That's simple: Dvorak Simplified Keyboard and Maltron layouts.
Colemak isn't interesting, if you don't care about transition from QWERTY or shortcut compatibility; its typing properties are very similar to Maltron THOR, except for vowel separation (and usage of a thumb for a letter). The closest thing is MTGAP or carpalx, but that's still the same in principle, only with slightly different (arbitrary) design criteria and even less usage in practice.
[...] Have they been scientifically tested? or at least have a lot of supporters? [...] Just wondering what layout, for english writers and programmers have been shown, and studied to be the most optimal.There has been no scientific testing, and not much informal study either, any time in the past ~30 years. It’s all just people’s personal preferences/biases, and their computer optimization programs built on ad-hoc untested heuristics.
[...] Have they been scientifically tested? or at least have a lot of supporters? [...] Just wondering what layout, for english writers and programmers have been shown, and studied to be the most optimal.There has been no scientific testing, and not much informal study either, any time in the past ~30 years. It’s all just people’s personal preferences/biases, and their computer optimization programs built on ad-hoc untested heuristics.
The physical hardware you have available is also a deciding factor.
Jacobolous may I ask what keyboard layout did you use?The physical hardware you have available is also a deciding factor.
Indeed. The QWERTY layout was designed for the original Remington No. 1 typewriter, on which neighboring type bars in the circular “basket” would jam when typed in quick succession, so the keys are distributed so that common English digraphs are separated on that physical machine. (The arrangement of type bars doesn’t directly/obviously correspond to key location on the keyboard.)
The Dvorak layout is designed for later typewriters from the 1930s, on which the type bars hit the front of the platen, and weren’t quite as prone to jamming, but still could jam if nearby type bars were activated at the same time. The design criterion for the Dvorak layout was to improve comfort by moving common letters to the “home row”, encourage alternation between hands, and put only uncommon letters on the bottom row, because the bottom row on a mechanical typewriter is really annoying to reach, compared to the home row or top row.
The Malt layout is designed for the Maltron keyboard, which has split halves, curved keywells, and extra thumb keys.
Some later keyboard layouts are optimized for flat laptop keyboards. (QWERTY, Dvorak, and Malt are all decidedly suboptimal in the context of a modern laptop board.)
- That's simple: Dvorak Simplified Keyboard and Maltron layouts.
- Colemak isn't interesting, if you don't care about transition from QWERTY or shortcut compatibility; its typing properties are very similar to Maltron THOR, except for vowel separation (and usage of a thumb for a letter).
- The closest thing is MTGAP or carpalx, but that's still the same in principle, only with slightly different (arbitrary) design criteria and even less usage in practice.
There is the ADNW project (adnw.de (http://adnw.de)), which was created for german but may still be interesting for you. They have a few alternative layouts (http://adnw.de/index.php?n=Main.Varianten (http://adnw.de/index.php?n=Main.Varianten)), but most importantly two pieces of software.- That's right, and some of you may know that I also use a home cooked AdNW version, made for my use case: typing Dutch (90%) and English (10%). AdNW can be seen as a modern version of Dvorak. The project's website is in German, but the layout can be adapted to any language or combination of languages. There is an article (https://deskthority.net/wiki/Keyboard_layouts#AdNW_.282010.29) about it in the Deskthority wiki, written in English to make this layout better known to non-German speaking keyboard geeks.
The physical hardware you have available is also a deciding factor.(QWERTY, Dvorak, and Malt are all decidedly suboptimal in the context of a modern laptop board.)
Certain people have different preferences as to what is comfortable, and some of it is based on their physiology, i.e. the size of their hands and the dexterity of their fingers. Rolling motions are also debated in terms of what is and what is not comfortable in terms of which particular fingers on the same hand perform them.
Personally speaking, I started with QWERTY, tried Dvorak and then ended with Colemak (not even really trying my own proposed layout seriously).A shame! It looked really promising, your layout :)
For me Dvorak just didn't click. I find that too much alternation is a bad thing as it requires stricter organization between the left and right hand, resulting in transposition errors (two letters in a word swapped). Colemak's rolls are quite comfortable to me. And even if it turns out that Colemak is slightly less optimal in terms of what I could achieve in terms of typing speed, there's a human comfort factor which may be more or less valuable than sheer typing speed.This is indeed very personal! To me a high alternation layout feels more even, more flowing, whereas a rolly layout such as MTGAP or Colemak after a while feels like roll - switch - roll - switch , that is: a bunch of letters on one hand, then switch over, then a bunch of letters on the other hand. But, feel free to have a completely different opinion :)
Experiments on transmission of information in the nervous system (Efron 1963) show a 2 - 6 m.sec longer delay to the right hemisphere stimuli. If such a delay exists it appears reasonable to conjecture that transmissions that cross the corpus callosum, which must occur with contra-lateral sequences, will each be subject to the 2 - 6 m.sec delay.We're stuck with such extrapolations.
