As everyone and their dog and their cat knows, there are significantly more keys to the right of the right pinky than are to the left of the left one, and that's before taking into account the nav cluster and the numpad (not to say anything of the mouse). In another thread, I proposed a layout that moves the numpad to the left side so the keyboard would be more centered and I wondered... shouldn't this be done on the alphanum cluster as well? Could all the {1-0}{A-Z} keys be shifted to the right by one unit and then reorder the rest, for the sake of a keyboard layout where the home fingers are “properly” centered? Could this be workable? I fired up KLE and after fiddling around a bit, this is what I came up with:
Main features of note:
- All the main alphanum keys ( 1..0 - Q..P [ A..L ; ' Z..M , . / ) have been moved one unit to the right... as well as the backquote (`~) key.
- The = ] \ keys have all been moved to cover the newly created rift. Note how the \| key is now 1U.
- The corner place vacated by the backquote key is now available and can be used for something like, say, Back Tab (more on this below).
- The 2.25U ANSI Enter key has been replaced by an ISO Enter; the latter is generally {citation needed} regarded as being easier to depress, and the former is favored by its users for being closer to the pinky... in this layout, the Enter key has the advantages of both.
- No tiny ISO left Shift; no excessively large right Shift.
- Since we're redoing the layout, I “went there” and separated AltGr into its constituent parts, as it should have always been; this layout has the four mods (Shift, Ctrl, Alt and Graph) on both sides.
- The comfortable accessibility of the Graph (formerly AltGr) layer would ease up full usage of it, avoiding with this the need for the extra ISO key between left Shift and Z (actually \|, as this stands now).
The addition of the Back Tab is a personal peeve; this key disappeared long ago from non-terminal keyboards, but the frequent use nowadays of Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab make me think that it'd be a nice addition... and one not too costly if for some reason it had to be taken away — in particular, if this layout were to be made into a 60%, having Esc move there in its place would certainly be much less of a fuss than stepping over the backquote key:
This isn't to say that there wouldn't be other difficulties — compact layouts that rely on shortening the extant right Shift would run into problems. For example, a carelessly designed typical 75% would risk looking like this:
Other keyboard layout redesigns (Colemak, Workman, etc.) rearrange the entire layout, but seem to not bother shifting the fingers' resting positions away from the usual placing (for example, Dvorak's home row is {Caps}aoeUidHtns-{Enter}); in orthogonal layouts, it's common to see the ASDFG and HJKL; halves separated by one column or more (even sticking a numpad in the middle!), but not simply shifting the entire block. In this regard, I have to wonder...
So far, most of the times I've had a wacky idea regarding keyboards... someone else has thought of it before; sometimes it's even been implemented into actual, mass-produced units; I can't believe I am the first git to think of this. Am I? Really? In spite of that, could this be workable? Not taking retraining into account, could this help regular and/or casual users to type with less effort?