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.
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.
From my own tests, the ring finger is consistently the fastest and the pinky is consistently slower. Surprisingly the fastest key (for me) is the bottom ring finger.
Also, the right hand is stronger and faster. From this I conclude that vowels should be put on the right side, due to more vowels have higher frequency--4 of 5 most frequent letters in English are vowels.
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. Like Dvorak 'S' & 'L' and Colemak 'O' which are quite common double letters. Hence, you're agreeing with me that common letters, especially letters that are commoly doubled in English, should not be put on the pinky.
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.
The Dvorak/AdNW influence is coincidental since the final layout is created by the optimizer. Probably because the default AdNW itself has heavy Dvorak influence and my modifications didn't change those qualities much, if at all.
However, the previous BEAKL prototype layouts that I created manually did resemble Dvorak. Since it seemed easier to divide the keyboard by putting all vowels on one side, and then work on each half to find the right balance.
But yes it is somewhat surprising for BEAKL optimized layout to resemble Dvorak that much. If you look closely at other layouts not created from AdNW nor trying to improve Dvorak, some of them may not be that much different than Dvorak. MTGAP has 6 vowels (AEIOU+Y) on left half. Colemak has 5 on right half (only A is on left side.)
As for the stats:
- 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
- 2.7% same finger is actually low relative to other layouts. Other layouts: Colemak 3.0%, MTGAP 2.5%, Dvorak 3.5%, Capewell 3.2%, Qwerty 6.1%
- 64% alternation is already higher than the other layouts, which have between 50% to 62% hand alternation.
- 14% adjacent is too high? other layouts; Colemak 15.6%, MTGAP 16.9%, Dvorak 12.9%, Capewell 18.8%, Qwerty 18.0%
- the trigram stats:
10.866 no hand altern.
42.637 two hand altern.
5.648 seesaw
5.328 indir same finger
These seem a lot better than MTGAP and Colemak.
MTGAP:
14.489 no hand altern.
33.870 two hand altern.
8.414 seesaw
4.187 indir same finger
Colemak:
19.892 no hand altern.
34.560 two hand altern.
10.736 seesaw
4.487 indir same finger
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).
It is MTGAP site.
https://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/typing-data-preliminary-analysis/ 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.