I also heavily use Caps Lock in programming, that's why I edited my Colemak layout file to put Caps Lock and Backspace back to their original positions.

I really think it would be better if computer systems made it easy to select letter/symbol layouts independently of modifier/control layouts. That way, you could choose to use even the Dvorak layout with the Colemak Backspace.

If you are using AutoHotkey like me, you can use a nice trick to automatically switch Colemak on and off:

Map the Backspace key to suspend the script, essentially switching to qwerty, in addition to generating a backspace character.
Map CapsLock to unsuspend it, i.e. let it restart colemak (as well as generating the ordinary colemak-backspace, of course).
It looks like this:

$Backspace::
suspend on
send {Backspace}
return

$Capslock::
suspend off
send {Backspace}
return

This makes the QWERTY-users automatically turn Colemak off when they delete their first letters of gibberish. They probably won't even notice that Colemak was on. A Colemak user will turn Colemak back on the same way.

It works nicely as long as the QWERTY-user don't try to use CapsLock - they would restart Colemak. You could use another more exotic key-combination to restart Colemak, but I find the symmetry appealing.

There are of course cases when this doesn't work, but it has saved me from having to 'fix it' a lot of times.

BTW I press shift+CapsLock to lock the caps. A bit harder to reach, but not much.

Heh. Will it put the computer in CapsLock mode though? I mean, does the user have to turn off CapsLock afterwards?

With this, you could also use the CapsLock light as a "Colemak ON" light! Anyone informed could determine the active layout at a glance.