Efficient keyboard layout for English and Spanish (opens in new tab)

If you look at alternative layouts in a vacuum and you base it on things like word frequency or character frequency, I'm certain you're right, but outside of the bubble and when you're interacting with software that all assumes that you're using qwerty and organizes its own keyboard interactions with that assumption, the advantages become much less clear.

In fact, trying to account for that is why colemak uses the zxcv keys where they are, if I'm not mistaken.

So I don't really agree with the notion that you get a huge benefit at all. You are potentially getting some ergonomic benefit in certain contexts (like typing out essays) while at the same time sacrificing ergonomics of keyboard shortcuts you may or may not be able to change and the mental overhead required to remap your muscle memory to fit it.

These tradeoffs are remarkably apparent to me as someone that uses a Kinesis board (and have used a variety of small, bespoke keyboards). There's a lot of tasks that simply aren't suitable for this keyboard, even if I remap the keys with QMK to try to better suit that context. If you need a key to be immediately accessible, having it placed inside a layer just isn't good enough.

With that being said, I'd encourage people to try these things out and see for themselves. I personally don't think they're all that useful, but there's dozens of others that I'm sure swear that using dvorak or workman or colemak or whatever alternative layout changed their life. Just don't expect miracles.

Many people have tried alternative layouts and stick with them.

I have not seen many anecdotes where people get used to an alternative layout, and then revert to using QWERTY because they find QWERTY more comfortable to use.

If you're goal is ergonomics, the physical layout will get you 90% of the benefits. Ditching qwerty might get you that 10% but at a higher cost since almost all computing is built around qwerty.

I agree with you but I dread the day I need to change layout and train my brain and my muscle memory for another keyboard layout.

I'm past my 40s- I rather teach my kid to use Dvorak.

> eliminate stretching (keyboards that reduce the number of keys help with that).

I think the more significant detail about "keyboards with reduced number of keys" is instead "keyboards with multiple thumbkeys".

On a standard keyboard, your thumbs only get to use spacebar. With these small keyboards, my thumbs get to use space, backspace, enter, escape, tab, delete. (And I put the modifier keys as Home Row modifiers).

Albeit, this is almost entirely orthogonal to how the alphabetical keys are arranged. Having 2-3 keys per thumb would be a benefit to any keyboard; where the main downside is "keyboards with 2-3 keys per thumb are expensive or diy".

I see people occasionally mention shortcuts or vim as reasons they can't switch layouts, but I've done it multiple times and you just learn the new spots, same as typing words with all the letters that moved. It never felt like a showstopper for me.

You should take a look at Colemak. It keeps the zxcv at the same place, particularly for shortcuts.

I’ve switched now 6 years ago. I had a speed of about 80-85 wpm on Qwerty. And now recently I’m on the same speed with Colemak. So that took about 5 years, without deliberate practice. However after 4 months I was already at 57 WPM which is perfectly fine to be productive.

I still type with thumbs on qwerty though. So I haven’t changed my phone to colemak. I must say though that when typing at a colleague's keyboard, I have to type with 4 fingers in order not to confuse the layout. I’m not able to do both as touch typing

I had the same issue, so I implemented the following workaround: https://github.com/tbocek/dvorak. This remaps on Linux CTRL-I back to CTRL-C when using a Dvorak keyboard layout.

Nice project. However it makes writing in some languages merely possible but not easy. For example Portuguese uses a lot of ã and õ, which are only available via dead keys. If I have to use dead keys anyway, then I'd rather use a Compose key, aptly mapped on the otherwise-useless Insert key.

Besides, Romanian language is not fully supported, lacking ț and ă, and Polish too, lacking ą and ę.

The problem with eurkey is the high enter key on German keyboards, it's kinda made for US keyboards. (I usually map caps-aous to äöüß and that's good enough for me).

My problem is a proper layout on a German keyboard, not some weird Umlauts on a US one :P

Thanks! It does indeed look better than the prevalent "US intl", which places Ö on the P key in favor of accented O.

I think, because I only ever need umlauts, I still prefer "German (US)" which only adds umlauts to the US layout.

Yeah, I love EURKey, it even includes the capital ẞ. The only thing I’d like is an easier typographic apostrophe (’ instead of ') which is on Ctrl+Alt+Shift+0 (though I do use it almost automatically, nowadays).

> And it also doesn't break the ' and ` keys, which US international breaks on Windows, since you have to type them twice to get the regular character.

You can also hit the space key after those characters (or other modifiers like " or ~) to get just the character and without a space after. I find it a lot easier than the Mac-approach, but YMMV.

I am using it on Linux (GNOME 44 under Fedora 38), where it is natively supported. I don't know about Windows specifically but I was under the impression that it is pretty well-known.

Let's go into why P is on the wrong side of the board in Workman (and in QWERTY, too). It is true that P is a vowel-hugging consonant. A distance analyzer that the creator of Workman used to look at travel distance would of course conclude that it should be one with the vowels.

But look how often P shows up as a double letter, which stops you from rolling the keys because of the double-strike: opposition oppression stopping appendage application applying appreciate --- there's a lot.

So in Workman the word PEOPLE is a painful SFB-fiesta, and that is a Top 200 word in English, and it does not feel good at all! That's because P needs to be opposite of the vowel cluster, not just because of PEOPLE, but because you need to use one hand to take care of the double-letter strike while the other hand is setting up the vowel cluster roll that is coming.

It's noted in the README.md Workman has a bad vowel cluster and one of the more annoying bigrams is LY.

The letter P in Workman is on the wrong side of the board. If you are making a vowel cluster (or close to one if you leave out A), then P goes opposite of where O and U go.

the inner columns are not great and you do need to get Z out of the same column as A to free up that SFB.

Interestingly, Spanish might be easier to optimize as a solitary language if the punctuation keys are moved away from the vowel cluster. You can get insanely-low SFB scores. Spanish is a higher-syllable density language with better spelling conventions than English.

What some of the alt-Spanish layouts have done is just take an EN-optimized layout and add diacritics (and Canaria is not an exception here either, it just restored some ergo sanity to Spanish vs. pushing Q and J to bad spots like most EN ergo layouts do). For those who work entirely in Spanish most of the time, EN-ergo layouts are not ideal.

I'm really good at typing in the traditional qwerty and йцукен layouts. The problem is that I need two and sometimes the wrong one is active. This is why I envy people who can do everything without needing non-Latin alphabets.