It might be that once you have completed the whole transition process, some of these problems might go away. So far you are at Tarmak 2, which is a good start, but there is still some way to go. Obviously I can't account for your specific issue with your left hand, but I remember from my own switching experience that I experienced some temporary pain in new places, as my fingers adjusted to the new patterns. The overall benefit in comfort of typing fluently with Colemak might relieve some of your symptoms in due course perhaps?

Arguably the Qwerty E key is undervalued in Colemak as F is fairly rare and for most people that key is quite comfortable, so if anything Colemak is probably already a good fit for you. Some people suggest a C-F switch as it doesn't affect same-finger bigrams, but not sure if that would help in your case. Larger switches that change bigrams are usually advised against.

I guess I'd be inclined to advise persevering with default Colemak (or DH) and only making further changes if you are still having problems.

Maybe you could use SteveP's optimizer to try and find something sweeter for your individual tastes, or maybe the BEAKL guy could cook something up? But it's a tricky track to make a layout, you easily overlook something and/or have to make concessions.

What I can chime in with is that apart from lower row usage I hardly feel that my middle left hand finger is moving up and down! This is because using the DH mod I rest it naturally in the crack between the home and upper row of my keyboard. So maybe if you use a NumPad (e.g., with Extend) for numbers and some kind of trick for the lower row then you won't really have to move that finger?!

The simplest lower-row trick would be to fill in for the middle finger with the ring and index fingers as applicable – or even the thumb. I don't think that'd hurt your typing much all in all. Which one to use would depend on the n-grams, that is what you come from and what comes after.

Another trick to moving the finger less would be to move the hand instead. If you type with the slightest hover or even just a possibility of lift-off, combined with a between-keys resting position as above, it's easy to float the left hand slightly up and down instead of curling the middle finger. Probably not quite as fast but that shouldn't be your top priority. I'm thinking that this would mainly apply to upper/home row transitions, but who knows – if it works well for you you might float all the way down to the lower row too?

For the record, total left middle finger use, by percentage of average English text (not the main thing I'm optimising for, but interesting):

QWERTY with middle finger X (my old keyboard as I used it): 12.10 + 3.87 + 0.19 = 16.16
QWERTY with middle finger C (my new ortholinear keyboard): 12.10 + 3.87 + 3.16 = 19.13
Regular Colemak (ortholinear keyboard): 2.18 + 6.73 + 3.16 = 12.07
Regular Colemak except C moved to thumb: 2.18 + 6.73 = 8.91
Colemak with C moved to thumb and F / Q swap: 0.1 + 6.73 = 6.83

Source: http://practicalcryptography.com/crypta … equencies/

Well, almost a year later to the day, I've just switched over my keyboard to swap F and Q (so F is now in the Q position of both QWERTY and Colemak).  It feels nice so far, and not too tricky to change!  Time will tell of course.

As I mentioned in the old posts above, I've been typing since the start with Colemak with the C key moved to the Ergodox key on the very bottom row, below the letter keys -- the one that's closest to my left thumb (which is not one of the nominal "thumb keys").  That's gone well too for me.

I'd also been thinking of trying Colemak DH recently, but apart from that really not being part of any other rational goal for me other than just geeking out, I think on an ortholinear keyboard like the Ergodox, the placement of M and V isn't so appealing.

Oh I didn't know about DHm, damn it you're tempting me again.