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Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

This is a really fun idea!

I wonder if any research has been done since Colemak was released about the optimal keyboard layout for English. Because letter positioning is not the only concern - you also need to worry about how easy it is to type common sequences of letters - finding the optimal layout is probably a very hard problem, requiring sophisticated mathematical analysis.

I can vouch for the advantages of using Dvorak, but I would totally consider a switch if someone had a "provably optimal" layout.

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There's a project called Carpalx [1] which is dedicated to trying to optimize keyboard layouts. The three layouts it offers as fully optimal according to their measurements (each with its own restrictions) seem to offer quite some improvement, though their names aren't quite as nice as some of the more popular alternatives (copied from [2] + some clarification):

- QFMLWY - this is best layout obtained by relocating all QWERTY letters

- QGMLWB - this optimized layout uses a Colemak-like character layout [ie. where the P and ; keys are swapped]

- QGMLWY - this is similar to the layout above, but keeps ZXCV in place

It's an interesting project but the inconveniences of switching from QWERTY to an alternative already stops me from switching to Dvorak or Colemak, so I doubt I'll move to something even more obscure any time soon.

[1] http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/

[2] http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization

Thanks, I've been looking at this site. QGMLWB seems pretty decent and KDE actually has support for Carpalx layouts already, so switching would be easy.

It's surprising that the layout didn't move more punctuation and symbols around - the Qwerty default positions for the comma and period are surely not optimal (bottom row, ring finger for period). I wonder what results one would get running the same algorithm but allowing these changes as well.

Update for anyone who was curious about that last point: I figured out how to use the simulated annealing software on that website, which allows you to use a custom mask for the characters than can be swapped. On my very first run I got a result better than QGMLWB: in fact QGMLWB requires 2.5% more effort to type the training corpus than the one I generated.

I bet a huge win would be moving the exclamation point, but I haven't figured out how to allow the program to remap shifted keys.

I've been a happy QFMLWY user for many years. It greatly eased my wrist pain and I feel a lot more efficient at typing. It took me about a month to switch from QWERTY, going cold turkey. I highly recommend it. The drawback is that I'm now not able to touch type on a QWERTY layout anymore. However, I think that's only because I no longer need that skill. I presume that if I had to type on QWERTY regularly, I'd be able to touch type on both layouts.

Agreed, I've been using Dvorak for almost 10 years now. It's more comfortable, and I can type roughly 20WPM faster compared to when I was using qwerty. That being said, switching to something better really does sound interesting.

There is space for improvement. I tried the neo-layout for a while which is optimized for German and it certainly feels good. However:

1. you have a hard time with every single set of default shortcuts there is

2. as soon as you switch languages it falls apart

3. as soon as you are using someone elses Computer it falls apart

I started to use the English layout with some custom mappings (for Umlauts) entirely and never looked back. The gap towards the default German one is not too big to slow you down too much, yet programming doesn’t feel like a total pain.

As a Dvorak user, I'm already paying these penalties, so switching to another layout wouldn't be that big a deal.

On another note, I'm rather skeptical of Colemak and other layouts that overly resemble Qwerty. It seems almost certain that they're sacrificing some degree of improvement for similarity to the layout most people are already familiar with. That's the main reason I learned and continue to use Dvorak.

I'm also a long time Dvorak user and I looked into other layouts and while some of them seemed interesting or even superior to Dvorak the difference is probably too small to justify learning a new layout. Even the Colemak FAQ says as much: https://colemak.com/FAQ#Is_it_worth_switching_from_Dvorak_to...

>I'm rather skeptical of Colemak and other layouts that overly resemble Qwerty. It seems almost certain that they're sacrificing some degree of improvement for similarity to the layout

You might be wrong about that, see http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?popular_alternatives for a rather in-depth analysis of keyboard layouts. Some QWERTY-like layouts manage to score overall better, although the difference is not huge.

Personally these days I'm more interesting in experimenting with different keyboard shapes rather than tweaking the layout some more. I'm currently playing with OpenSCAD to create a custom 3D printed split ortholinear keyboard in the spirit of the Dactyl.

I use a Dvorak layout with the I and U reversed as in Dutch and English the I is used more frequent. I could change and optimize more but then I compatibility would be less (remapping is not always easy). I can fallback to qwerty if needed. Ad 3: I use Karabiner-Elements on MacOS en Autohotkey on Windows to easily switch. I sometimes write German, but I don't bother with the umlauts, I suffix with e... not sure if a German reader finds that annoying.

I think German readers are used to read oe and ae and ue instead of ö, ä, ü etc.

Decreases parsability slighty because you might not be used to the visual pattern of the whole word, but unless you are writing a book, nobody will bother. Germans themselves would write it that way if the font has no umlauts or they are stuck with ASCII for other reasons.

I mapped right alt + a to ä, right alt + s to ß etc, which works quite well. The thing I like best is right alt + number for superscript number, because you can quickly make footnotes in any text that way.

What I liked about the neo layout is the concept of having different “layers”, for mathematical notations, greek letters etc. and this only shows how little thought actually went into most official layouts..

That's a great tip, it's obvious but I didn't think of that as I only incidentally write German. Layers are nice, but they can also be implemented in Dvorak.

The workman layout seems to have the most thought behind it: https://workmanlayout.org/

If I put in effort to tune the markov keyboard, I'll use the workman approach, right now the code isn't as smart as it could be.

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