I am using Norman as well. I find it very interesting that you state that you have better experience with other layouts that differ more from QWERTY concerning typing mistakes. How long have you been using Norman? For me it took half a year until I exceeded my QWERTY performance.
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Does anyone on this thread feel up to writing a concise summary of the advantages and considerations for the various different layouts that would be appropriate for the wiki? I don’t have the knowledge, but I’m curious. I could research and write something, but if one of you folks who have done that work would be up for writing something up for folks who are considering switching layouts, that would be awesome. 
Another nice guide to have would be something about keyboarding ergonomics and design. I know a lot of thought and research has gone into the design of the Model 01, and it would be nice to understand it more. What are the advantages of ortho-linear layouts? For those of us who are self taught typists, what keys are we supposed to hit with each finger? Why?
I’m adding both of these to my wiki wishlist, and would be delighted if someone feels like tackling the topics before I get there.
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I’d be concerned that such a write-up would lead to more controversy than value…I think the layouts the people prefer vary greatly with personal preference and it is my understanding that the thing that actually makes a difference in accuracy or RSI prevention is the hardware configuration.
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There is the potential for “misuse” and “division” but I doubt that’s Jennifer’s intention. I would venture a guess that her intentions are to illustrate the whys of doing things and design considerations so that it may provide insight for the user. They are of course free to adhere to or implement said design, or formulate their own. Ultimately its additional knowledge, neither good nor bad, neither boring or controversial. What you do with it is a different matter.
That being said, I do understand your concern(s).
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Of course there are pros and cons and personal preferences here. It’s like computer languages, I expect. There are languages and layouts best suited for one set of constraints or another.
For example, in teaching myself to touch type “correctly” over the past couple weeks, I’ve found I have a strong preference against using the same finger for two adjacent letters in the same word. For example, my old finger pattern for typing “fred” on qwerty was index-middle-ring-middle. My occasional glances at the keys are to visually reorient after a weird n-gram like that. So if I’m going to actually assign certain keys to certain fingers, I would prefer to find a layout that will tend to break up characters so it was unlikely I would have to hit two keys in a row with the same finger. This has everything to do with a personal quirk and nothing to do with any objective measure of “best.”
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Oh, absolutely. My concern is just this is exactly the sort of thing that is fertile ground for endless arguments…no real objective way to determine which is better, people are very invested in their choices (since learning a new layout is usually a significant endeavour). That being said, this community has proven to be very nice & friendly, so I think we have good odds of not having nastiness.
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Xah Lee has a lot of links and info about different keyboard layouts on his page - which is worth a visit anytime, btw.
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Yup! This is not a request I would make of every community, but from what I’ve seen here to date I think it’s entirely possible someone could write a relatively objective description of each of the common layouts (I think that’s Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, and Norman? am I missing something?) that would serve as a summary and stepping off place for someone new to the topic. It seems like many of you folks have tried multiple layouts and can explain what did and didn’t work for you in each.
It would also be nice to have non-English docs available.
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huh, yeah i have been using it for almost a year now and i just have never
really felt comfortable with it. i guess i should say that i’m pretty
proficient with it now but i just don’t feel as comfortable typing on it as
i did on colemak. i’m very interested in the dh mod of colemak and still
have an inkling to try workman because i haven’t tried it yet.
i just think that straight up colemak feels the nicest i have tried and it
may be due to the rolls that it’s designed for.
although the more i use this keyboard the more i’m tempted to just pickup
whatever layout jesse tells me to
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shut up and take my money… oh wait, we did that too.
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That’s a very interesting statement. I’m interested in the type of lateral movement you’re referring to, since I find lateral movement to be very easy (easier than longitudinal movement, anyway). I don’t rest my arms or wrists on anything when I type (unless something is in the way), and I don’t “stretch” or splay my fingers. Moving forward and back is a motion that includes my upper arm, but side-to-side (and slightly back-and-forth) is a pivot at the elbow, which takes less energy.
There are far more ways that people type that I imagined a year or two ago.
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I think the scoring systems used by the designers of various layouts might be good for the average typist, or a certain kind of typist, but the standard deviation is very wide.
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I use Colemak. Why? I gave myself a repetitive strain injury using QWERTY and had to quit all my web development gigs - literally stop typing altogether.
Dvorak posed a very steep learning curve, and typing on it did not “feel” right at all - there is far too much hand alternation.
