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That sent me right down the uncanny valley I tell you

tl;dr: Vanilla Colemak isn't obsolete, the angle mod isn't perfect for everyone - and both vanilla and DH are amazing layouts and you should find what you like

So I went back to vanilla Colemak after some thinking. I've been on DH for two months, got my 101 WPM peak on it so I'm not inexperienced with it. I think it works well for some people but after this time coming back to vanilla just feels right to me. Here's my two cents:

I couldn't ever get used to the angle mod properly. Without the angle mod I feel comfortable 'cheating' and just using my left index finger to press the 'C' key, and the 'correct' fingers for Z and X. With the angle mod, ZXC seem awkward to press to me. I'm typing on an ISO keyboard, maybe it's because I'm just not left-handed or something. After two months there was still a mental resistance, a feeling of awkwardness when pressing them. It could've been that I was too used to how QWERTY didn't have this mod, but I've managed to shake off everything else about QWERTY when learning Colemak in the first place.The position of C just really didn't settle well with me at all, and I'd always feel awkward pressing it, almost like it would go on to ruin the rest of the typing experience. The angle I'd have to change in my wrist messed up the rest of my touch-typing muscle memory or something. Back on vanilla, I feel like I 'own' my keyboard and the typing experience while something did feel foreign to me on DH.

I want to say contrary to the models I've read online about how DH makes pressing 'D' and 'H' easier, after having used DH I think they're of equal difficulty. It might be just the way my hands naturally approach the keyboard, but coming back to vanilla the 'HE' bigram feels great on vanilla whereas it doesn't feel as great anymore on DH. I remember that this bigram was what sold me on DH in the first place, but now it feels better on vanilla for some reason - I think I didn't like the repetitive aspect of the 'HE' bigram on DH while on vanilla it feels right to me. The extension that you make while pressing the 'H' on vanilla is more comfortable than the curl you need to make or something at a guess. I know the opposite is true for many people and that's why they switch to DH, but that's working in reverse for me here.

I know what I've typed above might get me into some trouble - I'm simply sharing what works best for me as my experience. Many people have an awesome time with DH and think it totally improves on the vanilla experience. I remember a bunch of people sharing their thoughts on the angle mod and how it made typing loads better for them in the Discord server. To these people it works really well! In my case though I never fully got used to it, but I'm really glad I tried it out as now I know what layout I'm going to type on for the foreseeable future. Apparently I'm a 'Colemak pioneer' in the sense I'm one of the first people to use DH and then go back to vanilla.

One final note on this really long post for anyone new to Colemak. I remember when I was starting to learn the layout I felt worried as other people were talking about DH was a 'better' layout than vanilla, almost as if I was wasting my time learning vanilla and I should just skip that and go to DH. The real answer is that it's better for some people. You're better off starting with vanilla (as it's easier to learn when transitioning from QWERTY) then giving DH a solid go for a week or two to see if you like it after you've really nailed vanilla. If I'd have started with DH, well I'd have probably stuck with it to be honest (QWERTY is awful) but it wouldn't have been the perfect experience to me as I think vanilla is.

I have some sympathy with this. When I first discovered the angle mod, I rejected it for much the same reasons. I realized I had unknowingly been using index finger for C all along, which is very comfortable. Thus applying the angle mod would have moved C (the most common letter in the bottom-left corner) into a worse position, and would require learning a new finger for it. Meanwhile the fairly rare V would occupy the best spot (in default angle mod). Didn't seem an attractive proposition at all, so I stuck with using the "wrong" fingers instead for a while.

This would have remained a satisfactory alternative to the Angle Mod, were it not for the annoying default B position - the worst placed alpha key on the keyboard. In the end I think what makes the angle mod worthwhile - in its modified DH incarnation, is it solves the B issue, plus puts a frequent key (D) in that best spot. But I acknowledge, for people who use the index finger for C, like I used to, adopting the angle mod is hard.

What? Have you gone mad!? :P But seriously, this is the bit I most disagree with. I know there's a lot of subjectivity and YMMV etc, but I find it hard to imagine how the HE bigram in DH is not objectively improved from default Colemak. But then, I suppose I would say that.

