This site gives some metrics that give a strong case for colemak.
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?popular_alternatives
The L in Dvorak and the moving of ZXCV, which is a huge pain for the kind of programing I have do, are the main reasons I will not switch to Dvorak. In the process of learning Colemak right now. The incremental improvements over Colemak they talk about on the Carpalx site don't really seem like that big of deal to me. You get that big improvement over qwerty with Colemak by moving only 17 keys and keeping the ZXCV group as well as it being a standard.
Shai, the creator of Colemak's response to Workman:
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.
http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=939
Allow me to address some of these points with Philosophy.
1. I see this as a highly-used but bad argument for a keyboard layout. Exhibiting the is-ought problem, I see the world as a nominalist would: I don't sacrifice ideals for some measure of gained utility from tradition. ZXCV should not be put where they are (or moved) based on a prior effort, or because you used to do tings that way. This is also why I don't find the "not broke -> don't fix it" statement to be valid at all. Everything is broken, and there is room for improvement everywhere. We must always strive to find (define) and achieve the ideal of perfection. Muscles can be re-learned easily, and ALT-INSERT, etc shortcuts work great. In linux, I don't even need the keyboard to copy/paste.
2. Once again, I think that keeping a number of keys similar to QWERTY just to achieve more similarity is wrong. Having incidental similarly placed keys (like A and M) is okay, provided that similar placement is not the goal. I am also a non-consequentialist.
3. I'm more worried about comfort than speed of typing (I'd learn steno/chording if I wanted speed) but this point (of preference) is a good one. This is a valid reason to choose colemak over workman. (I don't begrudge other's epistemology, as I believe that meta-epistemology to be impossible)
4. Valid point, but I see this as more of a macro issue than a layout one. No keyboard layout should be considered based on the macros (when comparing keyboard layouts: you can compare them if you want to compare your whole autohotkey setup or whatever). If this is the case with workman, then they have handily included suggestions for more than just a layout. (I try not to compare across-levels: Some things should be considered as incommensurable) I mean, you can set up (or disable) similar things in any layout.
5. I strongly agree: Hand alteration is important, hence why I chose Dvorak. One note: Hand alteration is not always good. I sometimes will reverse two letters in a word more commonly in Dvorak than QWERTY, I believe it's due to a different amount of hand alternation combined with my psycho/physiological expectations. (I am willing to consider that my position is not perfect, and might have some flaws)
6. I don't know what this is (I'll freely admit it. Now let me just look it up...)
7. I don't think you can compare layouts based on a single letter placement. That's gotta be a fallacy or something.
8. This smells like FUD. I would rather make a scientific claim with good data on both sides when trying to invalidate someone else's experiments.
9. All the [legitimate] design flaws points out thus far are pretty much just opinions. If the workman person considers his layout "perfect" then he is wrong. One must always be trying to improve (trying to see possible ways to make it better)
10. This is the first time he's mentioned his take on the layout being optimized for TH/HE, so I don't think his use of "again" is really justified. Still that's really splitting hairs. I looked up colemak and I don't see how you would twist your hand at all to type TH on it, Still, TH is much easier on Dvorak.
11. This is completely a terrible argument. Just because an ideas comes from a "lowborn" source, does not make it invalid. Ideas, and hypotheses stand and fall on their own. Look into the principle of supercooling: which was first suggested by a student, and dismissed by many scientists, yet his observation was still valid, even though his results weren't published in a journal. I don't care if I see a new keyboard layout on the back of a napkin, that will not disqualify it from being a good or bad idea. It might not "inspire respect" but that's not the point of analysis, or decision making. I don't "respect" anything based on it's outward appearance. I will make my judgment and decision (and later, respect) based on the qualities of the idea in question. Also, you cannot tell by just a blog post what sort of investment an author has made into a work. I can, for example, Test a layout for decades all by myself without telling anyone, and put it up on GH here. There is (nor sholud there be) and indication of the time investment I have made before going public. I am fairly certain that any position tying to find "investment level" from method of publication will be difficult-to-impossible to describe (rendering it meaningless. You'll just patch holes over your weak ideology) or self-inconsistent.
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Finally, if colemak works for you, then more power to you! I am glad to see it. Since nothing is really perfect, the pros and cons of anything will mean that it is better for some than others. For some people Dvorak is best, for others: colemak. I prefer Dvorak for philosophical reasons, and am considering switching to Qgmlwb (or similar).
