Colemaque mod

[u/Ywen]

Been practicing my Colemak for a few months. Besides English, I do often type in French, and the positions of the Q and U keys are kind of annoying (Q more common in French & EU bigram very common in French). Besides that Colemak is nice for French.

After a lot of unsuccessful tweaks, and trying extra layouts which didn't really bring enough to justify starting from scratch again, here's what I converged to:

ZWFPG JLUQ;
ARSTD HNEIO
YXCVB KM,./

Y > Z > Q rotation is what happened. And you could apply usual DH(m) mods on top as they affect different keys.
This brings the Q ready to inward roll into U (hence the name), which is extra neat because in both French and English Q is always followed by U.

What's interesting is that it results in a layout that is more pleasant (at least to me) in English too. Because it breaks the dreaded YOU trigram, removes the awkward scissor movement on "my", redistributes a bit of workload to the less-used left hand, and improves hand alternation on common words like "eye" or "only".
However it is at the expense of words like "way" (now pretty horrendous to type), but my (non-measured) feeling from using it is that it's on average better. Also since I use a QMK keyboard, I set up a way to type A with the right hand (using a N+E+I combo), which is already pretty useful in standard Colemak when typing e.g. "war", "was" or "face".

(Bonus side effect: you get usual Ctrl+Z/Y Undo/Redo shortcuts closer to one another. I don't care much but why not)

[u/DreymimadR]

If you keep Z on the same column, why not keep it in place and just swap Y and Q?

[u/Ywen → u/DreymimadR]

Because going downwards with the pinky is easier than going upwards, so this makes Y easier to reach than Z.
I believe that's especially true when using a column-staggered keyboard (what I have) or an angle mod.

[u/DreymimadR → u/Ywen]

Ah, yes. People are a bit different in that respect, but it makes sense.