On a side note: there would be nothing stopping you, for example, using a layout of left-hand vanilla Colemak, right-hand DH, which would give you improved HE (should you change your mind on that), but without needing to apply the angle mod. Or, you could apply the good old D>P>G switcheroo.

There's no reason why people shouldn't try default Colemak first. In fact, it's probably a good thing: I think there's some value to people "discovering" the HE bigram issue, to convince them of the need for DH first-hand. It's a pretty easy change from vanilla, so I don't really see it as much a waste of time if people didn't go straight to DH. The main annoyance with going vanilla first is probably the G, as you would have learned a new position for it, only for it to revert back to Qwerty.

AHHHHHH!!! But seriously... :)

I don't know - both now feel pretty good to me, although I do remember the DH bigram feeling better before having actually tried DH properly. After giving some time to use it properly, I don't object to either bigram by much and I don't really have a preference on closer thought. I thought the HE bigram was a pain after repeated use on loads of fast-paced typing tests (i.e not typical use) on both layouts. I didn't like the curl motion, but before I switched to DH I didn't like the stretch motion. Vanilla Colemak nostalgia was probably talking when I said I 'prefered' the stretching motion :). No preference?

I was going to say 'use DH without the angle mod' but that doesn't actually work haha... I'm a bit of a pragmatist and wouldn't want to fragment my keyboard to be even less standard than it already is (I know, I know). As a 'perfect' solution this would definitely be great however! Just like the 'H' on either layout, I'm realising I don't really mind the 'D' either... this isn't what you want to hear but it's what I think!

A lot of people really love DH and I can see why, I just never cracked the angle mod personally!

I do keep my wrists straight, for some reason I found I got evil contortions with the angle mod that I don't get without the mod. Pressing the 'Z' feels nasty with my pinky on the angle mod where it feels fine without it - I have to contort my wrists with the mod. What am I doing wrong?

I've actually never had serious discomfort while typing before getting into any of this funnily enough. I had to look that up and I can't say I've ever suffered (might do when I'm older)

Damn straight, compared to you legends over time I've come to accept I don't know anything about keyboard ergonomics! I can only really go by subjective experience without investing a lot of time into understanding a lot of the science, and subjectively both layouts feel pretty damn good to me. So basically, I'm trying to justify out loud why I'm going against the grain with poor reasoning ;)

I'm okay with you not minding D or H! I think that's fair enough. Claiming that the HE bigram is as good without DH as with sounds strange to me but I fully believe that vanilla works very well for you and that's fine isn't it.

You know, we gave the DH mod a good spin after SteveP invented it, even trying out different variants. The DH variants were both good I think, in very slightly different ways. At the end we settled for a slightly more involved and slightly better (I think!) variant, but one may feel that perfection is the enemy of good at times.

Your trouble with the Angle mod has soured the DH mod for you and I think we should all keep in mind that vanilla Colemak is a very good layout by (nearly) any workable standard! So I'm fine with your choice. I plan to support both vanilla and CAW Colemak in the foreseeable future, for similar reasons.

Now, regarding wrist angles: To keep your wrists straight (horizontally) and hit Z or X without an Angle mod, your hand has to float laterally. With an Angle mod, the pinky or ring finger curl down to hit Z and X. I'm guessing you find the hand float comfortable and the finger curl not. Again, fair enough. The big enemy is the classical way of thinking that the hands should be horizontally aligned with the home row, which will create an unergonomic ulnar deviation (now that you've looked it up, hehe!). For both hands, actually, but worst for the left hand since it'll easily have to increase its wrist angle to hit Z/X without floating the hand.

Hand float may alleviate a lot of potential layout trouble! With float, both the middle trench and the angle positions are no biggies anymore. But at least some of us feel that float should be an "icing on the cake" and not something to rely heavily on if the layout could be modified to demand less of it. But top-notch typists float all over the place anyway I think. So I don't know if there's an answer written in stone to this one.

