It's interesting, but I think I don't quite agree with him.  :)

- His layout has consistently higher same-finger ratio than Colemak. Same-finger is the worst of all the bad statistics in my head. It's interesting to note that he claims the layout optimized for the common bigrams in English and yet it performs suboptimally in this important respect! A difference of a percent or so may not look like a lot on paper, but bear in mind how much of a difference in typing speed and comfort an error rate difference of less than a percent can mean once that percentage is in its high 90s!
- The issue of "side-to-side movement" as he calls it is really about making the index finger stretch to the H and D keys, I take it? It's individual how much of a strain that is to people, but I do agree that for instance the F and U keys are easier to hit than these particular home row locations. However, there are good reasons for keeping those keys there and I hope Shai himself can elaborate on that.
- Personally, I don't think it's hard at all but then I play musical instruments. :)  I suspect that the Workman guy doesn't float his hands well while typing, contributing to his problems.
- I'm pretty sure Shai could also give a few specific arguments as to why the Workman layout leads to more of the dreaded same-finger problem and probably a few other things.
- While it's probably more or less as good to type on as Colemak, it moves more keys around from their QWERTY positions. The benefits of not doing so are not obvious to all newcomers, but in my experience they're substantial even after having learnt the new layout!

I didn't have to get as far as the workman layout to tell there are some major issues with it's design. Just look at the "strain/difficulty" map. "W" gets a 2 while "H" gets a 3? "A", right under the pinkie and requiring no movement gets a 2, the same rating as "V" on the bottom row? The only way these make sense is if I was just learning to touch type. Even then it is a long shot.

Hmm interesting. What his layout reminds me of is the numeric keypad -- where it's designed for vertical movement between the rows. I used to do numeric data entry and in my heydays was able to do over 16000 keystrokes per hour or at least 5 keystrokes per second. I disagree with Dreymar in that I don't think that Same Finger is the worst metric, especially if the difference is only half a percent. 10-keyers operate with over 30% Same Finger usage and it's not uncomfortable. In fact, it's quite effective. They also have a 100% same hand usage,(take that Dvorak :P).  While it's true that 10-keying cannot potentially be as fast as typing, my point is that a half-percent to even a 1 percent difference in terms of same finger utilization is negligible especially considering that it seems that he was able to bring down distance, and also index finger stretching by 50%. Granted at the expense of moving more letters around. I find his layout quite interesting.

I was wondering about that too.  I float so for H, I also don't stretch much and certainly don't twist.  I'm moving the whole forearm and keeping the wrist straight.  So H-E is simply forearm movement followed by snap back to home position and depressing the E with middle finger.  That's a very accurate move for me.  Much more than the attempting a sideways movement for the L in Dvorak layout with the pinky which is why pinky was often just stretching without forearm movement and getting strained.

The Workman layout is a layout that tries to gain a few extra percents of optimizing one factor, while completely neglecting other factors.
1. The layout doesn't maintain ZXCV in the same location. e.g. if you're working with different windows that have different keyboard layouts, it means you can't reliably copy and paste between windows. This also ignores the strong motor memory of these shortcuts. It makes it harder to learn, and more difficult if you're switching back and forth between layouts.
2. The layout moves more keys around, more keys move hands, they move further away. Many of the ease of learning elements in Colemak have been ignored.
3. Same finger is mostly ignored. It's quite bad on the ring fingers which aren't dexterous. You'll see people who complained in the forum about the same-finger of the WR/RW same-finger digraph on the ring finger in Colemak. Compare it to the PO/OP digraph on Workman which is an order of magnitude more common. Same-finger aren't a big deal in the beginning, but they become very problematic with high speed typing as they break the flow of typing.
4. Shift-Capslock is escape, which means that if you're typing words in uppercase by holding the shift, you can't make corrections without releasing and repressing the shift key, which is very annoying.
5. By optimizing for combos, it allows for quite long sequences of the same hand. Colemak IMO has a better balance between combos and hand alternation.
6. It has more row jumping than Colemak.
7. The letter D, which is the 10th most frequent letter in English gets a bad placement on the ring finger off the home row.
8. The research is based on a small corpus of six books, which skews all the statistics.
9. The author claims to be "Workman is now stable and better than before. There will be no more changes after October 3, 2010". There hasn't been any feedback yet from long-term users (I doubt even the author has used it for long), and it still has design flaws which means that either it will be changed again, or the flaws will be ignored.
10. The author claims "Typing ‘HE’ [on Colemak] forced the hand to make a very unnatural sideways twisting motion from the wrist and then back again". If you're twisting your wrists while typing, you're doing it wrong. Again the layout was optimized for the TH combo, while ignoring other typing statistics.
11. A project that only exists as a blog post, and doesn't even have it's own webpage doesn't inspire too much respect, or demonstrates any investment from the author.

