I typed Dvorak for nearly 20 years. I type Colemak now. I am still not up to my old speed after 3 months. I used to be able type in Dvorak without thinking about it. Eventually that will be true of Colemak.

Yes, there are differences. However you make a few false assumptions.

When it comes to learning a layout, there is absolutely no difference between them. Colemak is promoted as an easier layout to learn for Qwerty users. However, they offer no proof for this assertion. I am not aware of a single study comparing the two layouts on this metric.

Second, Dvorak offers a significant ergonomic improvement over Qwerty. Therefore time spent learning Dvorak is time well spent.

Third, when comparing the ergonomics of Dvorak to Colemak on various texts, they are mostly neck-and-neck, with very little advantage of one over the other. Sometimes Dvorak comes out on top. Sometimes Colemak does.

Fourth, if you are interested in increasing your WPM, the layout you use just doesn't matter. The world's fastest typists almost all use Qwerty. That said, you DO gain a speed advantage when you switch layouts, but one that has nothing to do with the layout and everything to do with you. You are making a concerted effort to be a better typist, and devoting far more mental and physical resources at doing so. Such concentrated efforts reap rewards in increased accuracy and WPM. Switching layouts gives you an opportunity to unlearn bad habits, and that too helps increase your WPM

So why did I switch from Dvorak to Colemak then? There are three reasons: Colemak has a better balance between hands, and does not overuse the pinkies. Second: I'm a programmer. The most common keyboard shortcuts are the same as Qwerty. The punctuation keys (save for the semi-colon) do not move either. For me this works better. Third: I had some bad practices of my own that I wished to overcome.

If I had to do this over again, I probably would not have switched. It has been far too much work.

http://mkweb.bcgsc.…

Go to the link. I put it in my original post, but I guess you didn't see it or something like that.

I read all of the material at that site a long time ago, and reviewed it again about a month ago. It changes nothing that I said. When you run finger travel tests against actual corpuses of texts, and correlate Dvorak and Colemak, the results are as I noted.

Besides, you are confusing the numbers with the difference that using one layout vs. the other actually makes. The big jump is from Qwerty to something better. After that, the minor differences that exist between further optimized layouts make no real world difference.

So, by all means, use Colemak, and stick with it. It's what I use now. But don't take it so seriously. Dvorak is an excellent layout. Anyone choosing it is making a good choice, and has the added advantage that their choice also happens to be an ISO standard, and is built in to all modern operating systems.