I used vim with colemak for a while.

It's really, really hard to customize because some commands are mapped according to their position (hjkl) and others are mapped according to their initial ("y" for "yank", e.g.).

Trying to keep both is thus impossible, as there are collisions. So your options are:

1) Preserve position, and remap everything back to its qwerty location. Downside: you have to train yourself that you're not pressing "n" for next, you're pressing "k".

2) Don't remap anything. Downside: nothing is ergonomic anymore.

3) Keep positional keys in their correct position, assign mnemonic keys when they don't collide with the positional keys and choose new mnemonics when there are collisions. Downside: only you can ever use your vim.

The best support I saw was for #3 but it ended up being a deal-breaker since I pair program (but that's OK, because using colemak itself ended up being a deal-breaker since I pair).

J and K are the C and V keys respectively, and H and L are the J and P keys respectively - so it's not too bad, though hardly ideal. My use of a dvorak keyboard is probably why I never bothered with H and L when using vim, and only very rarely used J and K. I just used the arrow keys, if I wanted to move one cell at a time.

(I never really saw the point of trying to make people use hjkl for cursor navigation. You should try always to use higher-level navigations commands, and if you move cell by cell, you've lost already! - so there's nothing wrong with using the arrow keys for it rather than hjkl. That is, after all, what the arrow keys are there for.)

I did remap the keys at first but found that the hjkl layout for dvorak is not at all uncomfortable. I frequently jump between disparate *nix systems, and for most part use the canned nvi in preference to vim. I try to do most of my work with as generic a vi keyset as possible. Multiple screens, etc, are handled with tmux (or with screen if its the only thing available). Dvorak is defaulted on my local workstation, and as I connect through a terminal emulator, the host unix box does not know or need to know that I run dvorak or have my terminal set to amber and black, etc. In short, I try to make myself comfortable while avoiding tinkering whenever possible.