The semicolon simply isn't Colemak's job! The moment the Colemak starts to concern itself with the placements of all kinds of rare symbols I think it will fragment into fractions. As it is, Colemak has focus on letters and the design is primarily concerned with leaving rare letters alone for ease of learning. If even rarer symbols were to be moved around, not only would it go against the grain of a main design principle but it would lead to differences of opinions over matters that are very hard to prove and very easy to feel differently about.

Also, different countries already have the symbols in different places. It's a right mess, it is. I'm going to start changing some of mine (Norwegian) because I think the Norwegian QWERTY has done a series of blunders with the placements of symbols, but I'm keeping that my own personal project.

Semicolons are fine for most people who have a refined outlook on language; I, for one, would not be without them! Just as interesting in this day and age is their use in logic languages. One of the problems with the Norwegian QWERTY is that it has put some symbols that are easily accessible on the US keyboard (most notably the caret, grave and tilde) in very hard-to-reach places which hurts coding.

So I suggest that anyone with an opinion on symbols make their own variant, but leave it all out of the main Colemak definition. In the *nix world this is very elegantly possible since you can stack definitions so that the Colemak remapping is followed by a further variant remapping and it all acts together as one; in the other systems you'll have to learn a remapping program to do it but at least MSKLC is free and easy to use (imho) and I suppose it isn't any harder on the Mac.

I second DreymaR's opinion. Let Colemak concern itself with letter placement, and let people to their own, personal maps for whatever they like. A stronger focus will better further its cause.

Ah, true. Simonh is right: The semicolon was too prominently placed. It obviously had to go from there. I just forgot since I don't have a semicolon there.

Now, your statement that Colemak users rarely surpass their QWERTY speeds sounds strange to me. Do you have statistics on this over a period of at least one year? I think not. I know that I have surpassed my QWERTY speed just fine, and we hear of others all the time - but also of people who hit 'bumps' and are frustrated for a while before gaining some more speed. Are you saying that Dvorak users just progress steadily into the sky? That wasn't my own experience with Dvorak at all.

But as I said, feel free to experiment with punctuation placement to your heart's content. I don't personally think that it will affect your speed greatly since punctuation is rare, but maybe it will feel better to you which is an important enough factor. I'm going to move the < and > on my own keyboard because they're now on a single key and I cannot remember which of them is the shifted one. I want to move them to the parenthesis keys so they're more logically placed for me, even if it means hitting AltGr and Shift to get them. I know this will not help my speed at all, but it will remove a source of frustration which will allow me to focus better on what I'm doing. Maybe that can actually help speed just a little, but more importantly it will help comfort.

Ah, sorry if I'm a sourpuss. I didn't read your statement to mean that you regarded the non-surpassing a speculation, but the reason you stated. Maybe I misread it a bit.

I've noted too, that lately there's been a stream of these complaints. A little ago there wasn't as many that I can remember, so I'm wondering whether it's a flavour-of-the-month or what. I don't think it's enough to base much speculation on at any rate.