FYI: I have created a Colemak-equivalent layout for the Russian alphabet, "Rulemak" (look at the end of the thread for the final layout).  It was not designed with native Russian typists in mind, just for occasional Russian typists like myself, so similarity to Colemak was the primary design goal, not creating the ultimately comfortable Cyrillic layout.  But I think it could beat йцукен since that concentrates too many common letters on the index fingers...

I'd be interested if you could have a try and comment on my layout, you can find it here (xkb is the X11 implementation).

Neat! I gave it a quick try, and it seemed very much like my first days with Colemak — plenty of mistakes and an astonishing speed of 5 wpm. It's difficult to say anything specific yet, but for some reason, similarity to Colemak doesn't really help (I wonder if it has something to do with me being a native Russian speaker).

Some random thougths:

1) “Э” is not in a very good position. It may not be a frequently used letter, but I like the ability to type the word «это» (which I tend to use a lot) without having to stretch my pinky too far.
2) You way want to add the missing “Ц” to the ASCII picture of your final layout. I had a hard time finding it.
3) Could you elaborate on what's wrong with placing the common letters on the index fingers? It's not entirely obvious to me.
4) There exists the DICTOR layout. The authors claim it to be more optimal than ЙЦУКЕН. I haven't tried it, though.

Sure, it's mainly useful for those with Colemak as their primary layout, who type Russian occasionally (like me).  But thanks for your feedback, it's useful for me!

Good point.  However, on many European keyboards (as opposed to the American layout displayed in my diagram), that key is between the quote (ь on rulemak, \ on йцукен) and Enter keys, instead of above the Enter key (the Enter key has a different shape).  Makes it a much easier reach already.

Oops, it's on "C".  Fixed now.

Lot of same-finger digraphs (ie. typing two consecutive letters with the same finger, slows you down a lot), which is what Colemak very much avoids (instead it encourages "rolls", consecutive letters typed with different fingers in a single movement, like "arst"), and frequent letters (е, н, с, и, т) on the top and bottom rows.

Thanks, I'll have a look.  But apart from the diagram, there's no explanation of why the keys were placed this way?

Interesting, I'll have a look, thanks.

I'd be very interested in your results with the carpalx model on a real Russian corpus!  But perhaps we should start a separate topic for this (I hope this won't go too much off-topic for the Colemak forum, but a lot of general keyboard related optimization stuff has been discussed here, and after all we're still discussing Colemak's Cyrillic twin :-)).

Good luck!

I think you'd have to take into consideration the frequency of the punctuation characters wrt. the rarer cyrillic letters.  I don't have statistical data on this, but I can imagine comma and period being more frequent than eg. щ or ъ, thus deserving better positions.

Interesting ideas.  I think on Linux you might want to swap Control and Caps Lock (which is what a lot of UNIX-Qwerty people do also, since older Sun keyboards had those keys swapped, too).  Then you automatically have Ctrl+H for backspace, and I guess the arrow keys could be mapped to.  But the way you describe it is not possible without deeper xkb hacking...