Principles for Keyboard Layouts (2022)
Efforts to design more ergonomic and efficient keyboard layouts highlight a trade-off between comfort, speed gains, and day-to-day practicality. Commenters compare split, ortholinear, and concave boards; alternative layouts like Colemak, Workman, Neo2, and highly optimized custom schemes; and tools that log key usage to auto-tune layouts. Many conclude that while radical layouts and layers can reduce strain and improve typing for heavy users or those with RSI, the benefits are often incremental and must be weighed against compatibility with standard QWERTY hardware and shared machines.
Custom layouts & symbol placement
- Many participants describe heavily customized layouts, especially for programming symbols and brackets.
- Strategies include putting parentheses on modifier keys, using home-row or thumb-accessible layers for symbols, or adopting multi-layer systems like Neo2.
- Some favor chording approaches (steno-like dictionaries for symbols, shortcuts, cursor movement) to avoid deep layer stacks.
Personalization via keylogging and analyzers
- Strong interest in tools that record keystrokes to optimize layouts around personal usage.
- Concerns about security/privacy, but several argue local, non-persistent or aggregated logging is acceptable.
- Suggested tools: layout analyzers, heatmaps, “benign” keyloggers, and genetic algorithms (e.g., Halmak). Some think generic corpora are “good enough”; others insist context-aware logging is needed, especially to capture backspace, cursor use, and shortcuts.
Alternative letter layouts
- Dvorak, Colemak (and variants like Colemak-DH), Workman, Norman, Neo2/KOY, nrts-haei family (Graphite, Gallium) are discussed.
- Reported benefits: comfort, reduced finger travel, especially for those with pain or poor QWERTY habits.
- Reported downsides: modest real speed gains, cognitive overhead, using other people’s machines, and mobile/TV keyboards.
- Several long-term alternative-layout users say they remain fluent enough in QWERTY; others found dual-layout use too hard.
Hardware ergonomics: split, ortho, keywells, thumb clusters
- Split boards (Moonlander, Glove80, Keyboardio, Lily58, Corne, Charybdis, Voyager, etc.) are popular for posture and RSI relief.
- Disagreement over thumb clusters: some love many well-placed thumb keys; others experience pain from reach/rotation.
- Ortho vs stagger: some find ortholinear or column-stagger clearly better; others report it feels unnatural and prefer traditional staggering or keywells.
- Keywells (e.g., Glove80, Advantage-style) get praise for comfort and number-row reach; some still revert to standard boards for one-handed use or convenience.
Layers, mods, and function/navigation keys
- Heavy use of layers, home-row mods, and mod-tap keys to keep hands on home row.
- Some argue layers are fine even for frequent keys if thumb-activated; others avoid holding layers for common actions due to discomfort.
- Divided views on function keys and full navigation clusters: some consider them mandatory; others rarely use them and prefer layer-based arrows (often Vim-style).
Learning & usability
- One camp advises avoiding keycap labels and cheat sheets to force faster muscle-memory learning.
- Another emphasizes labeling and printed references, especially when juggling multiple boards and complex layers, and for occasional users of one’s keyboard.