Hello everybody,
Some couple of days ago I started to use my DIY ergodox
(built at least one year ago if not more - but never had the chance to practice).
Something that surpised me a lot is that I was literally blocked to type.
The keycaps are blank so at first I thought that it might be that but even with regular keycaps I had too much difficulties.
After analyzing why, I just noticed that I was always typing without really keeping my fingers to their dedicated keys cluster.
I mean sometimes my right index could press B or even G while it's also true for my left index is pressing sometimes Y or H
(and this is also applicable to middle fingers pressing neighbor keys).
For reference, I'm typing on a qwerty around 50 wpm (not that much but this is almost without looking at the keyboard).
So since I'll need to practice a lot to get rid of that muscle memory, I see here a great opportunity to switch to an actual true optimized layout!
I'm not concerned about likeness toward qwerty (which Colemak claims) because since I have to start over with that split keyboard the learning curve will be steep anyway.
I'm also not concerned about numbers row and symbols since the keyboard is programmable, I'll probably end up having dedicated layers.
However, something I'm more concerned about is my pinkies. I have some little pain on them particularly on the proximal phalanges (third phalanges from the tip).
Besides Dvorak and Colemak, I have heard of
Carpalx QGMLWB and
MTGAP, and
AdNW (but for this one I failed to find english ressources and even english layouts without the german letters).
But I also heard that some of these designs are somehow arbitrary and only focus for example on raw letter frequencies and maybe at least alterning hands but not on rolling fingers and not taking into account bigrams, trigrams etc.
And meanwhile I also discovered BEAKL (which the official author's site seems down btw!)
Here a
link from the wayback machine; Here
a wiki page about the layout(s),
there are many variants; And here
an excellent blog from someone who's tinkering with the layout
(and he has some great keybs too!).
Then, I did many tests (really a lot) using the keyboard analyzer from
keyboard-design.com.
Regarding the results (mainly efforts, distances and finger usages), they are somehow very close to each others, but BEAKL variants have a very low pinky usage which I tend to prefer.
I also tried many top layouts from the lists at
keyboard-design.com, like
seelpy..
But I'm not a fan of having a letter and its capitalized version on different keys, even if the results are awesome. I'm not yet so cybernetically enhanced
Now before I continue on, I have a question for the people using one of these layouts or even a customized version of one of them, do you see real benefits?
Also to begin with, does it make sense to want
a perfect an almost perfect layout? Or is it something I'm overly complicating?
I assume that in any case, efforts and time will be necessary but since I'm willing to put the efforts anyway, I'm particularly concerned about the end results.
In my case the main reason is to gain more confort and I know that before the layout itself there are more important things around, like the keyboard itself (hence the switch to an ergodox - and I'll probably go with a dactyl later), the mouse (I'm using a big trackball actually), the chair, and so on..
So regarding the layout, since I will stick with it, I want to invest to the right one
(at least right for me but I want to be sure that the direction I take makes sense).
Regarding the layouts I tested, here are the results from the keyboard analyzer (linked above).
And here the associated heatmaps:
Edit:
Picture in original sizeSomething I wasn't aware and that I learned
here (down below) is the notion of Easyblock keys cluster and Homeblock Keys cluster.
Some of these layouts (particularly BEAKL varaints) almost match with the Easyblock and Homeblock cluster but not for both hands for example.
So I tried to relocate (arbitrarily) in some of these layouts some keys to end up with a heatmap that matches as much as possible the Easyblock or Homeblock clusters.
But I think that doing it arbitrarily will completely ignore all the notions of rolling, alterning, same finger press etc., really all the actual things that can bring comfort (because I'm more concerned about comfort than WPM score).
It was a long post, so thank you very much for taking the time to read!
Any comments or advice will be much appreciated!