I don't really want to get into philosophical discussions about necessity. I put a lot of work into this because it helps me, and have decided to share my work. If you don't need it, don't use it.

However, if you are using Colemak layout on the server (which, I note, you are not), it does become necessary. Because of physical disability (which is the reason I stopped using QWERTY) I have to be able to work in a lot of different configurations. This includes switching from working in a Windows VM on the console to continuing the same session remotely from my bed or sofa, and probably back again later. Cognitive dysfunction means I have difficulty working out why my keyboard is generating the wrong characters, and this wastes both time and energy (see The Spoon Theory for why this is a big deal). tl;dr: For people with chronic illness, energy is severely limited and can't be spent twice.

Aside from which, the QWERTY mapping covers only a subset of the characters that can be typed easily with Colemak. Not an issue if you only ever use US-ASCII, but it becomes more of one if, e.g., you have an interest in linguistics.

So having said all that, I'd appreciate at least some constructive feedback as I bet there's a stupid bug somewhere in the keymap that I've managed to miss, because I know I'm not the only person with these problems and therefore somebody else might benefit.

Julian

My use case is probably unusual, which is why I hesitate to say a dedicated keymap is “necessary” per se. I'm pretty MS-phobic, so aside from my access issues I want to be as unaware as possible that I'm using Windows. For that purpose, things like client-side compose make the whole thing a much more pleasant experience…

The lessons are based on the colemak.typ file available on this site, but have been expanded to include frequent words, shift key, punctuation, and alphabetic sentences lessons.