How do you go forward without visiting the past?  So much hub bub and crying about people taking down the Colemak site on Wiki, Waaah.  SHOW US THE RESEARCH!!!!

After 5 years and nothing on the web about how this layout was constructed is a joke.  Even if Dvorak wrote his own studies (nobody REALLY knows what happened - just speculation) at least an effort was made to document something.

For the record - I'm stuck in Colemak.  I've completely lost my QWERTY and now that Colemak hardware is making headway I probably won't do anywhere.  I just don't want to look back at age 60 and wish I had stayed with QWERTY or Dvorak because my hands are wrecked.

drmfmsa,

Colemak is not in a "semi-beta" version. Colemak was released in 2006, and was stable ever since. No further updates are planned, because the layout has been finalized. Colemak has been tried and tested by many thousands of users, and it won't change everytime someone tunes the algorithm that generates the layout. Throughout the years, I've addressed hundreds of criticisms that have been raised in the forum regarding its design. Looking back, I still believe that Colemak has made all the optimal choices in its design. Colemak today is still the most popular and most compelling QWERTY/Dvorak alternative. If you'd like to learn more about the design decisions of Colemak, a good place to start would be reading through all the posts I've written in the forum.

The Caps Lock issue has been decided. I have reached the conclusion that having an extra Backspace is much better than having a Caps Lock key. The Caps Lock key means that you have to keep in mind everytime you type that state of the Caps Lock key. It also avoids many issues where the Caps Lock is pressed accidentally (incorrect passwords, tYPING lIKE tHIS, accidentally SHOUTING on forums, etc.). The Caps Lock isn't necessary for any programmer whatsoever. Even Fortran programmers can type everything in lowercase. If you need to type A_LONG_CONSTANT_NAME you can either:
  1. Hold the Shift key.
  2. Type it in lower case, and then use your editor to convert it to uppercase.
  3. Type the first few letters, and then use the autocomplete function of your editor.

If you think Colemak is not good for programming, you're doing a lot of manual typing that could be automated at the editor level. If you use snippets, macros, autocomplete, auto-closing tags/brackets, etc. the amount of capitalized or non-alphabetic text you have to type is negligable. I highly recommend Sublime Text.

If you analyze the total amount of typing that you do (of which writing code is probably only a small percent), you'll see that you're pressing the backspace key several orders of magnitude more often than you need to use the Caps Lock key. Combine in it with the fact is that the Backspace key is #1 key that causes RSI, and moving it to the left hand improves the hand balance, and helps you to maintain the typing flow by reducing the amount of interruption.

The reasons why I decided to add a second Caps Lock instead of exchanging it with the Backspace key are explained here.
If you don't agree with this you are free to customize Colemak as you see fit, and redistribute your changes.

The international layout was modeled after the US-International layout, while trying to fix some of its flaws. It is explained in the Multilingual page, but it might make more sense if you see it visually, i.e. compare the US-International layout diagram and the Colemak international diagram.

The Colemak international layout is:
* Designed not to penalize people who are typing in English (in US-International, typing ' and " requires two keypresses).
* Designed for easy typing of common words in English with diacritics, e.g. café, über, fiancé, façade, jalapeño, etc.
* Designed to allow typing of typographics (e.g. ndash, non-breaking spaces, “smart quotes”, and special characters, e.g. ®, ™.
* Supports a much wider range of languages. The relative number of speakers of the language, the total number of languages containing the diactric, the frequency of diactrics in each language, and the total frequency of the diactric in all the languages, similarity to the US-International layout, ease of learning, and the key position have all been taken into account.

The tilde that is occuring by so many keyboard shortcuts, it's just a visual indicator to the typist that they typed an invalid combination, which was deemed in my eyes to be better than the alternative (beeping or doing nothing), and allows for a more consistent implementation across platforms.

As far as I know, Colemak is now included on Mac OS X Lion 10.7 ; A downloadable implementation is available for earlier versions. If you're using an earlier version, you can download the layout file to ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ on your home directory , and you don't need to install anything, so that's a "portable version" in my opinion.

What a horrible horrible lie!  :)  Well, to be precise it's not the statistics that lie but the statisticians...