deskthority

I started using the Capewell layout, but I have read many times that it should not be used. I very much enjoy the layout and agree with Capewell's ideas as to what make a good layout and as far as I can tell, the recomended replacement does not match with his ideas.

So should I continue using Capewell, use an alternate, or do as he planned and revise the code and use the resultant layout@

Link?

I'm playing around with non QWERTY layouts too. Colemak is good, but I like Workman's priorities better: less swivelling left and right with the forefingers. Trouble is, I don't like Workman itself…

Think I'm going to have to make my own. Anyone got some good analysis tools? I'd like to optimise for common bi-grams, like Workman does.

http://www.michaelcapewell.com/projects/keyboard/

Take a look, I love the full stop placement - above the A, replacing the Q on qwerty.

Looks a lot like Dvorak to me, which in turn looks a fair bit like Qwerty's 19th century rival: Blickensderfer's DHIATENSOR:

Note Dvorak's right hand home row. It's a respin of the Blick. A layout optimised for one of these:


Of course, Dvorak and Capewell are both likely better than Qwerty, which is notoriously suboptimal. But I notice that Capewell's page doesn't have any comparisons to Colemak whatsoever. Colemak's fairly new, but it's already a factory preset built into current operating systems, including even iOS. It's hard to beat, on pure metrics too.

http://www.colemak.com/

As I said, I like Colemak but I don't love it. The placement of S is particularly hard on me (so close!) and words like "the" (of all things) require lateral forefinger movement, which isn't pretty. So that's why I'm looking into Workman.

http://workman.deekayen.net/

Workman's too new to have the following that Colemak does. But the site is very informative and worth a read for the thought that went into it, in any case.

I'll run the comparison applet on the same texts as the other two, so we have direct comparison.

For some reason I can't get the same numbers - they are showing consitantly lower, even though I'm using the same applet and project Gutenbergs versions of the books.

What applet?

I gave the wrong link, the good read about design principles and Workman is this one here:

http://www.workmanlayout.com/blog/

I'm looking to make something a little less radically different from Qwerty on the bottom row. Colemak gets that right. No need to relearn copy/paste etc. But the middle of the home row is where Workman shines.

The comparisons between layouts were generated with an applet: http://www.michaelcapewell.com/projects ... applet.htm

Workman admins cite as the same version: http://www.workmanlayout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=35

Edit: If anyone can use java, a complete applet with all the layouts would ba amazing. I would do it myself, but I always was horrible at java.

Some more keyboard layout sites:

http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
http://mathematicalmulticore.wordpress. ... ayout-2-0/
https://github.com/michaeldickens/Typing
http://forum.colemak.com/
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/#/main
http://andong.azurewebsites.net/dvorak/DDvorak.aspx

Also see ADNW http://www.adnw.de
http://deskthority.net/keyboards-f2/the ... tml#p54408
http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=406 ... #msg809702