Whoa, so to you this:

+=======+=======+=======+
| H     | N     | E     |
| Index |   •   | Middl |
+=======+=======+=======+

...is more comfortable than this:

        +=======+=======+
        | N     | E     |
        |   •   | Middl |
        +===+===+===+===+
            | H     |
            | Index |
            +=======+

I don't get that at all. The vanilla is a stretch over two keys for two neighbouring fingers. The DH position feels so very very smooth to me.

I also don't understand how the hand can move less to hit the vanilla Z position than the Angle one. Unless by that you mean the ANSI Angle-Z position, hehe! But you're on ISO so no. With Angle I can hit Z merely by curling the pinky so the hand movement is zero. To reach the vanilla Z position with the pinky without bending the wrist, my hand has to float down-and-in.

Yes, that's it! I just tried it again and I'm sticking to my guns. It doesn't make sense, but I honestly think that I prefer the stretch motion on vanilla to the curling motion on DH.

Correct, I'm on ISO. I've bolded the point about curling the finger as this is the exact motion I don't like in my fingers, it stresses my pinky slighly in an uncomfortable way and makes me tilt my wrist slightly too where I usually don't have to while typing. It's easier to make a bigger wrist movement (say pressing the left shift) than the slight motion that would be required not to have to curl my pinky to press the Z key. Slight motions aren't nice.

Even though you were joking you did actually get me to check haha

Do you know that I heard the same reasoning from some qwerty typists, saying that big movements in qwerty allow to increase accuracy, while slight motions in Colemak home row is prone to errors?

I tend to agree on that point at least. Large motions, by their nature, do not necessarily profit you anything - or at least, we have no reason to suppose that this seemingly intuitive notion reflects some universal reality.

We need only reason deductively to see how how necessarily true the claim is - if, by nature, large distances between letters are necessary for accuracy at high speed, then fast typing in a layout which does not create large distance between the letters will yield more errors for typists as they type at speed. As experience and tests so far show, Colemak typists are about as accurate as QWERTY typists when typing at similar speed. Therefore, the notion has not been demonstrated to be true universally and asserting it universally is not justified if this line of reasoning is sound.

One could advance the idea that this an inductive argument and is stronger in this form, but then you're arguing on more probabilistic grounds. To the best of my knowledge, the "spread" argument has never been tested specifically enough to say how much spread apparently contributes to accuracy, for whom it does so, and whether or not accuracy is more probable with or without it. Add that to the fact that it would only take one good counterexample to raise questions about the conclusions we may draw, and an inductive version of the spread argument begins to look very inconclusive so far. It would not be prudent to make positive probabilistic claims when nothing seems to support them yet.

I would even go so far as to say that it seems experience and practice are probably removing whatever advantage that greater distance provides inherently, if there is such an advantage in the first place.

I'd say they come in at about 40 degrees. I think it's more the curling motion vs the stretching motion that would make one more comfortable in the other. I think on the whole I'm willing to say that both placements of H are comparably comfortable to me, with no problems with the vanilla placement to the point where I'd want to change it that much. So then I'd factor in how I never got used to the angle mod, and vanilla seems the better option to me by that point.

This issue does seem to split people, some have no problem with the middle column G/H keys, others are strongly averse to them. That's fine, of course.

I don't think this is a very good argument:

For one, Dvorak's studies were done in the age of typewriters; I don't think the experience directly translates to modern computer keyboards. I think it's possible that the Qwerty C/M positions might be less good on a typewriter compared to a keyboard. Mind you, I haven't used a proper typewriter for about 30 years so who knows.

For two, for all his "more than in the history of mankind" studies, the layout he came up with is still less good (in my opinion at least, but lots of others as well) than even vanilla Colemak. Don't get me wrong, he deserves credit for trying to improve on Qwerty and the DSK layout is obviously a huge improvement, but it nonetheless has sufficient flaws that I don't think you can accept his findings uncritically.

Well, remember in Qwerty, the right-hand home row is H J K L ;  - there is very little opportunity for awkward bigrams involving those keys. People might complain about HI or HO, but then Qwerty is terrible in so many respects that I think such problems go unnoticed, lost in the noise of all the other things that are wrong with it.