Hi, I am wubi typist using a hardware Colemak keyboard, here are my suggestions.

The wubi input method divides alphabet keys into 5 regions by the first stroke (一丨丿丶乙), which can be considered redardless of any keyboard layout.
So you can just assume that character roots are bound on the position of keys but not alphabets.
But the IMEs bounds them to alphabet keys, under some circumstances tweaks are needed to type English and Chinese smoothly.

For windows, Colemak can be installed as a standalone IME, everything works well as you switch between them.
Linux and macOS's layout are kept when you switch from Colemak to wubi, and then breaks your Chinese input. As a result, you must switch back to QWERTY first before switching to wubi. That's awful.

This condition can be considered equal to using a hardware Colemak keyboard if you delete QWERTY layout from input method list.
For solution, RIME input method ( http://rime.im/ ) is recommended, which is highly configurable so that you can easily tweak key mappings to solve the problem.
You can checkout my RIME config for wubi86: https://gist.github.com/EmingK/38e6728b … fa3ff12b33
The config translate keys back to QWERTY alphabets for query the encoding table, and echos character roots for visual consistency.

Hope my post can help you.

It should be if only talking about "cool".

As a character shape-based input method, one must know how to write it before typing the character out. Wubi xing also requires your memorization of ~200 character components mapped on different keys, leading to a steep learning curve.
For phonetic input methods, one only needs to know pronounciations, which can be much easier.
As a result, many people can't write some complex characters while being able to type it.
That's the cool point. You can write them w/o computers or keyboards ^_^
(All shape-based methods have this advantage. But Cangjie cannot encode phrases, Zhengma has longer average code length, Boshiami has looooots of character components and high code duplication. Wubi is the best :D)

For input efficency, wubi can encode most characters and phrases in no more than 4 alphabets with extremely low duplication rate, winning Pinyin in both code length and duplication rate (the code length also wins other shape-based methods). However, modern phonetic input methods have the ability to form phrases and sentences w/ consecutive input, eliminating the effect of code duplication.
So the most effecient method should be Shuangpin (双拼) imo. It only needs 2 alphabets to encode a character's pronounciation and easy to learn, the speed can also be boosted with the sentence-making ability.

Well, it's a lot easier when you have an IME that can form words for you Chinese and Japanese grammar is completely different, and I kind of doubt it that wuxi has easy support for kana, since they aren't really used in chinese.

Asian languages share most characters, while there are also something differs. Input methods designed for a specific language may not suitable for other language's characters.
For example, Wubi is designed for Simplified Chinese, which is used in mainland China. So it's hard to input some Traditional Chinese's characters, because some character components only existed in Traditioinal Chinese was not taken into account when Wubi was designed.
In comparison, Cangjie is more generalized to handle most CJK characters, you may be interested in it.

Regarding Japanese, it also has some Kanji that don't exist in Chinese, it has simplified some traditional characters, but they are simplified differently from simplified chinese characters.

I think at least in south korea there aren't many people that are using hanja much when they are typing, since most is only hangeul, but they have an interesting standard layout with all the vowels on one side, and consonants on the other.

They also have some very interesting steno keyboards :D<br>

Hehe, vietnames has such a beautifully ugly writing system, I'm kind of asking myself it it's really better than the chinese characters that they used before :p but it might make a lot more sense when you get it :)

Yeah, looking back at the japanese, they are really having one of the most convoluted wrting system that I've ever seen, with up to 20 readings pro ideogram, Some times they take the reading of the chinese sign and use that, others they take the meaning and use that instead, and it isn't helped that many of the signs are imported more than one time, with readings from other chinese dialects, or just from another epoch, and not even that system is not something that they have really manage to make many changes to.

So I guess an armed revolution is the only way? :p

You could have even more fun with retroflexation, oo, yeah, ipa is fun ;)

å æ:ɾən ka:ɲ dæ dri:v me?

Yeah, no sure, do you know if there are many languages apart from the nordic ones and some indian languages that have retroflexiation of consonants? I don't know, but it has kind of been jumping around in my head the last weeks :p

Hehe, yeah, come to think of it I read that page already, before I drowned in a couple of hours of reading different articles there, those damned blue links :p