast to type? That, I do not know.

I'm also really concerned about smartphone typing. QWERTY actually seems better, because my phone has a 4" screen, therefore more finger jumping distance would decrease the error rate in my opinion. But I don't know for sure, I can't prove it. And even then, I'd have to sacrifice typing on an iOS keyboard and use 3rd party.

So I would like to fully switch to Colemak, provided I don't sacrifice ergonomics and speed in French/Chinese/Japanese/Korean and that I could still switch to QWERTY on public computers (unless there's a hack? Probably not). Also, I'd like to point out, Chinese has a lot of vowel bigrams -ei -ao -oi -ai etc… and so, your right hand would be overworked imo.

At the moment, I can type without looking at 30WPM on Colemak in English on thetypingcat.com. I think I will be a bit less lazy for once and learn it to the full, especially since it'd be a first for me actually touch typing with 10 fingers (instead of 3).
I thought about it really hard this time, and once I leave high school to go to college…I'll only be using my own device 99% of the time. So I think I'll kick one of my excuses to the side then.

So my plan is:
Maintain QWERTY minimum speeds — just so I can type on more devices for the time being
Improve my Colemak — I'm learning cold turkey on thetypingcat.com
But after that? Idk. Colemak mods confuse me as I assume it's all geared towards English-only, correct me if I'm wrong.
I want to know more about QUICKIE. If it solved the problem when typing on public computers, that would be amazing.
I want to see how the Asian CJK languages fair on Colemak — as this is a big dealbreaker for me, and might be the biggest thing holding me back
And also, HOW do you all get special characters? I don't thin Karabiner works on macOS Sierra and higher. And maybe integrate the cool feature Mac has where you can long press for accents of pressed key.

If I insulted Colemak, I'm sorry. Please understand that I'm stubborn myself, and lazy.
When you got one friend saying, "Dude stick with the way you type. Don't bother changing. You type 40-60WPM. Why bother?"
And then you got that other friend saying, "Dude, this will totally increase your productivity CHECK it out. Come to Colemak"
— so the swaying from one side to another is daunting ; especially when QWERTY is standard and everyone pulls out that excuse - including me
My post mighn't be as clear as I want it, so if you have any questions? Please ask
If you read as far as here, well done srsly and thank you.
来自王凯

I use QWERTY for typing on my phone, that has nothing to do with my knowledge of colemak at all, colemak never was a good experience for me on a phone, so I'm sticking to qwerty or my crazy keyboard of the day thing, messageease for example is great for typing on the phone.

I'm typing Norwegian, English, German and Japanese using Colemak-CAW, the IME just follows the keyboard that I'm currently using so it works great for Japanese. Norwegian also have a lot of diphtongs, ei, øy, ai, oi, and so on, and German has kind of a bit of them as well, but I never really felt that that is a big problem.

I'm working in IT, so I'm jumping here and there between PCs, Writing colemak on my own, and qwerty on the others, I'm pretty slow on qwerty, but I can do my work well enough that noone complains, mainly I'm writing on my own though.

For me typing in cjk has been no problem at all, I'm just starting the IME, and I continue to type on colemak, and it converts to the right characters.

I type English German and Norwegian on colemak CAW without any problems, it lets me type accented letters, å ø æ o ó ô ß without any big problems, and for me at least is very much preferable to the qwertz keyboard that I was originally typing on, I used to switch between qwertz and qwerty in different langauges, and it was confusing me, now I'm mainly typing on colemak for all languages, so it's way better for multiple languages for me than what qwertz ever was.

For me colemak is nothing about speed, if you're just after speed then there is no need to go for colemak, then something like plover, or continue on with qwerty, the fastest typists are still all using qwerty, colemak is about comfort, if you get speed it's possible, but the reason for using it it has never been for me.

I can't really help you with your motivation, I can just say that for me colemak has gotten me from near rsi to being able to type comfortably again, and it also has done wonders with my posture while typing on a laptop due to the wide mod.

Message ease is a great keyboard for android, and I guess the ios version is good as well, although I have never had an iphone.

