Hi Shai,
I wonder what it would take (effort and/or $$) for Colemak to become an ANSI or ISO standard (like Dvorak). Perhaps this could make it easier to get it included in commercial operating systems like MS Windows.
While discussing this on IRC I convinced another guy to make a donation to Colemak. ;-)
I don't think it's anywhere near becoming a viable option. I don't see it becoming an ANSI/ISO standard without it being included in Windows first. Making it an ISO standard would require it to be backed up by many countries and many commercial organizations, which I don't see happening anytime soon. I have no idea how much it would cost, but it would be several orders of magnitude more than anything that has been donated so far, and frankly I don't see it as a worthy cause. A better route would be trying to get insiders from Microsoft to put pressure on including it in the operating system.
Update: Michael Kaplan explained that he isn't opposed to having Colemak included in Windows, it just first requires a sufficient business incentive, e.g. having OEMs selling Colemak hardware keyboards.
I think that such pressure could be dangerous, too. We all know how pissed-off Michael Kaplan ended up being because he saw the "C word" too many times in a week for his liking. :)
The most promising route as I see it, is the open-source movement combined with being visible. It has already been proven that the *nix world accepts Colemak as one of many additions. From there, it's a question of awareness. So it's in your Linux distro - now all you need is to know what it's for. Once that gets a foothold I wouldn't be surprised if it made its' way to the Mac, and eventually Windows would have to catch on.
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
No offense Shai, but I think the lack of a capslock option is a major drawback. Would shift + capslock work fine on all os's?
"It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in." - Earl of Chesterfield
The recommended way to enable/disable CapsLock is with Alt/AltGr+CapsLock.
Shift+CapsLock is unintuitive because if you're holding Shift to type a capitalized word, and you press CapsLock in order to correct a mistake while still holding Shift, and you'll toggle the CapsLock unintentionally instead of fixing the typo.
I don't know how much hacking would be required to get it working on all operating systems. If there's a way to make it work, I'll include it in future versions.
The recommended way to enable/disable CapsLock is with Alt/AltGr+CapsLock.
Shift+CapsLock is unintuitive because if you're holding Shift to type a capitalized word, and you press CapsLock in order to correct a mistake while still holding Shift, and you'll toggle the CapsLock unintentionally instead of fixing the typo.
I don't know how much hacking would be required to get it working on all operating systems. If there's a way to make it work, I'll include it in future versions.
What would really be ideal is having a Kinesis or Maltron keyboard and putting caps lock on one of the smaller thumb keys. But for us normal people, backspace is a good position for something with the frequency of caps lock.
What sort of stuff do you do with the donations?
My typing speed record: http://hi-games.net/typing-test/watch?u=493
Some of it goes to hosting, some of it goes for personal use, and some of it is put aside for future Colemak purposes. One of the ideas is to use the money for bounties, e.g. fixing the Caps Lock in Ubuntu.