Personally speaking, I started with QWERTY, tried Dvorak and then ended with Colemak (not even really trying my own proposed layout seriously). For me Dvorak just didn't click. I find that too much alternation is a bad thing as it requires stricter organization between the left and right hand, resulting in transposition errors (two letters in a word swapped). Colemak's rolls are quite comfortable to me. And even if it turns out that Colemak is slightly less optimal in terms of what I could achieve in terms of typing speed, there's a human comfort factor which may be more or less valuable than sheer typing speed.
Of all the well-known layouts, evidence suggests that MTGAP takes the lead in most tests for both prose and code. Not surprising, since it was created from algorithms for finding the best layout. Colemak and BuTeck-(AdNW) are slightly behind.Which evidence? I’ve never seen a serious scientific study about any of these layouts.
Ideally pinky usage should max out at around 5% each and 8% total, but preferably even lower. Same with columns inside the index fingers. Altogether these 4 columns should do no more than 16% of the workload. Conversely, the 3 middle columns are much stronger and faster. Even the top and bottom rows in these 3 columns are typed much faster than the home pinky--sometimes 2x to 3x faster.Do you have some evidence for these claims? Or is this just your personal preference? My personal opinion is that this analysis is substantially incorrect. I would expect real-world data to easily falsify it for a typical sample population of touch typists.
I find my pinky surprisingly strong on home and bottom row presses. Also as long as you float your hands when typing, it's barely an issue to press keys that are off from the home row, so what's most important is that the right keys are positioned for the right finger to avoid bigrams with the same finger. I also disagree that rolls slow you down or that they are tiring.
Welcome yellowfour. Interesting layout, the BEAKL-layout. Looking at the figures it seems a mix of Dvorak and Colemak. And looking at the nice pictures, I still see the Dvorak/AdNW backgrounds in it, with all the vowels on one side.
- A 2.7% same finger use seems rather high !
- 64% of alternation is OK, though my personal preference is a bit higher.
- 14% adjacent keys is (to me) *way too high*. But, other people *love* rolls on adjacent keys.
- I don't see the figure on 3-letter combos on one hand (the AdNW optimizer shows this, when in trigram-mode. Often, a layout that has many "nice" rolls also has many not-so-nice 3 letter combos on one hand. Or even more on one hand, such as (querty) secrets
I agree with yellowfour that a "2 keys left, 2 keys right" rhythm may be ideal - although I do not have data to back this claim up (the mtgapcom site has some anecdotal data though, that seem to support this).
The difference is in milliseconds, so your body can't detect the difference. You need special hardware or software to time how fast each finger types (like http://patorjk.com/typing-speed-test/). The difference adds up quickly in a matter of seconds and minutes.How long a test did you do? You should probably do a test for a half hour or something, on whatever type of prose you commonly type (rather than some chunk of a classic novel) if you want a fair sample.
There are as many bad rolls as there are good rolls for the pinky, so that "advantage" is a wash. You don't like bigrams with the same finger, neither do I. So having the weakest finger (pinky) hit double letters should be avoided.You should try to avoid one-finger, two-key bigrams for any finger. In my opinion, pressing the pinky twice is only marginally different than pressing the middle or ring finger twice. Pressing the index finger or thumb twice in a row should be somewhat easier though. It depends somewhat on how stiff your keyswitches are and how the keys are physically arranged, though. One of the problems with the pinky is that it’s physically shorter, which means that on many keyboards it is slower to e.g. reposition the pinky from the top row to the bottom than for other fingers.
It is MTGAP site. He timed how fast trigrams are typed. The fastest trigrams in general are typed with 2-1 or 1-2 meaning 2 letters on one hand and the 3rd letter on the other hand. Of all the slowest trigrams, the bulk of them are typed all on the same hand.By far the fastest 8-gram is going to be something like the QWERTY ;lkjasdf.
But if you need to type QWERTY sad or sas or something like weasel, it gets pretty slow.
This is what the adnw optimizer calls seesaw.Does it separate out combinations involving the index finger? Because the index finger is much more independent than the other three fingers, alternating back and forth between e.g. index finger and pinky is nowhere near as bad as alternating back and forth between middle finger and ring finger.
This is what the adnw optimizer calls seesaw.Does it separate out combinations involving the index finger?
