I don’t think tricky is the word I would use but ideally they would either be alternating or rolling (use the other hand or use fingers next to each other), pinky off home row followed by index off home row is not ideal on the same hand but then the same can be said for the period.
I’d rather pinky/ring then index of the same hand than middle/index and then index of the same hand. If it’s the pinky or ring, the rest of the fingers can spread to help with the stretch.
The qwerty layout has the braces in the same positions (Dvorak RL) and Jesse certainly writes plenty of code.
Honestly I don’t think this is a concern. Any of these will be easier stretches than those of us used to a standard PC104/PC105 keyboard currently have.
But given where enter is on the Model 01, what would you suggest?
(Edit) When I said “braces” above on RL I meant square brackets.
I think in most programming languages we expect the following truths (I’m going by gut feeling so feel free to correct/comment):
{ and [ will be followed by space, a letter or enter in order of frequency
( will be followed by space, a letter ) or enter in order of frequency
Both will usually be preceded by a letter, tab, enter or space in order of frequency.
] and } will be followed by enter, space, letter in order of frequency
) will be followed by enter, colon, space or letter in order of frequency
Both will usually be preceded by a letter or less frequency space or enter
Assuming enter is an off home row press for the right index finger.
Assuming that we need to use the left or right palm to enable the FN layer
Assuming all letters are equally used and distributed.
{[ don’t really need to be anywhere close to ]} because there is no rolling benefit since they rarely occur next to each other.
{[ should be easily followed by a space or enter
{[ should be easily preceded by tab, enter or space
]} should be easily followed by enter or space
I think I’d consider:
{ on M
[ on W
] on J
} on K
Off the top of my head, Javascript and PHP often have [] and {}. I think a lot of languages have [] when doing things with arrays; especially PHP since it’s used to append something to an array such as $myArray[] = 'something'. Maybe JS is alone in having a lot of {} (empty objects), but I’m not sure.
So like this:
My gut reaction is that it’s weird to have the “right” brackets on the left and the “left” on the right. And I don’t like that <> are next to each other and so are () but then [] and {} are not. I’m also not sure that I agree with all your assumptions, and would want to see some hard statistical evidence on the various digraphs before making decisions based on them.
I agree with you and I would much prefer to have all brackets and braces mirroring each other, opening on the left and closing on the right but I think for that to be feasible Enter would have to be on a thumb cluster, ideally left of space and for round brackets and less/greater than we’d need a custom keyboard layout.
In this case aesthetics / ease of remembering may very well trump ergonomics but I thought I’d point this out.
I’d love to try out layouts like that.
But I think we’re definitely getting into the realm of a custom personalized layout rather than a default Dvorak one, here.
Even if those brackets (and the others) don’t often end up next to each other doesn’t mean they don’t often get typed together. I know I’m in the habit of typing the matching close bracket (of any type) immediately after the opening one, then moving the cursor back one space before filling it in (except in cases where I have the editor set up to insert the matching close bracket automatically). Not so useful in Python, naturally… 
I do the same thing with quotes. Yet another way in which examination of final text doesn’t accurately provide information about how people actually use keyboards.
In my (planned) custom layout, I’ve currently got all four left brackets ({[< on the left side, and all four right brackets mirroring them on the opposite side. I’m not sure I’ll end up liking this arrangement – but it might just cause me to change my typing habits when writing code.
I think it’s worth considering that, if we’re trying to make something as close as is reasonable to a standard Dvorak layout, that the angle brackets have no relation to curly braces or square brackets and that said curlies & squares are up and to the right (hence me trying to up them on the upper row of the right hand in my layout somewhere higher up in this thread).
Yeah, that’s also how default qwerty has it, and I think it’s wise to stick close to that as far as is practical too. With that in mind I think leaving the curly braces on RL is the right move. The square brackets can’t stay on GC if we have the cursors as we’ve mostly agreed they should be (C would clash). Jesse says FG leads to a miserable experience, so I think next best is probably VZ.
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I think this is probably the best solution to getting close to the standard Dvorak Simplified arrangement, unless you want to consider shifting the arrow keys down a row (more similar to the typical cluster on a PC104), which would make it possible to put the square brackets on N & S, and the curlies on R & L (arrows on MWVT). To my eye, that looks more like Dvorak Simplified.
Edit: As a non-Dvorak typist (and someone who’s planning something else anyway), I don’t really feel qualified to “vote” on this issue, but I thought y’all might want to consider this idea.
That’s a very interesting idea. One issue is that having the ] on S means a clash – F11 is there in the default qwerty. It could potentially move, such as to the /? key.
That would look like this (I’m going to start naming them since we have so many possibilities):
"RLNS"
But if moving the cursors down a row like that, I think it’d be better to just leave all the brackets where they are on default qwerty, like this:
"Cursors below"
I have to say I’m now torn between the above (“cursors below”) and what I had in the “RLVZ” bit of post 137 above, which is this:
"RLVZ"
Way to throw a spanner in the works 
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Heh. So, I forgot about F11 & F12… I thought it was odd to put them there on the QWERTY layout, too – it seems much more natural to have them at R0C6 & R0C9, instead. But if they’re going to be there on that layout, I think your “Cursors Below” option is the best, with the caveat that I’ve never touched a Model 01, so I don’t know how comfortable it would be to use one hand to hold down the right palm key while operating the cursor keys there.
“RLVZ” also looks good – less similar to the QWERTY layout, but if the cursors are more one-hand friendly in that position, it’s probably better. Curly braces probably don’t get typed one-handed very often.
Excellent points once again.
Paging @jesse: how comfortable or otherwise is palming right-function and using the cursors as placed above in “cursors below”?
I don’t think I’d personally want to type on something like that. Moving the arrow keys primarily below home row seems less comfortable to me than other options. Arrows are something that you use a lot when you’re using them. Putting them as close to a neutral set of finger positions feels like a win to me.
F11 and F12 were very much an afterthought that got shoved into unused locations. I’d be thrilled to relocate them
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Of the three options, I like the looks of RLVZ the most - it seems like it’s a better tradeoff to have to reach down to hit a curly brace than to have the arrow keys in a shifted-down position since, as @jesse says, arrow keys will be probably be hit multiple times while in use.
I’m imagining that if I was using a “cursors below” configuration, and wanted one-handed operation of the arrow keys, I’d probably shift my thumb down to use the side of the knuckle on the palm key, rather than curling my fingers that much.
Wish we had units to test on!
So do I. We’re pushing the factory as hard as we can.
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Sometimes it feels like we are shooting in the dark here 
. I would like to try it out before I can make a ‘meaningful’ suggestion.
I would propose that there is an option to get Keybordio shipped with blank keys and later finalize the Dvorak layout when people had a good go at it.
I’m happy to pay for shipping again to get a better final product. 
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