Or you could try Dvorak, the "ou" bigram on Dvorak is very fast and comfortable. Another option is to try Imak which a has very fast "you" with almost the same alternation as dvorak but with lower same finger ratio as colemak and balanced between the right and the left hand. However, Imak is still under testing and if you are interested to try it out with no guarantee except that you should be able to type  60+ WPM, then tell me.

Indeed, thoughts, you & your are very comfortable on Dvorak. Thanks for recommending me Dvorak nimbostratue. Been practising for 3 weeks now & can average 65wpm and miraculously, no pain on the right pinky! very comfortable.

Thanks so much nimbostratue, but please don't take this the wrong way. I think I'm just going to stay with Dvorak 'cause I can't mentally handle it haha. I've been putting my brain through too much misery the past two months. Have already switched three layouts from Colemak to Workman and now to Dvorak. I wish I had the mentally to do it. Wow, the past three weeks was a gruelling experience. I kept on pressing keys all over the place from Qwerty, Colemak, and Workman when practising. But all in all, I'm glad I switched to Dvorak.

nimbostratue that layout actually looks very nice, good job :)

I have tried over 10 to 12 layouts and believe it or not, you can reach almost 50 WPM in just 1 week if you practice properly and concentrated on the common bigrams and common 1000 word.

Indeed it will be mentally touch to maintain two layouts especially during the first few weeks, and it would be even harder to learn two layouts at the same time, as I did, since you do not have enough muscle memory to remember each layout and it will take several hours to retain back your speed. In the beginning, I wanted to find a layout that allows me to type comfortably above 60WPM and I initially started to learn dvorak but after two days I switched to colemak, which was problematic to my right hand and actually to my keyborad, as it worn my 'K' and 'L' keys which correspond to 'e' and 'i' on Colemak. Now I really see no point of learning any additional layout beyond dvorak, since it is comfrotable to type with at a speed above 60 WPM, but because I have already designed Imak before trying dvorak, I am going to try it out, and I think you should be content with dvorak.

Thank you pafakata90 I think this layout will add around 10WPM speed to dvorak and it will still be comfortable as dvorak, and for sure it will be faster than colemak because I reached with a similar layout 66WPM in 14 days, and I think I took one race from you on typeracer but you won the rest :).

If you are a programmer then you will probably program on your computer and it is very easy to run a autohotkey script to remap the symbols again to their original location on QWERTY, but let me tell you another thing:  I used to feel more comfortable on QWERTY to reach = and - than to reach []. The reason is that I go for  0, -,=, and backspace with my ring finger, which has a natural reach to these keys and much faster than the pinky and you do not need to move your hand, just open it with a slight rotation.

About the layout that you are going to try I guess an algorithm generated this layout based on distance metric but it did not take into consideration the physiology of the hand, so I am not sure if you should give it a try while you have dvorak out there that has been tested over the years. Also for programming, I do not think QWERTY is good either because if you notice that the left hand has always to hit the shift key which can make your wrist suffer, so the best thing is to design a separate layout and spread the symbols between the left and the right hand. Also it would even be better to replace the tab key with a shift and go for it using the ring finger of your left hand. I have actually designed a programming version of Imak and I called it Imak Pro, but I have not used it since I has changed Imak layout drastically later and was concentrating on getting the layout to be comfortable typing regular text.

I tried swapping numbers and symbols back when I started learning Colemak. I was pretty frustrated and switched back within a day or so, so I don't think I gave it a fair chance, but it did turn out that I use the numbers more than I had anticipated. I might try it again someday, though.

Yes I am. Typing is actually fun now.
:]

I like the look of Imak, it looks familiar for some reason.  What's the rational with the <, >. positions?

The reasons are:

1- during the last 5 months I was analyzing text from famous books (http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top) using this tool http://www.codesharp.co.uk/dvorak/   and in every case the probability of having "e," is much higher than having any other key combined with "," and of course the probability of having "e." turned out to be much much less. So by placing "." under "e" this would decrease the same finger ratio.

2- increasing alternation because each time you type "." , "," or ";" you have to follow it by hitting the spacebar with the same right hand. This of course applies for right handed users, who are the majority by far.

3- On QWERTY and   due to the fact that the left hand is slightly below the right hand, since usually we hit the spacebar with the right, it turned out after testing that if I replaced 'V' with a key of the weight of 'F' ,for example, the left index start to suffer from the downward pull, and it took me weeks to recover from this tension. So I am limited with the keys that I can replace V and B with. However on the right hand there is no problem and no body have experienced problem with going to N or M

4- I was testing a mirrored version of Imak which I will show below, and I was really convinced that the 'L' and the 'D' positions should be swapped since first the "E" key is faster than the "G", which requires some stretching of the index finer (Referring to QWERTY for E and G). I have proved this, at lest, for me by typing simple compos
"ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed ed"
"fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg fg"

Also "L" is compined with a lot of words and it that position it decrease the jumping ration between 2 rows a lot, so make Imak like this has help me to put 'L' in the optimal position.

