geekhack Community > Ergonomics
Yet another keyboard layout: eNNe
Sc0tTy:
Updated:
By now Ian and me have made a lot of changes to the layout and word lists which resulted in big advances :)
I will be keeping this opening post unchanged but the name BoeKoe is no more, its now eNNe.
Enjoy the discussion :)
Original post:
Hi there,
So yes, this is yet another keyboard layout... And with all layouts, this one fills some specific needs (and comes great responsibility).
In particular this layout is to be used on an ErgoDox keyboard.
The layout I will be introducing shortly is developed for typing English and Dutch (about 50/50 share) and programming in C#, JavaScript, LESS and HTML.
Before I start I would like to clarify some things.
Introduction
I've been typing Colemak for over 5 years and recently one of my TEK's started failing.
So I had to look for a new keyboard and a long story short I purchased a ErgoDox EZ.
One of the downsides of this keyboard is that it has fewer keys than the TEK and moved some other keys around, this forced me to rethink my layout.
Firstly what I did is modify Colemak so that it wouldn't be a problem but I also really felt the need to tweak the layout because some fingers were being overused (mainly my right index finger).
This brought me back to the same journey which resulted in me choosing in Colemak.
Firstly I started analyzing my own WhatPulse data, it contains 2.1 million keypresses.
I also know that key count is not the only thing that makes a layout good (or bad) and after doing a lot of research I decided to base my layout to Ian's X6.4H layout, I preferred it over the BEAKL layout. You can check out Ian's and Den's long conversation here: http://shenafu.com/smf/index.php?topic=89, its a very interesting read.
The X6.4H and the BEAKL layout both have one great omission: the arrow cluster.
According to my data the arrow cluster has a combined usage of over 191.000 key presses.
Which is about 8% of the total amount and therefor it must be easily accessible (specially with copy/paste and such).
I didn't like a some other things about X6.4H and so for the past few weeks I've been tweaking and tweaking and I'm finally comfortable to publish my own layout to the world to get some feedback.
For this first version I only wanted to move around the keys and not assign any extra layer to them, that will be my second step. That step will including assigning F-Keys, moving numbers and punctuations to another layer and assigning keyboard shortcuts to be used while developing and such stuff.
Another step I want to take is to move the modifier keys to the home row with the EZ's "Spacecadet" functionality :) So please don't worry about Shift/Ctrl/AltGr placement.
BoeKoe
Introducing the BoeKoe layout:
For you non-Dutchies, we have the saying "Boe zegt de Koe" which is a kind of children's saying and translates to "A cow says moo". I found it fitting with the Boe and Koe trigrams being painful to type on this layout. A cow also usually has only two colors and this layout tries to cater to both Dutch and English.
These are its design guidelines:
* Comfortable for both English, Dutch and programming
* Arrow cluster must be on the right hand primary layer. They will also be included in load count for each finger
* Outer index columns must be as light as possible
* Right index finder load must be reduced significantly, because of significant usage with mouse/tablet and arrow cluster
* Right thumb load must not be high, because of significant usage with mouse/tablet
* Middle finger is touch and can handle load
This is the Flipped version which I will be using for testing on the Keyboard Layout Analyzer forks.
Flipping the layout shouldn't impact the layout performance in the KLA tests but it does significantly anyway.
The flipped layout also makes it a little easier to switch from Colemak, especially as I switched the T and S keys already.
I also used the following weight, which I derived from info here: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=82183.0
According to my WhatPulse data this results in the following load finger load:
And following column load:
This is the load comparison compared with a standard Colemak layout on the ErgoDox, with the UP arrow key placed where the comma is.
For extra information, this would be the column load using Ian's X6.4H layout according to my WhatPulse data.
With the UP arrow key placed where the comma is AND the H key placed the same as the BoeKoe layout.
As you can see this has a significantly bigger load on the index fingers.
The original X6.4H layout has the H key placed where with the Spacebar, which imho is a really bad choise as the Spacebar is by far the most used key (not counting the E key).
Wordlist
Attached you will find the word list I used for generating this layout.
It includes Ian's following word lists: Most used words exploded, Bigram and Trigram.
And includes a top 50000 Dutch words exploded: but only any word that has a count higher than 1000 you can find it here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hermitdave/FrequencyWords/master/content/2016/nl/nl_50k.txt
Scores
These are my scores on the three Keyboard Analyzer forks with the mixed word set.
Den's: http://shenafu.com/code/keyboard/Keyboard%20Layout%20Analyzer%202.html
Ian's: http://kla.keyboard-design.com/
Wierdly I cannot get above the X6 NonGr layout. I beat it in every sub test, but my layout only loses slightly in the "Same hand and thumb use" test.
I'm unsure why that has such a high penalty though.
Patrick's: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer
BoeKoe performs pretty good on full English key sets too, Alice for example, especially considering the other constraints I put on the layout:
As a disclaimer: I have not typed a single letter on this layout, I will do so starting tomorrow :P
I wanted to get feedback before I was a week in.
Attached you will also find the two BoeKoe layouts and the two X6.4H layouts.
I look forward to any positive or negative feedback!
X6 ErgoDox NonGr.txt (13.25 kB - downloaded 212 times.)
X6 ErgoDox.txt (13.25 kB - downloaded 193 times.)
BoeKoe F.txt (13.36 kB - downloaded 201 times.)
BoeKoe.txt (13.35 kB - downloaded 216 times.)
Wordlist en Woordenlijst.txt (281.15 kB - downloaded 561 times.)
Sc0tTy:
Updated the post a couple of times with more information etc., should now be complete :)
Sc0tTy:
Did some more tweaking, got it below 114 at 113.99 :)
Switching the R and N key will reduce it to .85 but I don't think it's actually better because the ring finger would be moving around more.
Ian told me that having the S on the index isn't the best idea. I tried moving it around but can't seem to find a spot and keep/reduce the same score.
I'm still not happy with the LSM column, but it seems to be the least-worst for now.
BoeKoe 133.99.txt (13.36 kB - downloaded 194 times.)
iandoug:
I still get vastly different results from Den original scoring vs current scoring.
Even when testing on plain Dutch (ugly duckling borrowed from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25580/pg25580.txt) with angle quotes replaced with normal doublequotes.
Must have a look at Den's current scoring and figure out what is producing such radical differences.
Sc0tTy:
Just so you know typing the letters é or è is very simple on a dutch layout: hit the back-tick or apostrophe and then hit the key.
Also using those lettters like for instance meer and méér is 99% the same word but just prolonging or shortening the pronunciation.
Therefor replacing the é with e is not a problem, though the ' and `placement should have that usage in mind.
And to be honest, I hardly ever use it. I'd say maybe once a week for één but thats it.
I ran that text on v1 and v2 but see no mayor difference for BoeKoe, so i'm not sure what you are talking about.
v1:
v2:
Or did you mean on X6 NonGr?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version