My original intent for this thread was to get an idea of what J&K wanted to stay the same, as far as is practical, between the qwerty layout and the other default layouts.
The hope was that this would help focus the efforts to come to a consensus on the various non-qwerty layouts, by way of more restrictions. Less blue sky thinking, more practicality.
I didn’t necessarily mean it only in terms of printed keycaps, but that is presumably a more pressing concern than the subtleties of the layouts (which could be tweaked until launch time and even beyond, as long as they line up with what is printed), so it should likely be a focus.
The TLDR is essentially this:
- Ideally Jesse wants the top row, centre keys, palm keys, and thumb arcs to have the same functions between all “official” layouts, as far as is possible/practical. (See posts 42 and 43 above)
- Jesse is dead-set on printing left-down-up-right arrows on HJKL on the qwerty layout (I’m all for that because vim, but some others strongly disagree with it), but that notwithstanding I’m attempting to urge him to print them in an inverted-T instead on the right hand for layouts which do not have HJKL in a row in the regular qwerty positions. I have a lot of arguments for this above. Or not print them, but to at least recommend this as a default position for the cursors on such layouts.
- If the “recommended” positions for the arrows are as I suggest for non-hjkl layouts, the intended default position of the } key clashes, and so I’ve suggested moving the {} one space to the left each, for all layouts including qwerty. Yet to hear back about whether that’s acceptable. What I have in mind here mainly is consistency, which I think for default layouts is good insofar as it’s practical.
- There are strong opinions in both directions about whether arrows should be printed or not, no matter where the default maps in firmware put them.
Regarding your scenario 1, I don’t think anybody was discussing printing inverted-T arrows on the left half at all. The currently planned layout (shown on the front page of the website) is to have mouse movement keys on WASD on the function layer. I started a separate thread about these mouse movement keys which you may be interested in. In it I propose putting them at the qwerty ESDF positions instead of WASD, and the impression I got was that most users agree. But I don’t believe there are any plans to print arrows on the left half, whether in one position or the other. That could be another discussion. I’d be all for it, I think, as long as they’re on ESDF!
Your scenario 2 of arrows in a line on GFDS isn’t a good idea in my opinion – the idea of arrows in a line is largely (as far as I know) only because a chunk of programmers (those who use vi and qwerty, essentially) are used to movement actions being on HJKL, and that’s specifically there, such that having it on the left hand instead would be no good.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing against matching what is printed to the default logical layouts! 