END {
for(i = 0; i < n; ++i){
# Skip thumbs and index fingers
if(abs(finger) <= 2) continue;
for(j = 0; j < n; ++j){
# ditto, and skip hand alternation as well
if(abs(finger[j]) <= 2 || finger*finger[j] <= 0) continue;
for(k = 0; k < n; ++k){
# ditto.
if(abs(finger[k]) <= 2 || finger*finger[k] <= 0) continue;
# Select combinations where the finger for the first and last
# key are on the same side with respect to the finger operating
# the second key.
if((finger-finger[j])*(finger[k]-finger[j]) > 0){
print "Trigramm", name, name[j], name[k], extra, "'seesaw-noindex'";
}
}
}
}
}
soooo
what is the most optimized layout recently?
mod-dh?
AdNW and Capewell-Dvorak
Normal typing around 70% english, 30% German
Aus der Neo-Welt 299.860 total effort 185.946 positional effort left right
1.037 same finger rp 9.628 shift same finger top 5.2 11.9
kuü.ä vgcljf 71.342 hand alternat. 24.577 shift hand alter. mid 37.2 31.9
hieao dtrnsß 1.898 inward/outward 25.122 inward or outward bot 5.1 8.8
xyö,q bpwmz 8.823 adjacent 20.578 shift adjacent sum 47.5 52.5
4.587 no hand altern. 44.612 two hand altern.
3.395 seesaw 6.664 indir same finger
8.1 11.2 13.0 15.2 --.- --.- 18.0 10.8 13.8 9.9 Sh 2.5 1.1
Capewell-Dvorak 354.518 total effort 193.950 positional effort left right
3.414 same finger rp 9.864 shift same finger top 5.3 11.3
ü,.py qfgrkö 67.405 hand alternat. 33.439 shift hand alter. mid 35.5 30.3
oaeiu dhtnsä 1.250 inward/outward 26.683 inward or outward bot 6.8 10.8
zxcvj lmwbß 15.023 adjacent 18.946 shift adjacent sum 47.5 52.5
7.746 no hand altern. 40.167 two hand altern.
4.124 seesaw 6.076 indir same finger
8.4 8.3 16.8 13.9 --.- --.- 16.8 11.5 15.4 8.8 Sh 2.2 1.3
I type 100% english and I use normal ANSI layout so AdNW is better or are there other layout that is better?
I've tried dvorak but the layout is not for me cause its been hurting my pinky finger because of the heavy use of right pinky finger and I'm searching for another layoutI type 100% english and I use normal ANSI layout so AdNW is better or are there other layout that is better?
Hi Bocahgundul, it depends on your preferences, so try them out (at least a few days / evenings). All are much better than Qwerty.
- Colemak is a fine choice. Pro: closer to Qwerty. Neutral: more rolls, less alternation then Dvorak. Depends on how this feels to you.
- If you want a better Colemak, MTGAP is very nice. The cons are that you have to make your own scripts, so that may be hard for some.
- Dvorak is another fine choice. Pro: is standard on all operating systems, even Windows. Meaning you can use Dvorak withour any USB sticks etc. on virtually every computer, it's "just a setting away". Neutral: more alternation, less rolls.
- If you want "a better Dvorak" there are 2 possibilities for English:
- AdNW (it beats Dvorak when typing English). AdNW is good for German AND good for English. If you only type English, AdNW is still better than Dvorak.
- Capewell-Dvorak is another "better Dvorak". It keeps some qwerty shortcuts, but all in all it's not as good as AdNW. So in the Dvorak family, AdNW is the best guess for typing English.
All in all this leads to three layouts that are all good for English and also well supported (meaning either built in in Operating Systems or available as software for easy install or use off USB-stick) :
- Colemak (and improved qwerty)
- Dvorak
- AdNW (an improved Dvorak).
My advice would be to try both AdNW and Colemak and see which one you prefer. Give both some time. I myself prefer AdNW by far for English, but again this is very personal, lots of people prefer Colemak. Diversity is good :)
Is there good software that helps you switch from layout, to train yourself for example for colemak. Like goodtyping.com with pictures and all?
Is there good software that helps you switch from layout, to train yourself for example for colemak. Like goodtyping.com with pictures and all?
I've been using http://thetypingcat.com/ with great satisfaction. Has Colemak tutorials too.
I use amphetype (https://github.com/webiest/amphetype). You have to build it yourself, but it's nice and simple and doesn't require an internet connection.
For lessons, I analized a bunch of text material I wrote myself (scraped off my own disk drives :D). I used a simple python script to find the most used
- two letter combinations (also known as digrams or digraphs
- three letter combinations (yep, trigrams or trigraphs)
- 4 and 5 letter words - my greek is rusty, so I just call them 4-grams and 5-grams :)
I type mainly in Dutch and English. Therefore, I complemented these x-grams with the 1,000 most common Dutch words and the 1,000 most common English words. As found on the internet.
