Hit me. Is it colemak, dvorak (guessing no), maltron, or one of those really rare ones? I can't seem to find those websites that compare the stats of different layouts
Which "stats" are you referring to?
Are you considering just typing text, or programming, or gaming, or calculations or combinations thereof?
For my money, speaking solely of entering text, if you're looking purely at the "layout", you have to compare only those factors which are not "human related". eg whether it's "comfortable", can one get a decent "rhythm", whether one can type accurately, quickly, whether one gets sore shoulders. They're all related, I would submit, to individual variations of people, and should not be considered, at least in a first approximation.
Measures such as distance traveled by the hands/fingers over the course of keying (say) 10,000 words, what distance is traveled keying "common" digraphs and trigraphs (common in English I suppose), what percentage of typing requires moving from the home row to another, what percentage of keying requires a "hurdle" ie from the top row to the bottom row or vice versa
would probably be more valid indicators of a layout's "efficiency".
As a starting point (note that) I'd submit that the number of different words which can be typed with minimal travel, ie without moving away from the "home row" would be the way to go.
It's a very simple calculation, very accurate (providing all parties start out with the same word list(s)), and as long as one ignores individual perceptions of whether words are commonly used (this varies with occupation, country etc) pretty well indisputable.
http://www.maltron.com/keyboard-info/word-lists/word-lists-maltron-layout.htmlhttp://www.maltron.com/keyboard-info/word-lists/word-lists-qwerty-layout.htmlThe above links give a fairly detailed comparison of QWERTY against Maltron. Perhaps somebody might like to continue the analysis with Dvorak and Colemak.
This link (which I also placed in another post) has some fairly detailed academic papers which make interesting reading, and as far as I'm able to find, there are not equivalents for the other layouts. (It should be noted that the Lillian Malt papers indicate that she actually used Dvorak in her study, as well as QWERTY and Maltron.)
http://www.maltron.com/keyboard-info/academic-papers.htmlJoe