5- the last reason is that ',' is more common than '.' and the C position is faster than X on QWERTY, and i feel it requires slightly less wrist flex

Below is the Id of the mirrod Imak that I was testing and I reached a speed higher than dvorak for almost the same amount of training while trying to maintain dvorak, but actully to advance I had to stop dvoraking for three days and then after that it took me a day and a half to go back to my original speed on dvorak. Now I sopped the mirrored Imak and I dvanced on Dvorak to a max of 70 WPM on typeracer and 63 WPM for 5 minutes on high games, which actually took me less time than colemak and less training and I still mix some Imak with dvorak which slows me down.

load the ID:
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,36,44,37,16,46,35,24,23,21,32,25,26,27,28,18,30,47,19,31,20,22,29,17,34,39,40,41,42,33,48,45,43,15,38,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60

into http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

this mirrored version of Imak that I was testing has all the time lower finger ratio than Colemak, lower multiple row jumps but slightly less alternation than the final version of Imak.

Note: Non of the layouts that I have designed have caused me wrist pain, which seems to prove my theory, but there is something else  which I will discuss later (maybe tomorrow).

first we must agree on what a roll is: According to my definition of a roll, it is a sequence of three letters typed with the same hand either in inward or outward manner but not both. So a bigram "ou" is not a roll for me :) and taking this definition into account if I compared Imak to Colemak I do not see much rolls on Colemak. On the right hand side of Colemak I see "ion" and "oin" . "oin" is a roll, but it is not that common. On the other hand, I do not consider "ion" and "you" as a roll, and I actually consider them to be a devastating compos on the right hand. For, example type " ion ion ion ion ion ion ion ion ion ion ion ion ion"
then revers i with o, and type
"oin oin oin oin oin oin oin oin oin oin oin..."
and see how oin feels much better.

The point is that while an outward roll could be easy on most of the fingers, it is actually feels really bad on the pinky especially if it is combined with an inward roll like the case of "ion". During the last month of training on Colemak, I had to stop typing some days because of pain in the bone of my small right hand pink, and the damage was not only happening to my hand but also to my keyboard (maybe later I post an image of the wear). Now if we go to the right hand, I can see ars and rst on colemak, and the only words I typed containing ars were years and hears, that is not to say there are not may words that contain this roll, but unfortunately I have not met them.
So, according to my definition, I find no rolls at all on dvorak and QWERTY, correct me if I am wrong :). Anyway, Imak is still in the testing procedure, and it would be nice if all of us cooperate to produce a nice comfortable alternating layout similar to dvorak, but balanced has low finger ration, and eliminate the problem of 'SL', which I do not find much problem BTW.

No, actually I have not thought of this. Good idea and when doing something I rather to do it well rather than confirm to the standards :). Unfortunately, I will not be able to test the layout this week cuz I ruptured my ear drum from slamming into the water hard, So I have no desire to do anything now until I recover.

While teaching classical touch typing, they teach people to hit the spacebar with their right hand thumb, whether they are right handed or left hand, but of course if you did not learn touch typing at school then you might hit keys with alternative fingers as I do, and even if you learn proper touch typing, you might have deviated at some ponit. So, I think the majority of people hit the spacebar with their right hand and I remember I observed some of my classmates and saw that they were doing that, but I have not done any statistics about it. However, if you want statistics here is some which suggest that 10 percent of the world population is left handed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-Handed
http://askville.amazon.com/percentage-p … Id=2705822

But the interesting thing here ,erw, is that I have already asked 3 people before you who are typing on colemak and they told me that they do not feel any  problem in their right hand, and 2 of them hit the spacebar with their left hand and the other hovers his right hand. One of the people I asked is a friend of mine   https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1046  , and I remember I told him that this is the reason that he do not feel much discomfort in his right hand. and I told Jin here https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=1123   about some of the solution for colemak problem, which include hitting the spacebar with the left hand. So, a simple change of hitting the spacebar with the left hand would change the typing pattern of the hand. Actually, this is part of the problem that I said I will discuss tomorrow after I prepare some figures to illustrate the problem that I have faced while designing the several versions of Imak, so hopefully tomorrow I will make it clear.

About the rolls, i was aware of some of the ones that have you mentioned on the right hand but i did not want to list all of them, but indeed some of them are quite common like rst, which I have mentioned, and some of them are not. Anyway, in principle Colemak should have more rolls than Imak since Imak is an alternation layout, but Imak has a handful as well :).

I am left handed and press spacebar with left hand. Colemak is still use the right hand more (52%) so you should use left pinky to backspace to balace two hands' work.