I mentioned in the thread here (
http://geekhack.org/showthread.php?27089-A-Kinesis-Advantage-fan-tries-the-TrulyErgonomic-keyboard/page2) that I liked the Maltron idea of pushing the hands farther apart by splitting the letter keys and putting the number pad between them, so I played around with Qliner Hotkeys keyboard designer and came up with something ergonomic enough to surf the internet, and big enough to surf Maui.
My influences include the Maltron, the ErgoEmacs design by Xah Lee (
http://xahlee.org/comp/ultimate_keyboard_layout.html), and my TypeMatrix 2020. Plus, I added a touchpad, because I really like them, and you can ditch the mouse. (To make the keyboard more reasonable in size -- but still big -- you can remove everything from the touchpad on up, and simply use the secondary number pad home/end/ins/del/pgup/pgdn functions.)
I decided to show the CarpalX QGMLWB layout (
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization) and the MTGAP non-Kinesis layout (
http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/introducing-the-first-fully-optimized-shifted-layout/#comments) with a four changes of varying significance. First, I moved one key (the backslash key in QWERTY) down next to the right shift. Second, I added a "Lock" key -- holding it down with caps makes capslock, with shift make shift lock, scroll makes scroll lock, and num makes numlock. You can even go into Alt and CTRL-lock (the former if you wanted a lot of alt-num codes, the latter for whatever). Third, I changed some of the keys on the number pad around -- added a delete, dropped the Enter since there was one an inch to the right, added a comma.
And finally, much more importantly, I flipped the numbers along the top row of the keyboard with the punctuation keys, since having numbers in the center makes it rather superfluous (you can still access the numbers like normal by hitting shift, while the punctuation is unshifted).
The top picture in the two following picture pairs shows the major unshifted keys, while the bottom shows the shifted version. And finally, the very bottom picture shows the punctuation I would prefer to keep together (MTGAP split apart some of them), but just to keep it confusing the bottom key is unshifted and the top key is shifted.
CarpalX QGMLWB:
[ Attachment Invalid Or Does Not Exist ] 41958[/ATTACH]
MTGAP
[ Attachment Invalid Or Does Not Exist ] 41986[/ATTACH]
Punctuation key pairs I like:
[ Attachment Invalid Or Does Not Exist ] 41960[/ATTACH]
(Editing this produced additional thumbnails. Not sure why. I hope MTGAP is fixed. The attached thumbnail has an incorrect picture, but I'm not sure how to get rid of it completely.)