I don't see how the w is worse than normal colemak w?

Dreymar has a wide layout in his sig.  Maybe the angle mod would also help. I don't know enough to say whether it'd work the same way for QWERTZ-based layouts, however.  Hopefully he should respond soon.

Modifier layers such as his "Extend" or an AltGr layer can also help in typing symbols without reaching all around.

What lalop said.

- The Angle mod makes the <> key your friend rather than enemy.
- (Keep in mind that the LShift is no farther away than the RShift is, so it shouldn't be so bad. We Euro-hooligans are used to it at least.)
- The Wide mods make the Enter key easier – as well as Back, RShift etc
- The Wide mods make the right hand less centered
- The Wide mods make it easier to hit AltGr for a world of fun glyphs.
- (The Extend mod makes it easy to reach navigation and other keys from the home position – damn useful for coders!)

You're an Englishman you say? But the English do already have the 105th key!? Or are you the proverbial "Englishman in New York" that Sting sings about? ;)

You forgot to tell us what platform(s) you use. Thus, I'll assume you mean Windows. Now, as you'll see in my topic sigs I have a few recommendations for a UK 105-key Colemak layout as well as a few ready-made Angle/Wide ergonomical mods. Download my PKL package and select an AWide layout, and we'll take it from there maybe?

Heh, people taking Ubuntu for granted these days? Makes me happy. ;)

The image you link to is a German keyboard, by the way. The dreaded QWERTZ layout, the characteristic ÄÖÜ letters and most importantly the delightful command key captions! Why use the pedestrian 'Del(ete)' when you can 'Entf(ernen)'; why 'C(on)tr(o)l' stuff when you can use your 'St(eue)r(un)g'; why 'Scroll' when you can be 'Rollen'?!? ;)

A proper Cherry board should have moveable key caps IIRC. That makes using a WideAngle mod all the more pleasant. I usually set my boards up to WideAngle QWERTY and let guests type on that. The proper typists stumble a bit on the shifted ZXCVB keys but mostly they hardly notice it which is fun.

Did you use the patch for the right Ubuntu version? I have 12.04 LTS and 13.04 versions available. If there's a problem I'd like to hear about it.

Merging manually should work fine though – I even suspect that using the wrong version would work just fine as the update changes to the XKB files are minor indeed. ;)

But the WideAngle variants aren't accessible from the options GUI for some reason these days (used to be possible in earlier Ubuntu versions). You'll need to set the xkb model by hand using for instance 'setxkbmap -model pc105awide-sl' and/or the /etc/default/keyboard file; it's there near the end of my Big Bag topic. (Yes, it's a long topic, I know...)

Just curious; one of the reasons I love ubuntu is that colemak works out of the box; have you thought about adding your varients the the ubuntu install?

Nice!

Yes, I've thought about and I'm definitely interested in adding my variants. I don't know how to at the moment though, and since I've got a lot of changes I guess I ought to break them up into smaller bits (models, locales, extend etc). Also, I should be working with the XKB source files and not edit directly into the rules files I suppose.

All in all, it's not about adding the changes to Ubuntu but to the X.Org server itself. I hope I can get around to it sometime... and that it's welcome over there! :)

There's also the matter of some things not being finished yet. I'd really really like to have the Extend home position modifiers (A/S/T keys) working before distributing that, for instance!