All the IMEs that I use have done this automatically, both in Windows (work) and Linux (home)

On windows not as far as I know, on linux you can go wild and do whatever you what with it, you can do crazy stuff with the keyboard configurations, and with the IMEs as well.

Exactly stuff like this is why I don't use a mac, it's nice if you do exactly the stuff that apple wants you to do, but if you do something else it's bound to constantly break, and be needlessly complicated.

Yeah, then I think you're on the right way, at least for me there is nothing more comfortable than using colemak to write.

Coming into this thread all of a sudden (i'm only really replying to OP, it's tl;dr!) and addressing your one main concern - I was in school myself not too long ago (before Colemak) and had to use a bunch of public computers. I really don't think I would have switched just then. Since you're 15, you're gonna be all over public computers for at least the next three years, so in your mind the switch isn't worth it. You're just thinking practically, fair enough. It's probably not worth it for you right now, and that's cool.

The idea that Colemak is scarce would only really apply in your context however. After you go to university (I don't know how the system works where you live but I'm speaking from a British perspective) you can just use your own laptop that has Colemak installed, and carry that everywhere. Once you start real work, if you work from home you'll be fine for the layout, if in an office you can probably ask an IT guy to install the layout (why would they say no? this is super important to you and probably quite easy to implement) or bring in a programmable keyboard with the layout built in. Even if you are the IT guy you could use your programmable keyboard to fix PCs, or just develop good QWERTY dual keyboard skills. What I'm trying to say is: wait a few more years and you'll probably be far away from being forced to use QWERTY like you are now.

At the end of the day, I mainly only use my devices (really only my desktop), and that's got Colemak! The comfort is stupidly higher in typing compared to QWERTY, so it's worth it in my mind. If it's not for you, don't use it, and maybe pick it up again when you're in a better position to give it a shot without having to use as many public computers. You've kind of answered it yourself with 'and once I leave high school to go to college…I'll only be using my own device 99% of the time'!

It won't do this. Unless you're like, an author and have to type a ridiculous amount. Literally improving the speed at which you type won't help as you want to be typing quality, not quantity. Improving your typing comfort (massively with Colemak) may have a knock on effect of making it more pleasant to finish your typed work at a stretch though.

There is. It's MSKLC (Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator), written by Michael Kaplan. It's a front end for kbdutool, a command-line compiler that can do even more (like making the Caps a Backspace, should you want that).

More importantly for me, using PKL (Portable Keyboard Layout) and my variant PKL_eD, you can modify layouts much simpler and get stuff like Extend. It's what I use. But Sotolf knows that.

Colemak-CAW[eD]-Extend, all the way. A little faster, a good deal more comfy, a lot more fun! ^_^

That's a lot of mods rolled into one:
C – Curl(DH)
A – Angle
W – Wide
[eD] – Edition DreymaR AltGr mappings and dead keys
Extend – absolutely awesome Fn-type extra layers

Then, Sotolf, you haven't messed around with Linux the way I've messed around with Linux! I once (or was it twice?) managed to brick a Linux install by fiddling with xkb! Good times...

Check out the PKL repo by the way. Developments are happening there these days. So far it's been small steps, but I'm about to make a bit of a revolution. Yay!

Thanks for the big compliment, by the way! And, oh: Your favourite things about the layout are Colemak itself and Extend. There, I even answered that for you. :-p

It's nice to see that you too like the dead keys in Colemak[eD]. I haven't gotten much feedback on them, but I like them myself as they aren't too hard to remember and quite well integrated. I mean, they're only on AltGr+symbol keys so they don't ruin the letter block, and their release symbols can usually also be found on their usual Shift+<key> position so you don't have to do a song-and-dance when coding.

I really like the diaeresis and acute positions, and those two are by far the most important ones – to me at least. Together with ß on AltGr+s, I find typing German quite comfy. Ohne beschränkter Geschwindigkeit! (The only problem seems to be a too poor C position? Ah well, can't have all.)

Is Extend working for Mac then, juice43?