I am switching from Qwerty to Colemak and I need a phonetic Russian Colemak with a short a learning curve from phonetic Russian Qwerty (which I have been using for 15 years or so).

Here is phonetic Russian Qwerty that ships in macOS for reference:

I don't approve of some of the design choices of Rulemak, so I'd like to suggest a layout which attempts to match (where logical & convenient) the layout of phonetic Russian Qwerty:

Benefits:

– 18 letters match Colemak phonetically:

Ф, П, Г, Л, У
А, Р, С, Т, Д, Е, И, О
З, В, Б, К, М

– 9 letters without English character equivalents remain in the same positions as phonetic Russian Qwerty:

Щ, Ъ
Я, Ш, Ю, Э
Ч
Х, Ц

You could argue that Х and Ч should be swapped, but I'm deferring to standard phonetic Russian here by leaving X on the Qwerty X key and Ч on the Colemak/Qwerty H key.

– The soft sign Ь has been moved off the minus key to the upper row (on the ] key). This character is on the end of most verbs in their infinitive form and here it requires less vertical hand movement than in phonetic Russian Qwerty. It's also helpful to have access to the dash symbol for words like по-русски, по-моему, etc.

– The Colemak Y key is Й, which makes a lot more sense than putting it on J (standard phonetic Russian & Rulemak). Й is Y: Йода (Yoda), йога (yoga), бой (boy), etc.

– The Colemak J key has Ж. The J sound in Russian is represented by two characters (ДЖ). John is Джон. Д is already in place on the Colemak D key, so Ж should be on J.

– The vowel Ы doesn't exist in English. It fits in neatly on the end of the home row in a sequence of other vowels (Е, И, О). Its convenient placement is appropriate given its use in the words for you (ты or Вы) and we (мы). It's also Russian's default plural marker. Luckily the ' character is not used in Russian and the Russian quotation characters (« ») replace < and > on the comma and period keys.

– The Colemak colon key (Qwerty P) is retained (even if it looks sort of out of place). Colon is used in Russian, and it's not the most comfortable key to hit from the home position (for me), so I'm happy to keep consistent punctuation here.

– Like standard phonetic Russian, Ё is only accessible via option-е. Ё is often rendered as simply Е by lazy Russian typists because almost all words make sense from context without the extra umlaut. The standard iPhone Russian keyboard hides Ё behind Е too.

I'm already typing reasonably well with this layout. I'm happy to share my macOS keyboard layout file, and I'd welcome feedback!