APT VS Canary

I've considered both the earlier version of APT, as well as Engram, with these layouts putting punctuation on the center index columns.

APT

Apt: https://github.com/apsu/apt

It's a rather bad layout by current measures. Not a lot better than QWERTY, and barely better than std Norman, much worse than Workman, Dvorak, Halmak, Engram, Colemak, Semimak, ISRT, RSTDH, MTGAP, APT, Poqtea, Hands Down, and many, many others. Even the simple Notarise is much better (with similar distance stats), and is much easier to learn coming from QWERTY.

Or u/apsuity's Apt v3

I don't have any personal experience with anything except Colemak-DH so I can't offer recommendations based on personal experience. With that being said, if I was to try a new layout I'd likely choose APTv3 or some variation of Hands Down as I hear good things about both.

It's the L placement and left index _mostly. Right hand is a bit overloaded as well however, like rnv on ring and the f placement, never on dvorak despite being full alt is not fun lol. That is not to speak for all sfbs on right hand like rn, sl, ct and gh which are bearable to slide on a low profile keyboard but hard to deal with on anything else. It also creates annoying patters like ght and wr because it puts everything on this hand. Left index is all of that, squared. You can deal with it just like you can deal with qwerty's jank, but there's just many better options out there. You could for example take a look at apt

nah colemak is good, dvorak is pretty garbage. If you wanna try something with a similar feel that's really good maybe try APT. Instead of that you can maybe also try some colemak mods like Colemak DH or rollmak: q w f p b z l u o y c r s t g m n e a i ' x v d k j h ; , .

https://github.com/Apsu/Canary I don't understand the sections on row stagger and angle mod. Please could someone explain in simple terms where to rest my fingers and which finger to use for each key. Thank you so much.

Keyboard layouts that are worth checking out are Canary, Graphite and Semimak. From what I understand they have all been made in the last two years. I'm biased in favor of Canary as it's very similar to Colemak which made the switch easy for me and I find it really comfortable, but the only thing that really matters is your personal experience when actually typing on the layout, not all the statistics that some people obsess over endlessly.

At https://github.com/Apsu/Canary, it's stated that Canary has 55% of all trigrams as rolls.

Try Canary layout https://github.com/Apsu/Canary It is very similar to Colemak DH and having E and U at different fingers. But, E and O is now at the same finger, isn’t that an issue for French typing?

Romak also has some very nice attributes, as do poqtea and uciea. I also find Canary to have a lot of merit.

My current layout, Canary, wouldn't be a great fit for this board, as with the reduction of six keys from a 34-key layout, six letters would be need to be under either a combo or layer, which I'm not too comfortable with.

I use hrm with canary layout, which puts the most used keys on the home row, so that means that I tap on the hrm keys the most. And I have pretty much 0 mistakes.

The homepages for Semimak JQ and Sturdy include thoughts by their respective creators on the layouts' strengths and weaknesses, though surely with a little bias =) The Canary homepage has detailed description of its Colemak-inspired design.

I use Canary ortho https://github.com/Apsu/Canary

Quick note about ortho vs column stagger vs row stagger when it comes to layouts: they generally don't make a difference, though sometimes you still want to make a change. This is most often with regards to upper + lower inner index vs howerow inner index, like on Canary (note the difference between the indexes of the ortho and the regular variant).