Hey there Kenran, welcome to the forum. Having used both DH and Vanilla, I don't think that DH changes enough to really be an issue with getting used to it. The biggest change is really the angle mod, but you will get used to it if you give it a shot. Alternately you can make your own DH without the angle mod. Are you typing on an ISO or ANSI?

Can't speak for the Carplx layouts myself, sorry.

I am of a similar opinion to NottNott. Mod-DH changes enough to be useful and doesn't mess with what isn't broken, on the whole.

One thing you should take into account is that metrics, no matter how robust, are usually accounting for factors common to users as well as the personal views of what the individual behind the metric considers important. It's a good starting point, but not ideal because there is no effort to address a deeper issue - individual users adapting to the layout and their comfort levels with long-term usage, which may not always follow the data obtained. It's possible to study the human factor in depth, but not by designing keyboard metrics and having a computer give you the results without extensive human testing.

Another issue is the flawed nature of keyboard entry generally. It's actually pretty sub-optimal by nature when you think about it, with fingers being responsible for individual keys that are struck in a particular order at speed. As a result, there will always be at least a handful of combinations which "break" the efficiency or are not as comfortable as they could be, which is a necessary compromise under such a system. This particular issue of method is probably one of the reasons that, no matter how fluent the typist, you never seem to see typing scores that go very far beyond 212 WPM or so. Stenography and other chorded methods tackle this problem with a completely different paradigm and do achieve comfortable and fast results at the cost of approachablility. So what we really want in a keyboard layout is going to be maximal efficiency and comfort within the limits of the input method itself.

If you do attempt Mod-DH, which is worth it for the comfort benefits in my view, make sure that you do so on a layout which affects the smallest number of common keys if possible. On an ISO layout in a Wide configuration, the only real hurdle I have encountered for non-letters in day-to-day typing is the relocation of slash/question mark. The ANSI layout does not have the benefit of an additional key off to the right on the home row that can be used for the apostrophe, so moving things around further is needed. The ISO layout is the more comfortable of the two in this regard, in the experience of several users.

Finally, both rolls and alternation are addressing similar issues, and Colemak does employ both to achieve what it does. In fact, with alternation specifically, a case could be made that it does this a little better than Dvorak in giving the right hand only a little more to do, rather than favoring it more significantly. I appreciate alternation, but find that certain common sequences in a roll are quite essential for comfort once you have mastered them. Opinions vary widely on this point and I don't know that the advantage of rolls is as decisive as some people think, but they are ergonomic. Another point about Dvorak is, for all the flaws in its research, they did have the right idea in taking it straight into the "real world" of real people using it. This is the difference between efficacy and effectiveness as psychologists use the terms. A particular intervention or treatment may work well in a clinical setting (efficacy), but the results outside the lab are what everyone wants to see (effectiveness).

Long story short, I think the typist ultimately determines what will be most efficient and comfortable for them, though there are common factors for all of us that must be considered first. This may serve to highlight why ergonomics fall as much in the field of psychology as they do the hard sciences, and in some cases are purely psychology's domain (the study of ergonomics actually is a lesser-known specialization in industrial/organizational psychology, for those wondering).

Hopefully you found something useful in that lengthy exposition. Years of exposure and consideration have led to these conclusions, and I'm still learning.

There isn't anything specific that I'm aware of (yet), but any typing game or practice you can use will work. I think you'll probably be able to focus on words rather than individual letter practice pretty quickly.

And if you use a mechanical keyboard with QMK firmware and/or something from DreymaR's big bag of tricks, either of those would allow you to move Shift around anywhere you like if it bothers you. I find, though, that the Wide mod puts your pinkies closer to where they need to be anyway, so it hasn't been much of a problem. YMMV.

The best typing tool that I've found is Amphetype, it's layout agnostic, so it doesn't really care what your layout is, you import some text and write it, then it sees what words, bigrams and trigrams are the hardest for you, and it can also generate lessons based on what you're having problems with.

There is also keybr.com, it's pretty good, but only works online.

Pretty much anything that lets you type different samples with a good mix to avoid boredom is fine.

I like 'keybr.com' or Amphetype. 'Typeracer.com' too. It's good to know what your speed is at a relaxed, average and frantic state.

It's fun to type relaxed what you used to type frantically a while back.

(I also fully endorse Colemak-DH over MTGAP. Totally biased, but here we have a support community where we can give feedback on what works, what doesn't and how we feel about the layout.

Using MTGAP, you're in a foreign land with a keyboard no one helps you with, likely inferior to Colemak-DH.)

It's quite the conundrum that names can hold so much weight. It took me awhile to see that CAW and Mod-DH were not the same thing. Making the distinction is helpful if you understand both, but possibly unclear if you do not.

It's also unfortunate that we're all over the place with the names we use. Ideally there would be consensus on one name for only one layout, but that would also carry a cost - giving it a name that doesn't contain "Colemak" is unhelpful, and calling it simply "Colemak" is disrespecting Shai, without whom no such mods would exist in the first place.

A rose by any other name...

On the "official" site, it has always been called "Colemak Mod-DH", which although is a long name, does accurately alert you to the 3 key things you need to know:
(i) it's based on Colemak
(ii) it's a mod
(iii) the D and H keys are the main keys moved.

For example:

There you go, the terms "Colemak", "DH", and "mod" used in the same sentence!

I don't have a problem with calling it either Colemak-DH or Mod-DH for short, they're both logical enough and close enough to the full name to not cause confusion IMO.

I should clarify a bit, what I meant by saying that a unified layout would be "ideal" was that it would be quickly understood without any ambiguity by those seeing it for the first time. Modular changes like those described are indeed something I would say is essential. If there is no getting around it, there is no getting around it.

Regardless, I would say that, if you've done as I have and have a number of customizations, it's best to resist the urge to call it something different. This would only add to an already confusing situation. I had in mind to call my lil' variant "Colemak-תּ" since it it is oriented toward a "typist's" workflow, and Typist-Angle-Wide would be "TAW", one possible English approximation of the Hebrew letter "Tav".

But then no one would have a clue what I was talking about, anywhere. :P

Also, regarding a separate name for Angle, Wide, Extend, moving 6 around, and so on. I think there are secondary things. For instance, in the world of custom keyboards, everybody use their own layout for modifiers and additional layers, but they are still considered just qwerty if qwerty is used for letters.

The name or refraining from using it? XD

The trouble with naming is it's subjective, and I'm not keen on the effort of renaming it based on subjective feelings when the original name has been around for four years already. In the spirit of compromise though, I'll put something prominent on the main page about it being commonly known as "Colemak-DH".

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