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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

I learned recently that there are way, way more alt-layouts than the ones you've heard of: Dvorak & Colemak.

Not only that, people just change them to suit their needs! They use things like Hands Down [0] as a guide, and make up their own layout.

Wild.

[0]: https://sites.google.com/alanreiser.com/handsdown

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Thank you for the link! That looks fascinating. I have instantly added it to my "keyboard" bookmarks folder!

I will promptly forget it exists and keep typing on the random layout I learned to touch type on 20 years ago, all the while suffering from terrible finger acrobatics and wishing for a better layout every single day.

I've made my own layouts[0][1] and I'd say the many variants of Hands Down are probably the best example of a layout that's been developed in a thoughtful manner.

[0]: https://www.jonashietala.se/series/t-34/

[1]: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/11/26/the_current_cybe...

Would you say they are hands down the best?

(I do believe that the best for you is a custom layout.)

Very nice website with many solid principles! Though one big flaw in all the designs I've seen is that they rely on bad data - text corpus that is the output of human editing efforts, not the input.

So all those "0.00001%" stats aren't as precise as they seem, and you still see the frequently used backspace/enter in the awful pinky position despite the official philosophy of "Hands Down is easy on the pinkies"

Have you seen any design that is based on actual human input?

As far as I'm aware hands down layouts were primarily designed to be used on a split ergonomic keyboard with thumb cluster, the space and enter lives on the thumb cluster.

Even those better thumb variants don't seem to statistically take that into account (judging from the description/heatmaps/data sources), but then it also presents the "slab" variant...

For those who type on German keyboards or in German, there are a number of layouts that have evolved around the Neo 2 layout [1]. The main driving force is ergonomics, but since not everyone works the same way, many variants have emerged (and still do) [2]. Interesting is the craftsmanship, including customized programs to optimize the layouts [3].

[1] https://www.neo-layout.org/Layouts/

[2] https://maximilian-schillinger.de/keyboard-layouts-neo-adnw-...

[3] https://hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/evolve-keyboard-layout

German layouts with [ ] { } in such horrible positions are killing all joy when programming, especially in curly brace heavy languages.

Changed to US qwerty 30 years ago, never looking back.

You don't save much. {} still requires a modifier key. You get [] for "free".

There is a whole usability universe between shift and AltGr, the former being accesible with the other hand.

I always changed to ANSI layout, independent of the layout of the actual keys. Now I carry a HHKB with me, and connect through BT to whatever computer I want to work on. No matter what human language I write in (I do some) I prefer using accidents like tildes and umlauts with modifier keys.

And there are modal editors, who switch keylaouts depending on the need of the minute.. debug/edit/search

https://keyboard-design.com/internet-letter-layout-db.html

site is a bit awkward to browse though.

If you're interested, look at the layout doc: https://bit.ly/layout-doc-v2

Yeah when I was a 20 or so and just started working I taught myself Dvorak for a while, but realized how bad it was for coding in C. So I made my own C language one as well.

Of course you still have to type text and at the time you couldn't easily switch between different layouts, so after a time I got bored of it and gave up.

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