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that typing lessons philosophy is/was "keyboard centric" in the sense that exercises are based on the keyboard: first you type words on the homerow, then words on the top row, then words on home+top row, and so on. I thought that "word centric" would be better. That is: first train the most common combinations and words. Then less common combinations.
Anecdotal evidence from the adnw-mailing list is by the way that:
- going cold turkey is as fast as a step by step, deliberate training. This resonates with me when I think of learning languages. No better way to learn spanish than surrounded by people who *only* speak spanish.
- accuracy > speed. So first focus on not making mistakes, then on speed. The reason is that you need to form muscle memory. The muscles are dumb, they only repeat patterns. If you constantly type wrong patters, you learn the wrong patters. BTW, accuracy > speed is also who musicians learn. Look at the super fast metal guitar players, or classical piano players - they both train on accuracy, not on speed. Speed is a byproduct of playing accurate.
- training (on amphetype or other programs, or online) is usefull to identity your weakest words / combos, and then train specifically on those words.
Now excuse me, I must start my Amphetype and do some excercises ;D I'm a mediocre typist myself :(
The main thing I've learned from this switch is that there are costs to picking something too original. What will you do if you get a job where you need to work all day on a computer you aren't allowed to customize heavily? Workman is the most exotic you can get and still be compatible with normal machines, since it's among the default options for most Linux systems, can be added to Windows with a portable application, and has 1 iPhone/iPad app that supports it. Anything more rare, and you're tied to your workstation. At this rate I'll probably switch to Dvorak sometime in the future, simply for the sake of being able to transfer more easily between devices.
1. If you are not allowed to change your PC or get your own hardware, your boss is a m*therf**ker and you should seek employment elsewhere. I had to work with eclipse on a i3 with 512MB memory in 2012 with a 17" screen OVER NETWORK which was 100mbps. I quit.
2. If seeking a proper boss is not an option, bring your own hardware. That's what I do now: I take my mbp everywhere I go. Have my own screen and mech board at the office.
1. If you are not allowed to change your PC or get your own hardware, your boss is a m*therf**ker and you should seek employment elsewhere. I had to work with eclipse on a i3 with 512MB memory in 2012 with a 17" screen OVER NETWORK which was 100mbps. I quit.
2. If seeking a proper boss is not an option, bring your own hardware. That's what I do now: I take my mbp everywhere I go. Have my own screen and mech board at the office.
Good luck getting custom HW into a nuclear plant =)
Also, when you have to switch between computers all day, and use stuff you do not own or control (think troubleshooting, for example), you are stuck with what is available. Carrying a keyboard everywhere, all the time, is not always an option.
sometimes it is simply not allowed to plug in any hardware "therecould be malware ;D
With HDDs I can understand, but keyboards..
sometimes it is simply not allowed to plug in any hardware "therecould be malware ;D
With HDDs I can understand, but keyboards..
See here (https://srlabs.de/badusb/). Any USB device can be made malicious. A keyboard could also have firmware that, when plugged into certain boxes, behaves differently, and collects data about the box, which the owner can later extract. Just by looking at it, you can't tell what is in the keyboard. There may be an audio recording device in the case, for all we know.
another question:
Whats the best way to bring adNW to an ergodox? (just drop the ü ä ö ß into the 1.5u column or second layer..)? Has anyone experience?
75% is definitely the best one out there.Did you post this in the wrong thread by accident?
75% is definitely the best one out there.Did you post this in the wrong thread by accident?
I've been using QWERTY with custom key mapped keys on my 75%, taking a page from the HHKB layout with the Capslock = Ctrl, \| = Backspace, Backspace = \|, as well as my right control key as a Fn layer key. [...] How I edit word documents now is that by holding down the right Control key (FN) with my thumb, I use my left hand on WASD to move around, and my right index finger on \| (Backspace) and right middle finger on Backspace (Del) to quickly edit documents.Seems like you have a setup you like. :thumb:
[... definitely the best one out there]
my personal layout (optimized for Dutch, but also OK for English):
buy,* qkvlfj
saeio gdtnrw
z**.ij pcmhx
I nicknamed this [English] layout DvorMax:
kyu.* zlmdpv
rieao hnstcw
x?:,/ jqfgb
I notice there are quite a few changes to your personal layout since Nordsee! which you created at the same time as DvorMax. Any changes you would recommend for DvorMax?
Hi,
I know it's an old post, but do you happen to also have an ADNW layout that is fit for Dutch, but that fits on 30 keys?
I'm looking at generating one with the adnw program, but the configuration is daunting :)
Or if you could share your config files for Dutch that would be great as well!
thanks
Jesse