I find it to be so, but I think you'll have to give it time before you come to a conclusion. Your Dvorak is fast, so switching to Colemak will be annoying for you. Unless you have patience with this project, it may very well fail.

Dvorak is a good layout so you won't get any major direct typing advantages from Colemak in all likelihood. It's just the QWERTY-compliance issue. It may become too annoying for you to use a layout you're not accustomed to, which isn't really easy to learn (it's easier than Dvorak to learn... for a QWERTY user - but I switched from Dvorak to Colemak and had some trouble before things stabilized) and which gives no apparent advantages for quite a while. Not trying to put you off the idea, but just don't expect too much too fast. That way, you'll be pleasantly surprised instead of unpleasantly!  :)

I just switched to the standard Colemak from the Norwegian one, and the one thing that I find annoying with that is the dash. I wonder where it could be better placed? Maybe it should get the place next to the period; that's where my old layout had it and I never found that frustrating. Question marks and forward slashes should be rarer than dash/minus I think.

Anyone remember a good link to the frequencies of punctuation?

The only thing I did change with my new Colemak was to put the Norwegian characters in more logical AltGr places. And swap the colon and semicolon. Maybe someone who codes C all day would want the semicolon to be better placed than the colon, but the rest of us shouldn't have to suffer. I greatly enjoy the colon's easy placement in Vim (commands), entering time points (HH:MM) and in everyday language.

Well, I tried writing some code today in Colemak at work, since I was getting sufficiently practiced with it that it was displacing Dvorak from my default mental layout. I discovered I really hate having dash and equals up in the corner, since -> and => are fairly common digraphs. Although braces and brackets are also common, they tend to be used in conjunction with parentheses or numbers, so they don't pose as much of a problem as jumping over two rows.

If it were entirely up to me, I'd move the quote down to where slash is, and move the other characters (dash, slash, equals, and the brackets) to their Dvorak positions. But while this is a tweak I'm perfectly capable of making, it means a rougher time switching to/from Qwerty on other machines, and it also means that anywhere offering standard Colemak is not nearly as useful. Whereas using an unmodified Dvorak means that there's a pretty good chance of being able to get "my" keyboard on "foreign" machines.

The most painful parts of learning were R-S and S-E. After I got R-S sorted out and passed 20 wpm, I'd often get an S when I meant E. I think that's because E is the same finger on both Qwerty and Dvorak, but switches hands (but not finger) for Colemak. That was something I didn't have time to overcome. Another same-finger-opposite-hand problem child was K.

There is only one more experiment left for me to do. Once my fingers get Dvorak solidly back into them, I want to test my speed again, and see if the different feel of Colemak limbered me up any. At the moment, I get mostly-Dvorak if I'm typing as fast as possible, and half-Colemak if I think in the least about where the letters are.

Most of the time I use alternative fingering for -=[] keys (I place middle and ring figers on the pair '-=' or '[]') surprisingly it is so easy I have no placing errors. However if changing something to get the minus sign more suitable placed I think of one key upper ' lower - next to the Enter. Where the key next to = would be upper _ lower " Still the latest is used widely in programming but it doesn't go with obvious awkward pair.

What do you think?

The only disadvantage of this (which is advantage of classic colemak) is that it require programmatic layout translation, hardware key swap on some keyboard will not work for that.

Yeah, I am aware... but my imagination drives simple solution to all this issues. I think of creating pen drive USB transcoder of keyboard layout, but I do not know if I would be able to home made it as small as I expect. Another option which I just investigate is bluetooth transcoder - I spot bluetooth keyboard from logitech and I just wonder if It is possible to transcode the keyboard layout via some java applet on my mobile phone.

Does anyone investigeated options to get "hardware" colemak keyboard chiply? I do not mean key caps only.