QWERTY will always be Nr 1, event if everybody knew about Colemak. From all my friends that know about Colemak (and they're quite a few) only one has made a switch. Very few are interested but not intrigued enough to switch and most don't care whatsoever. Of course that's not a very objective case but I feel that's the way it is.

People are always afraid to change and rather stay with the familiar, no matter how bad it is.

That is how family exists and society remains.

Revolution happens, but not so often.

However great it is, it would still have trouble displacing Qwerty.   I was going to liken that to Betamax and VHS - but apparantly Betamax wasn't better:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 … nt.comment

First there's an issue of whether it's actually a superior layout to begin with.

But even if you told an ardent Qwerty fan boy that it was better -  you need a compelling argument for switching.  People are resistant to change.

It would be great if the rationale behind the layout was exposed.  And leave it up to the scientific community to judge the merits of the layout.   You can't sell the layout on annecdotes alone can you?

So I posit that you lay it bare to scrutiny.

Word of mouth is probably the best kind of advertising there is though.

Not sure how much of an evolution Colemak is from Qwerty?  It's in part a weird hybrid of both Dvorak and Qwerty.

For those not migrating from touch typing using Qwerty, would it be still as compelling to switch to?   Or would a noob be better of picking some other optimized alternative - and if so which one?

Sell me Colemak!

You had your chance at getting Colemak into Windows 8 and you blew it...   You've got to make it incredibly easy to adopt.

Give it a go though, you can try and suceed where Dvorak failed.

I have said it on other posts – the similarity to Qwerty, in terms of typing, had nothing to do with the reason I changed. The similarity in general was one of the reasons but that was because I'm a heavy shortcut user, not because of typing. And I switched from Dvorak.

What I mean is that the similarity to Qwerty is by far not the main reason to chose Colemak. Colemak is great in many factors, mainly the low same finger ratio. There are and will be layouts that increase one factor for the cost of another so the difference between Colemak and those other layouts is the user's priorities.

But the bigger reason is that Colemak is much better tested than them, so it's a solid and safe choice.

It's not a big sample, true, but how many other keyboard layouts have any sort of community similar to this one – doing different discussions and sharing so many experiences of the switch. Some of the users also have experiences with other layouts and can compare. I personally find this very valuable information, along with the pure stats from analysers like on Carpalx website, for anyone considering changing layouts.

Since I haven't found any other forums or discussions similar to these here, I just assume that Colemak has bigger user base and hence is better tested than the rest of them. Not talking about Dvorak, of course – it's been out there forever, and anyone doing a research on alternative layouts probably stumbles upon it first.

Less than one thousand out of billions. Isn't it make me special!

How many people enjoy learning experiences that improve quality of living? Colemak is one example.

Most people repeat mundane living without a thought or imagination. They waste huge amount of time watching TV shows, manufactured pleasure by corporations for profit.

While Colemak is not likely to ever dominate, it is possible for it to have more modest ambitions. The trouble is QWERTY is so ubiquitous that most people wouldn't even consider anything else.

I had an interesting experience a few days ago when I was working at a client site with my laptop. I am currently learning Colemak via Tarmak and so had some keys remapped. Naturally I was asked about it, but the reaction was not so much curiosity, but more like horror - "why would you want to do that?" !

It would be nice if we can get to a stage where using a non-QWERTY layout would at least acknowledged as minority but still "normal" :-)

If it helps, you can link to the Colemak Talking Points I've recently made.

I think that popularizing Tarmak would also go a long way.  It's a lot easier to digest changing 3-5 keys than changing all of them.  Of course, as stevep99 points out, we also have to provide a good rationale for why we're changing those keys in the first place.

I was talking to some folks in #colemak on freenode, and they seem to be of the opinion that a hard wired Colemak keyboard would be a bad thing.

They do sell high end Dvorak keyboards that are 'hard wired' for Dvorak.... So.... I dunno.

I'll have to read the "Talking Points" and hard layout conversations later, today is looking to be a busy day at work.