I've added it to the list of alternatives layouts, but I think there are better ones out there.

I am currently learning the workman layout, and I like it so far.  I've typed Dvorak for 4 years (over 100 wpm), and have learned 2 other layouts (colemak & a modified carpalx).  While it's much too early to make any conclusions about workman, I can say that I have high hopes for it.  Many of you have immediately disregarded it, probably because colemak already meets your needs - which is great.  Colemak is a fine layout.  But I wouldn't be so quick to label it as pointless. 

Shai brought up some good points, but many of them are non-issues for me.

1) ZXCV is not nearly as important to me as how well the layout flows under my fingers
2) Ease of learning is a valid point, although workman will be easier to pick up than dvorak
3) Same finger is about as good as dvorak.  But not all same finger sequences are undesirable
4) Shift-capslock is a two-edged sword, but I tend to agree with Shai on this one
5) There are long sequences on the same hand.  Time will tell if that is good or bad
6) True, yet I haven't encountered any that are awkward to type
7) The letter D is in one of the easiest keys to hit, for me.
8) A corpus is only as useful as your heuristics
9) The author has used it for 2 months and types about 70 wpm.  *all* layouts have flaws (yes, even colemak)
10) Agreed
11) Again, agreed.  But just because he hasn't yet, doesn't mean he won't...  the layout is very new

One of the reasons I didn't decide to stay with colemak is because it overloads the index fingers, and I found mine were in pain after typing all day.  Another reason is that it never quite felt right.  I felt some sequences were a lot harder to type than they should have been.  Workman appears to address those concerns without sacrificing things I care about, but like I said, I won't know until I have reached a 60-70 wpm.

I'm not here to bash on colemak, or glorify workman.  I just hate to see people disregard it so quickly when it appears to have a lot to offer.

Would you care to explain further?  Thanks.

bsdhacker, I think that there is something wrong in your typing technique if you can't reach comfortably the letter "L", regardless of finger length. Maybe you could post a video of you typing, so we can tell you what's going wrong.

It's got to be about not floating.  If you have good typing position, with wrists straight and the heel of the hands in the air, not anchored, the all those three letter sequences become a snap with practice no matter what the relative length of the fingers.

Bsdhacker, have you got any more thoughts to contribute after so much time has passed.

I am particularly interested to hear your thoughts on point #5 (long sequences on same hands).

Thanks.

Besides the quick brown fox, Sean Wrona would approve, too:: " I believe my biggest advantage in typing is that I do not necessarily use the same finger to type the same key. I use whichever finger is most comfortable, which can vary based on the context of the letters in the word." (from http://seanwrona.com/typing.php)

On the other hand, what about swapping H and M?  I know that, this way, H would be on the bottom row, but I think that the bottom row is too maligned.  For me, the M key is an easy reach for the index finger without moving the hand.  What about you guys?

Workman is on the right track as far as difficulty. But his chart is too simplified. Thus I have made a more detailed strain/difficulty/effort chart based on his:

Effort is not just based on strain and reach for the fingers, but also how much arm movement is involved to minimize strain on the fingers. We both agree that the top and bottom rows for the pinkies are the worst. However, I disagree on several other keys, particularly the bottom row.

So I agree with spremino that the bottom row is much maligned. According to my chart, the bottom row is generally easier to type, that is, uses less effort overall. After the four home keys, the bottom index key requires the least effort, much easier than the center column index key--the same key which brought about the Workman layout in the first place. Thus I have made several layouts that favor the bottom over the top, in particular to take advantage of the bottom index key, and consistently the overall efforts for these layouts are less than Dvorak and Colemak, and even Workman.

I echo the sentiment regarding the top index key not that easy to reach. It is moderate difficulty; only 5 keys have greater difficulty, and 9 of less difficulty. In other words, of the 15 keys on the same hand, it is the 6th worst key.

You can read more about my experiments with my layouts here:
http://www.shenafu.com/smf/index.php?topic=89.0