Colemak “on the other hand” is optimized for 2-3 letters per hand before switching, and these di- or tri-graphs should be inward rolls. Combined with the other design criteria (such as maximizing compatibility with QWERTY), this made the layout the best choice for me, and I believe most people switching from QWERTY. I have tried many of the Colemak variants and found each of them offers some improvements, but also some drawbacks. The tried and true Colemak layout seems to offer the best balance of learning ease, ergonomic improvement (both subjective and objective), and mainstream support.
How did it help my hand pain? Well, Colemak was different enough that the motions were not causing me pain anymore, and being forced to slow down as I relearned it made a huge difference as well.
During this time, I also thoroughly researched hardware keyboard layouts and realized that the choice of a hardware layout has a huge effect on what soft layout would be optimal. The lack of a vertical stagger on a regular keyboard makes the QWERTY layout quite usable in my opinion. Specifically, it puts the E, R, I, O, and P keys within very easy reach of the middle and ring fingers. This violates strict touch typing style, but is far more pleasant for my hands. I use the same strategy on Colemak on standard keyboards.
To this point, I have found the very different staggering on the Keyboardio to be a mixed bag in terms of improving the ergonomics. It really prefers that the strict touch typing style, and indeed, soft layouts that would operate best with such a style.
I am fairly certain that I will make changes to the Colemak layout in order to accomodate the staggering of the Keyboardio. The matrix-style variants may be a starting point, but the vertical stagger of the Keyboardio changes a lot.
So, I think the focus of any comparison document should be on the relative merits of each soft layout on the Keyboardio rather than a general comparison. Of course, including the design objectives of each layout is sensible, but the various optimization strategies are very much tied to the hardware layout they aimed to optimize.
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ok, so for each layout we should have an intro to address what problems the designer of the layout was trying to solve and what assumptions they made when solving it, and then how that problem/solution space maps to the Keyboardio?
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Yes, great! To the design criteria, different layouts (both hard and soft) favor different typing styles (strict touch typing, overload ring/middle, floating vs stretching to centre or peripheral keys, crossing under to reach QWERTY “c” with index…). The Keyboardio layout is opinionated, in that it favors certain behaviours and penalizes others. The staggering of the keys also changes key travel metrics and relative comfort of home row vs top row vs bottom row… basically, a soft layout could be designed with the exact same goals as say Colemak, but based on the different parameters given by the geometry of the Keyboardio may yield a very different result.
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The lateral movement I refer to is the one you tend to make to reach the row containing BGV and JYK with your index fingers on a qwerty keyboard. Based on your description on how you perform this movement I do not think it would cause an issue for you since you are shifting your hand instead of stretching your fingers sideways to reach those keys but I still think you would not want to be doing that all the time so you would not want your most used keys to be on those rows.
I do agree that lateral movement is easier than having to stretch your fingers to reach keys such as the number line on your usual keyboards. With the M01 that doesn’t seem to be an issue since to reach the number line, all I have do to is open my palm.
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I don’t think that belongs in the Model01 Wiki. There is already lot of info on this topic on the internet.
I respectfully disagree (and agree with @Jennigma). The M01 is about ergonomics, typing, keyboarding, etc. Sure that information exists on the internet, but its not in one convenient place, we’d all have to go scouring the interwebz looking for it, when we could just as easily have it here. There’s also the possibility that as we’re writing the wiki that new thoughts come to us, new concepts, or modifications to current concepts that evolves typing and how we do it.
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In that case, it would make sense to start a new project/wiki and pool the info there. Unless you’re planning on writing about layouts that are closely tied to the physical layout of the Model01, discussing the pros and cons of Qwerty, Dvorak, Workman etc. on the wiki of a firmware for the Model01 might not be the right place for it.
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I am looking at the conversations developing on the forums, and planning to make introductory resources available on the wiki that give new folks a grounding on those topics. Personally I prefer to learn as much as I can before asking questions, so to some extent I’m also building the resource I would like to find if I were new to the community.
One of the things I would like to avoid as the community develops is to have the more knowledgeable folks get bored with having the same conversations over and over with new people climbing the learning curve. Taking those common topics and consolidating them on the wiki is another worthy goal.
it’s obvious that one of the most persistent threads, and the reason we’re all here at some level, is an interest in alternative layouts. I’m certainly not intending to go into depth about layouts on the wiki, but it seems entirely appropriate to have a paragraph or two introducing each layout, and pointers to more information.
To be clear, I don’t intend to get into pros and cons at all. My plan is to describe and refer, not discuss.
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