This is a super-boring post that I’m uploading solely for the benefit of people who might be Googling for this specific thing in the future. If you don’t know from the title that this might be useful to you then there’s no point reading further.
This won’t remap caps lock to backspace; I recommend SharpKeys to do that easily. It does, however, set the shift key to turn caps lock off when pressed, so that if you somehow end up with caps lock on you don’t have to change layout to turn it off again.
This layout is different to the one you get if you just use Microsoft’s custom layout tool, because it will update keyboard shortcuts too. This might be a bad thing if you don’t want to re-learn shortcuts; I already had.
Finally, I’ve added a few extra characters on AltGr, so AltGr and – types an en dash, AltGr and . types an ellipsis, AltGr and 8 types a bullet symbol, and so on. If this is of no interest you it shouldn’t affect you in any way.
If you don’t know what any of this is about but you’ve still read this far despite my clear recommendation, here’s a brief primer. Colemak is an alternative way to set out the keys on a keyboard. For example, if you’re using Colemak and you press the series of keys that would normally spell ‘qwerty’, you’ll type ‘qwfpgj’ instead. The idea is to put the most commonly-used letters on the part of the keyboard where your fingers normally rest, so that you don’t have to move your hands around as much when you type. There are a few of these alternative layouts (you might have heard of one called Dvorak). Colemak tries to be more efficient than the normal Qwerty layout while not moving things around too drastically – so, for example, the Z, X, C and V keys used for undo, cut, copy and paste shortcuts stay in the same place. People don’t generally agree about whether using one of these alternative layouts is worthwhile, and there are significant downsides to not using the standard, so please don’t take this post as a recommendation that you should start using Colemak.