That being so, I'm sure the design of Colemak was intended for those familiar with Qwerty.  And the whole swap less keys than Dvorak thing was a good short cut to better home row optimisation that preserved some short cuts.

Without the layout creator detailing their methodology you don't actually know if Colemak was optimised using modern equipment.  For all we know Shai just tried different layouts and took the one that felt best.

The layout has certainly got its roots steeped in Qwerty.  For richer or poorer.

If Shai is reading this thread, then I'd love to hear about the voyage of discovery.  Or even a little paragraph detailing the whys and hows of its beginnings.  I read that the layout  originally won a competition, what was this, what was the inspiration?

Others have said that the evolution and description can be found in scattered posts in the forum, that is hard to piece together without lots of reading.  A summary would be nice.

I'd suggest green for improvement and blue for conservation. More intuitive I think.

The home row thing is actually mentioned on Shai's pages, namely the 'Fun page' where a text passage purely written on the Colemak home row is quoted. That wouldn't be easy on QWERTY!

If you list advantages, the hotkeys are such an advantage and should be listed. I'm technically oriented and I like the ZXCVBQW consistency. Furthermore, using my Extend mappings nothing is broken really unless it's one of those games where you can't remap stuff; those will cost me a press of Ctrl+Shift+` before I start playing.

I think you're wrong about the language analogy: Yes, people do indeed mix their Spanish or Russian into their English and speak with heavy accents! Not sure why you haven't seen that happen. As for QWERTZ vs QWERTY, both of them are pointless and used by people who don't care about layouts so it's bound to be frustrating. Colemak and QWERTY aren't exactly similar although not as extremely different as for instance Dvorak is, but I think that's an advantage since it makes it easier to switch back and forth than the dvorak layout did. So my "evidence" albeit single-person beats your conjecture I believe. ;)

I agree on mentioning the rolls. It's often mentioned that Colemak has less hand alternation and the rolls are a compensation for that (unless you hate rolls and love alternation for some reason).

There's a point in here. The advocacy has to address two distinct audiences: Those who didn't know alternative layouts existed and may be convinced that they can be beneficial, and those who are into layout switching but need to choose between dvorak and Colemak and the plethora of alternatives available.

For the former, any and all benefits of Colemak over QWERTY are important.

For the latter, a comparison of Colemak to dvorak and others is relevant.

I think the front page should address both, but those who are already hooked on switching will be more motivated to follow a link to more info so the detailed comparisons should be elsewhere. That's how it is today, more or less, but it can be a bit tricky to navigate today's site map I think.

Going off on a tangent here I have to say it depends on the memory technique.

As someone who has learned how to memorize a shuffled pack of 52 playing cards backwards and forwards in 8 minutes, pi up to 250 digits and all the phone numbers of friends and family this isn't strictly true if you use the peg system coupled with the major memory system technique.

It involves pre-memorizing a journey in your head or places around a location you are very familiar with, you then convert the letters and numbers of the password/credit card number or whatever it is you wish to remember to objects performing actions using your imagination and then you attach the objects to the pre-memorized places in imaginative ways.

For example I will never forget my credit card number because I use vision of my bicycle with a lot of weird stuff going on on it. The weirder the image the easier it is to remember without effort. There is a rhinocerous charging around the front wheel, there is milkshake balancing on the handlebars, there is a nun pushing a tonne weight around the rear wheel..., the images are very silly but I will never forget the number :).

This is a very powerful technique and is what the world memory champions use and is more or less linear in terms of the time required vs the length of the password.

It may not be attractive to most people, but for people like me who use no control shortcuts/hotkeys/bindings and don't care about the placement of these default shortcuts, colemak still offers good placement for letter bindings. For example, y and p are copy (yank) and paste universally for me and are in much better positions than for qwerty.

One thing that's actually nice (though probably only for me) is how some keys are moved OFF of the home row or away from better positions. This allows for better mnemonics for keys. For example, "l" is no longer in the direction area (hjkl) and I can use it as "last" (last cursor position, last tab, last window, last split, last buffer in win history, etc.). d (delete) and f (find) are displaced (still to decent positions) so I can keep the mnemonics for those keys and replace their desirable positions (now s and t) with actions I use more often (with their own nice mnemonics). Obviously this could all be rebound to be only dependent on actual location on the keyboard and some mnemonics are messed up, but I find it kind of nice (which might just be me adapting to the layout more than anything).

Also, I agree that the method of loci and other mnemonic techniques don't really apply when getting a keyboard layout into your muscle memory. I memorized the actual colemak layout first thing when I started using it, but it's not as if I was suddenly able to type it perfectly because of that.