Sounds interesting. One more good point that there is no need for a new keycaps in Colevrak kits of custom keycaps sets because of this change, Q keeps the top row, ; in the middle row is available in qwerty, and ' in the top row is available in Dvorak.

For ease of reference, some of us on the Colemak Discord have started calling this mod Colemaq since that makes it easy to combine it with other mods such as Colemaq-DH (which I personally use).

I think both the effort of the keys involved and the frequencies of the symbols are hard to assess and there can be no universal solution.

On the right pinky I prefer the keys in this order (nomenclature after ISO/IEC 9995): C11, B11, C12, D12 and D11. Maybe that’s because I’m a lazy typer and don’t let my hands float. D11 requires a hand movement instead of just the finger movement that’s sufficient for the other keys.

The frequencies of the symbols can vary dramatically between different people. For instance, outside of coding I never use ' or ". And coding covers a multitude of very different languages. There is no common ground as far as most non-alphanumerics are concerned.

That would be oO, /?, '", [{ and ;: in standard Colemak nomenclature.

I manually enter typographically correct quotation marks and apostrophe. Sure, nearly all typists don’t do that. They have no easy access to these characters. I thought we were different.

Maybe I am a robot. I do tend to fail at CAPTCHAs.

It would work out for me in that case. But I don’t use Colemak, anyway. I was just giving general thoughts on your idea. I’m using my own dvorakoid layout and have letters on all those keys. Being terribly right-handed I took some load from the left hand and put it on the right one. I’m not using a wide mod and left shift is my main shift key. It’s used for 70 to 80 percent of the uppercase letters.

Or...? Is my first proposal (QU > SC / MN > SL > EQ) silly in that it gives Backslash a better position than Slash? On ANSI boards the argument for not involving Backslash is that it's on its own fat key so it's just as well to leave it alone there. However, on ISO and matrix boards one should take advantage of the fact that Slash/Question is a lot more common.

So let's include BS in the loop then:

QU > SC
MN > SL > BS > EQ

Using vanilla Colemak, on an ortho board:

6   7   8   9   0   =   \
j   l   u   y   '   [   ]
h   n   e   i   o   ;   /
k   m   ,   .   -   _____

With the Wide(ISO) mod, on a staggered board:

  \   7   8   9   0   =
[   j   l   u   y   '   -
 ]   h   n   e   i   o   ;
   /   k   m   ,   .   _____

I don't know, better? Looks better. And as a side effect it puts Slash in the same position it has in the Wide-ANSI mod.

I'm still not convinced I'll bother doing this at all though...  ¯\(º_o)/¯

On the other hand, this got me thinking that maybe I should try out just the first cycle! The very simple QU <> SC swap will take care of the most pressing business of the common quote versus the less common semicolon, and that may be enough for even the enthusiastic modders that dare to touch their symbol key placements. It has the further advantage of keeping everything quite close to both standard QWERTY and standard Colemak and like the DH mod it changes no fingering so at the moment I'm thinking it looks rather good...?