When you are drilling new keys but you absolutely do not want to look at the layout map that shows the keys you are supposed to know already.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
29 points (96.8% liked)
ErgoMechKeyboards
5876 readers
2 users here now
Ergonomic, split and other weird keyboards
Rules
Keep it ergo
Posts must be of/about keyboards that have a clear delineation between the left and right halves of the keyboard, column stagger, or both. This includes one-handed (one half doesn't exist, what clearer delineation is that!?)
i.e. no regular non-split¹ row-stagger and no non-split¹ ortholinear²
¹ split meaning a separation of the halves, whether fixed in place or entirely separate, both are fine.
² ortholinear meaning keys layed out in a grid
No Spam
No excessive posting/"shilling" for commercial purposes. Vendors are permitted to promote their products/services but keep it to a minimum and use the [vendor] flair. Posts that appear to be marketing without being transparent about it will be removed.
No Buy/Sell/Trade
This subreddit is not a marketplace, please post on r/mechmarket or other relevant marketplace.
Some useful links
- EMK wiki
- Split keyboard compare tool
- Compare keycap profiles Looking for another set of keycaps - check this site to compare the different keycap profiles https://www.keycaps.info/
- Keymap database A database with all kinds of keymap layouts - some of them fits ergo keyboards - get inspired https://keymapdb.com/
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is not so much about relative distance to the home position. The more important measure is if there are lots of bigrams to be pressed by the middle finger on the same hand right next to the index key -- it is believed that a lateral stretch, meaning having to press a key on the central index columns, right next to another key on the same hand middle finger column (e.g., a qwerty 'gd'), is more uncomfortable than if the index key is on the home column (a qwerty 'vd'). This is the logic behind the dh mod.
Personally I think both 'd' and 'h' are of too high a frequency to be placed on the index finger non-home position, so neither the vanilla nor the dh variant of colemak is good in that regard.
d is the 11th most frequent letter [1], so there are many other letters vying for the 8 main home row positions. However h is 9th, it's a good candidate for a better position, since it occurs in the two most frequent bigrams (th and he).
Since backspace is used far less than frequent letters by competent typists and enter is also relatively infrequent, it is probably best to put something like e on the thumb cluster, so that h can be on the home row.
[1] http://norvig.com/mayzner.html
Colemak mod-DH puts D and H right below the home row so they are easy to reach with your index fingers. I'd say that's the most reasonable way to go about it without going full custom.
Sure, but as @galilette@[email protected] mentioned, this move is not great on non-contoured keyboards.
Please see my reply to that. I disagree and I think it comes down to hand position.
For me it doesn't matter much. Since I have a contoured keyboard nearly all alpha keys are easy to reach with my hand on the palm rest (not hovering). But I'd rather have h on the home row as well, since it reduces finger movement for frequent bigrams like th. I have backspace on one of my thumb keys, but I don't use it frequently, to it'd be more optimal to put a letter like e there, so that h can move to the home row. So even though I use Colemak-DH, I am experimenting a bit with other layouts like Maltron since I don't believe Colemak it necessary among the best layouts, it just gained quite a lot of popularity. Well and it's fun to rewire parts of your brain :).
It's a bit of a shame that layouts are high effort. Given a large enough budget, you can try multiple ergo keyboards. But the cost of learning a layout is so high that people experiment only little with it (if at all), so people continue to use QWERTY or if they learn something else it would be Colemak now or Dvorak 20 years ago. Of course Colemak and Dvorak are large improvements over QWERTY, but they may also be local optima.